Swiss TV Documents The Poetry Project

I recently started to read The Poetry Project Newsletter as a complete run, starting with the first issue—published December 1, 1972—with the goal of reading them all chronologically over the month of August, at least up through the 1990s (or about 175 issues). As the (mostly) monthly news supplement of The Poetry Project, the Newsletter is full of all kinds of information, like publication info for new books and magazines, calls for work, event announcements, local New York City and national poetry news, reviews, commentary, strong doses of gossip, and a consistent undercurrent of lively resistance to the genre of the “official” newsletter. The various editorial voices are always up to something and the poetry news comes, as it should, a little slant. The Newsletter offers an incredible set of lenses on the history of the Project, and as an enormous stockpile of information that’s gone mostly untouched by literary scholars (the full run from issue #1 to the most recent, #261, is probably somewhere between 2,000 to 2,500 total pages), there’s a lot of great stuff buried in there.

Front page of The Poetry Project Newsletter No. 81, March 1981.

As I was printing and stapling copies of the Newsletter gathered from the Project website (they have about half the full run available to read and download; the other half I’ve been making copies of at Emory University’s Rose Library archive), I happened to read a note written by Greg Masters in Newsletter No. 81, from March 1981. Masters, who was then the editor of the Newsletter, is filling in the Project community on why a TV crew has been filming recent events at the Church. As he writes, “they’ve been filming in 16mm what must now be a few hours of Poetry Project events for what will eventually be cut down to a 15-20 minute segment for the Swiss TV show ‘Schauplatz’ which Mr. Suter [the director] described as a sort of cultural ‘60 Minutes.’” Of course, the Project is no stranger to a documentary attitude toward its programming. Since at least Paul Blackburn’s heroic lugging of a reel-to-reel recorder around the New York City poetry readings that were the immediate precursor of The Poetry Project events, the Project has consciously documented its existence in multiple forms, an activity that the Newsletter is very much a part of. As Masters suggests though, that doesn’t mean that a professional camera crew at the readings isn’t evidence of a new energy around the Project: “[T]he fact that a pro group with camera needing tripod has been showing up occasionally to document what encourages us further to feel is worth documenting, adds to the already exciting sense of ‘something’ happening this year, as continuous as past years, at St. Mark’s Church.” The events that Masters describes them filming—Ted Berrigan and Steve Carey at a United Artists book party, a reading by Elio Schneeman, a mimeograph machine in the Project office—sound like an interesting cross-section of the Project’s activities, from showing the community’s generational range (Berrigan to the young Schneeman), documenting social literary events like a book party (of which, unlike most readings at the Church, there are not audio recordings), and in terms of seeing the Project’s inner workings. “I think we’re all hoping to be able to someday see all the footage they’ve shot here,” writes Masters.

Excerpt from The Poetry Project Newsletter No. 81, March 1981.

Unfortunately, it seems that no one ever saw any of the footage, nor did anyone get to see—and perhaps this isn’t surprising in the early ‘80s—the actual episode of the Swiss TV show “Schauplatz,” which translates roughly, I think (?), as “Location” or “The Place.” But this note by Masters was enough to get me looking for some trace of this footage. Surprisingly, it didn’t take long to find all 10 years of Schauplatz, which ran on Swiss TV from 1980 to 1990, digitized on the contemporary station’s website. A few searches later and I’d found it, the episode of “Schauplatz” titled “New York Poetry Project,” which aired on February 9, 1982, about a year after the initial filming in New York. However, the episode isn’t viewable outside Switzerland due to geoblocking. After some circuitous VPN work, I managed to access and make a copy of the episode—now shown here for the first time. (See below.) Even for a literary community that so thoroughly documented itself, the “Schauplatz” episode is an incredible living document that exists as the only known audiovisual recording of the Project of its kind from this era.

Bernadette Mayer recording Wednesday night reading by Elio Schneeman and Rebecca Wright on January 28, 1981.

With Peter Wehrli as host, and as Masters’s description suggests, the 16-minute segment documents a stunning range of the Project’s vibrant community in the early 1980s. Here’s a detailed (and half-rushed) accounting of what the episodes takes us through: opening shots of the IBM electric typewriter and Gestetner mimeograph machine in the upstairs Project office; Elinor Nauen voting—likely for Project Board Members—with Ed Friedman in the red plaid shirt; Allen Ginsberg at his two-day special lecture/workshop on the history of metrics, which we see more of later; a shot of a crowd with Rochelle Kraut passing by looking directly at the camera, which then settles on George Schneeman in a brown sweater; the inimitable Barbara Barg playing with Mike Sappol and Joel Chassler as the all-poet band Avant Squares; some incredible shots of the intersection at E. 10th Street and Second Avenue as well as the scaffolding and construction on the Church, which had been severely damaged by a fire in July 1978; Assistant Director Bob Holman, who compiled the "Oral History of the Poetry Project” in 1978, describing the Project’s history; an absolutely amazing shot of Nauen next to Bernadette Mayer, then the Project’s Director, with a baby on her back, at the table with Friedman and Ted Berrigan; Gary Lenhart placing his vote; Holman—with Lewis Warsh in the shot behind him—overseeing a Community Meeting in the Parish Hall (we see Steve Levine, Ron Padgett, Lenhart, Regina Beck, Barg, Cliff Fyman, Susan Cataldo, and others). What else? There’s an incredible warm-light scene of Padgett and Maureen Owen in the Project office as the Gestetner runs off copies, Padgett cuts some paper, and Owen answers the phone while spinning back across the room to manage the mimeo—not easy!; Mayer discusses Project funding as we jump through a montage of shots around the Project offices—flyers and posters, stacks of paper, big sheets of paper where it looks like the names of everyone who has recently read at the Project are listed, and Holman at the typewriter with the reel-to-reel running in the background. The full multimodal behind-the-scenes environment of the Project at work. We also get 19-year old Elio Schneeman and Rebecca Wright giving a Wednesday night reading on January 28, 1981, complete with Mayer managing the recorder with Kim Jones, Gerard Malanga, Pat Padgett, and Katie Schneeman in the audience. Then an incredible crescendo, for me at least, in Ted Berrigan’s interview. I’ve never seen a video recording of him speaking outside of giving a reading. The vividness of his voice and facial expressions is really astounding to me, especially the expressiveness of his eyes. Before the dubbing sets in, we can hear Berrigan say “I taught the first poetry workshop here [in 1966]. One year I set up the chairs for the readings every week, for which I was paid five dollars, which I needed very much.” As Berrigan speaks we see Rene Ricard holding a copy of Jim Brodey’s new Judyism and then Steve Carey signing a copy of his new The California Papers for Daniel Krakauer. It’s amazing to see Brodey signing a copy of Judyism with two pens simultaneously: “For Mike, Eternal Love.” And there’s more! But you’re going to watch it anyway. The segment closes with Wehrli back in the studio showing the audience a set of German translations of Ginsberg’s books as well as a copy of Guillaume Apollinaire is Tot, a compilation of Berrigan’s work translated and edited by R.D. Brinkmann that was published in 1970. This places the “Schauplatz” episode in a lineage of German-language interest in the aesthetics of the New York School that reaches back to German translations of O’Hara from the late 1960s.

So here’s the full segment below. The audio is a little wonky and of course the Swiss German dubbing covers up much of what some of the writers say, but I’m hoping to be able to translate everything back to English to add subtitles and to make a complete transcript available. Just today the video made it around to many of the poets you’ll see here. An initial chorus of responses via email: “What a thrill. Holy Moly.”—Greg Masters; “OH OH OH. WOW WOW WOW.”—Elinor Nauen; “This is so fabulous!”—Maureen Owen; “I was pleasantly stunned.”—Ron Padgett; “How amazing to see ‘us’ so long ago.”—Steve Levine; “Unfuckingbelievable.”—Bob Holman. I agree with everyone. The Poetry Project has been running for 54 years. Here we get a view into the Project when it was just 15 years old and being led by Mayer—one of the most revered avant-garde American poets of our contemporary moment—out of the crisis of the 1978 fire. The early ‘80s were the end of an era at The Poetry Project and within the community of New York School poets on the Lower East Side. This video documents those changes vibrantly and with renewed material specificity.

Many thanks to Greg Masters for his ongoing generosity in pointing out the full cast of characters here and for writing the original Newsletter post that led to all this. Thanks, too, to everyone who responded to and shared the video so far.

Lost in the Stacks: THE RAYMOND DANOWSKI POETRY LIBRARY ON THE RADIO

It’s not every day that I have the opportunity to hop on the radio to talk about teaching the archives, let alone to curate a set list of Ted Berrigan-centric New York School-related songs, but that’s exactly what Lost in the Stacks, the research library rock’n’roll radio show at Georgia Tech’s WREK asked me to do for our episode “Teaching the Archives.” It was so fun to be able to talk about the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library at Emory University and Berrigan’s poetry in such a vivid, energetic medium. Lost in the Stacks describes itself as “the original research-library rock'n'roll radio show! Broadcasting on WREK Atlanta, each show features an hour of music, interviews, and library talk united by a common theme.” It’s an incredible show with episodes about open access issues, citizen archiving, exciting original research, all things library culture, and refreshing perspectives on the work of libraries, archives, and the folks who make them run—plus great music.

It was a pleasure to talk with hosts Charlie Bennett, Public Engagement Librarian, and Wendy Hagenmaier, Digital Collections Archivist, and to be able to co-produce the episode alongside them. In our conversation, we talk about my use of archival materials from Emory’s Rose Library—particularly from the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library—in my first-year writing courses at Georgia Tech and as visiting faculty at Emory, encouraging students to do their own original research at the Rose Library, the joy of the “material oomph,” my scholarship on Ted Berrigan and Alice Notley, the New York School’s overlap with punk and rock music on the Lower East Side, and the incredible pedagogical wealth of the Danowski Library. And by the way, early in the episode I mention a student project on the band Television’s connections to the New York School of poets—the same band from which the intro/outro song of Lost in the Stacks is sampled—and that completed project, “Television: Where Punk and Poetry Meet,” which utilizes copies of the rare magazine Genesis Grasp from the Danowski Poetry Library to showcase the early aesthetic influence of the New York School on Richard Hell and Tom Verlaine—is available here.

A few quick annotations on my choices for the playlist for this episode that aren’t addressed directly in our conversation:

“Early Mornin’ Rain” by Bob Dylan: In the Early Morning Rain is the title of Ted Berrigan’s book of poems published in 1970 by Cape Goliard Press/Grossman.

“California Dreaming” by The Mamas and the Papas: In his iconic “Red Shift,” Berrigan writes at a particularly dramatic momentum-turning point in the poem “There’s a song, ‘California Dreaming,’ but no, I won’t do that.”

“People Who Died” by Jim Carroll: Carroll was a close friend of Berrigan, Notley, and many other New York School poets. Carroll’s infamous The Basketball Diaries was first published by New York School small press United Artists. “People Who Died” is also a poem by Ted Berrigan.

You can listen to the full episode of “Teaching the Archives” here.

The vinyl and music stacks at WREK’s own riotous archive.

What study is about: On "What is Poetry? (Just Kidding, I Know You Know): Interviews from The Poetry Project Newsletter (1983-2009)"

The following review first appeared in The Georgia Review Spring 2018, Volume LXXII, Number 1.

Wave Books, edited by Anselm Berrigan

As an archive of over a quarter century of artists speaking together, What is Poetry? (Just Kidding, I Know You Know) is a successful embodiment of the generative talk and surprising lineages that have defined the Poetry Project since its establishment in the 1960s. Even the book’s interrogative, doubly-animated title, lifted from a questionnaire by Charles North that begins the collection, marks the performative, independent, and witty consciousness of the Project itself—as an arts institution on the border of institutions, run by poets, that’s been home to fifty years of fierce, cherished conversational momentum. As the title suggests, it’s not really what “you know” but that you and I are here to share an inquisitiveness, to exchange a little of the question’s serious shapeliness.

That is, the question “What is poetry?” is only asked half-jokingly until it isn’t. Readers familiar with The Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church-in-the-Bowery will recognize how and why asking what poetry is (or what a Poetry Project is) might be necessary to the poets who populate it, and The Poetry Project Newsletter has helped articulate the feeling and thinking fabrics of the space. With 251 issues, the newsletter is a long social song to which the Project’s overlapping aesthetic, political, and cross-generational communities all contribute by echoing off one another. Among more monolithic or short-lived arts institutions, rarely have any been associated for so long with so many aesthetic formations that, as editor Anselm Berrigan notes, “are variously highlighted, fleshed out, made ambiguous, undermined, and otherwise reformed in the interviews found herein.” Like the Project itself, What is Poetry? is a record of oscillating, idiosyncratic correspondences rather than a monument to a cohesive aesthetic center.

As a happy result, this book is no anthology. No conversation quite settles. There are disagreements, digressions, problems, and leaps forward. This multiplicity makes the 440-page collection of interviews a good book, a good place to gather.

Featuring conversations with poets and artists as various and luminously idiosyncratic as Alice Notley, Fred Moten, Ed Sanders, and Renee Gladman, whose interviews are conducted by a range of young(er) writers—many of whom are now aesthetic leaders in their own right— such as Lisa Jarnot, Magdalena Zurawski, and erica kaufman, the collection emphasizes that cross-generational voices are always already happening together. But this togetherness is a sign of oscillation rather than cohesion. The interviews stick together because they all emerged intended for The Poetry Project Newsletter, though their movements with and against one another produce new scenes and ideas entirely, evidence of Berrigan’s astute editorial positionings.

Consider the opening three pieces in the book. The first is a playful questionnaire by Charles North that juggles the interview as a social and aesthetic form whose initial question “Why are we doing this?” echoes the book’s title as a refusal of assumptions and expectations. Following North’s playful self-reflexivity is an interview with artist Red Grooms by poet Anne Waldman that is punctuated with pronouncements such as “The ocean to me looks very nineteenth century. It was probably painted best in that century.” Next is an interview with translator Paul Schmidt by Tim Dlugos in which translation becomes more about enmeshing your thinking in a poet’s work than executing a translation with precision and clarity. As Schmidt says, “Your responsibility is to transform it.” A reader can find, or at least sense, an answer to “What is poetry?” in this sequence of collaborative, cross-genre voices where poets, prose writers, artists, translators, filmmakers, activists, musicians, scholars, and every collaged, wayward combination of these practices settle together in the space of the book. Everyone is furiously interested in what everyone else is doing, and this active participation in and attention to other artists’ work and thinking acts as a sub-narrative across What is Poetry?—the trace of an interdisciplinary aesthetic imagination that the programming at The Poetry Project continues to embody.

And really, it’s rare to get in one tome so much varied talk about innovative contemporary poetry. The only recent comparison I can make is to Andy Fitch’s Sixty Morning Talks (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2014), a collection of 2012 interviews that produce a snapshot of innovative poetry practices that year via Fitch’s sharp, generous conversations. The comparison doesn’t constitute a model, though, because What is Poetry? not only chronicles the histories and personalities that have sustained the Project but also reinterrogates those trajectories, leaving them up in the air and newly able to be traced by the poets who arrive next. As if to interrogate why such a collection might be assembled in the first place, North’s questionnaire asks, “The question is, to what extent does commenting on a poetry scene produce that scene which, until that point, didn’t quite exist?” If these interviews are a site of production, a section of the news for a community always being made new, they are also an invitation to come next, to mix up and get mixed up in another lineage without cementing a trajectory or submitting to the social and historical demands of the scene. “I think everybody must already know this,” says Bernadette Mayer in a 1992 interview, “—I hope they do—that one person can write in many different ways.” The same flexibility applies to the Project itself, which is an institution and a historical center with a lineage of publications and, more important, people—the poets themselves speaking “on this high frequency,” as Kenneth Koch describes it, all of whom have been thriving, arguing, living (and sometimes dying), performing, and writing for over half a century.

Perspectives on community and lineage permeate these interviews. Asked about learning from such a seemingly disparate array of writers, the great Lorenzo Thomas offers a reply that describes an ethos of the Project itself: “Everybody was very much interested in knowing who came before us regardless of what their nationality or race might have been, though we might have been more interested in some people than others, individually. But that was the thing, we wanted to know who came before us. What, if anything, did we have in common in terms of the situations that we faced and the situations they faced, which is, I think, what study is about.”

It wouldn’t take much to convince me that “what study is about” is as good an answer as any to “what is poetry?” if answers are what one is looking for. Thomas’s description of studying is of a shared yet idiosyncratic looking around and falling into, an inquiry into common feeling and recurring confrontation—studying as ethics and politics, which is to say, a poetics. I’m buoyed by interviews like this one with Thomas, which apart from this collection would have taken a trip to a university special collections or unofficial residency in The Poetry Project offices to read. The original newsletters—often fragile, ephemeral documents—are housed now in this thick, perfect bound shed of a book, with a different historical light on them. I’m wondering where else we might find this many hit singles framed together that’s more than just a best of, as this book is. There’s a rough, critical pleasure in the accumulation across these conversations, one in which the reader is able to exist on both sides of each interview, speaking and listening. As Waldman says in conversation with Marcella Durand, “I remember Edwin Denby saying that St. Mark’s cultivated an exquisite ear for poetry. People learned how to LISTEN there.” Building on Thomas, listening also seems to be what study is about – personal, radical, and made of voices.

As the Project and Newsletter continue to stage a variety of overlapping contemporary communities of artists, the ongoing heritage of the Project also continues to garner scholarly interest and editorial projects that collect and frame the work of the communities and artists that grew in and through organizations like the Church. Those familiar with the Lost and Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative will find What is Poetry? to be an expanded companion to that invaluable archival pamphlet series, cousin to a growing list of projects and narratives that document the poetry and poetics of Manhattan’s Lower East Side, including Out of This World: An Anthology of the St. Marks Poetry Project 1966-1991 edited by Waldman, All Poets Welcome: The Lower East Side Poetry Scene in the 1960s by Daniel Kane (whose interviews with Koch and Larry Fagin appear in What is Poetry?), and St. Marks Is Dead: The Many Lives of America’s Hippest Street by Ada Calhoun. It is exciting that Wave Books, the publisher of What is Poetry?, will continue this necessary archival and historical work with its new Interview book series, the first of which, There You Are: Interviews, Journals, and Ephemera, edited by Cedar Sigo, traces the life, work, and legacy of Joanne Kyger. One can imagine other books similar to What is Poetry? about Woodland Pattern, for example, or the Poetry Center at San Francisco State University, whose rich histories would benefit from such a project by a contemporary poetry press like Wave. For now, What is Poetry?, with its smart, chatty, and ongoing exchanges, furnishes us a chance to look back at a quarter century of work, attitude, and vision in The Poetry Project Newsletter, and to generate future conversations with as much urgency and devotion as the ones collected therein. As Thomas says, “I don’t think attention to the past destroys the poet’s ability to say something new, or to be innovative.” It’s old news, but What is Poetry? is all new.

"We work at the Poetry Project": Bernadette Mayer's Working Notebook, 1980-81

With Stacy Szymaszek's 11-year tenure as Director of the Poetry Project coming to an end and the search for a new Director well underway, I recently returned to the listings of the St. Mark's Poetry Project Collection in the Rare Book & Special Collections Division at the Library of Congress. Former Director Anselm Berrigan oversaw the acquisition of the Project's Archives by the Library of Congress in 2007 and the over 1,000-item collection--including decades of recordings, flyers, newsletters, and ephemera--is described as "probably the most significant [archive of] post-war poetry readings in existence." Because the collection is still unprocessed, I started corresponding with librarians at the LOC a few years ago about particular materials, lists of recordings of specific poets, and other information. The last I heard, batches of digitized recordings of poetry readings were beginning to be processed, though I haven't been able to access them yet. When this collection becomes available it will be a windfall for scholars of the New York School and the history of poetry in New York City.

But for whatever reason there is one item, and one item only, from the sprawling Poetry Project Collection that is currently available online--an item described as "Notebook of Bernadette Mayer, Project Director of St. Mark's Poetry Project, 1980." Mayer was the Director of the Project from 1980-84, preceded by Ron Padgett from 1978-80 and followed by Eileen Myles from 1984-86, and this notebook, available as a full-color 182-page PDF is a fascinating, vibrant document of Mayer's work as an arts administrator. It is, essentially, a record of Bernadette at work, a swarm of notes and reminders and information that keep one's daily responsibilities manageable, or at least traceable. In What's Your Idea of a Good Time?: Letters & Interviews 1977-1985, Mayer's letters to Bill Berkson, contemporaneous to this notebook, often mention her work at the Project. "Meanwhile," she writes in January 1981, "I've become (as I think anyone would) obsessed with Poetry Project. But I don't like other people's attitudes to my so-called authority--if only it were sexier--the directrix!" Full of love and gossip about the Project, her friends, and their thinking, the correspondence in What's Your Idea of a Good Time? also tracks the development of Mayer's book Utopia. It probably doesn't come as a surprise that working at an independent arts institution with the history and personalities of the Poetry Project would make one wish for a genuine utopia, whatever that might be. (Mayer imagines it as a lot of things, including a jail for landlords and utopia chairs). Being able to read this notebook, created amid the social and political ruckus of the Project, adds another layer to how deeply and naturally interrelated Mayer's work as Director was with her poems in the early 80s.

Filled with scribbled notes, poets' phone numbers, lists of names for possible readings, reminders, budget concerns, doodles by her then-young children, sketches of correspondence, questions, ideas for events and poems, and even a colored map of the Church describing volunteers' responsibilities for the 1980 New Year's Eve Benefit Reading, the notebook acts as an animated snapshot of the planning and record keeping that went into the events and readings that facilitate and support a community of major artists. It's an incredible visual document. From day-to-day Mayer is checking in with Alice Notley about a poster, calling John Wieners, writing to Cecil Taylor, or checking to see if a grant application for the Project Project Newsletter is due yet. A few of my favorite entires are a page that just says "Dennis Cooper" written vertically, doodles by Mayer's children Max and Marie Warsh, Bernadette's own doodles (clearly made during meetings), and the cover itself, with its loose arrangement of notes, quotes, and annotations, like altering "College Ruling" to "College Reagan Ruling" and the sketchily-housed "LOVE." 

More than anything else, the notebook is a document of labor, evidence of the difficult and overwhelming work that it requires to manage an institution like the Poetry Project, including managing the personalities, egos, and arguments amongst artists and other Project employees. Perhaps the most significant document in the notebook is a three-page letter from Mayer to Bob Holman, then Coordinator, host, and workshop leader at the Project, which seems to have stemmed from Holman objecting to Mayer allowing people to smoke and drink during readings in the Church:

Dear Bob,

I'm your friend. I was your friend before I was "director" of the Poetry Project, before I knew anything about it except to teach my workshop. We work at the Poetry Project, not personally ambitiously (I hope) to further this nearly political cause, we believe in poetry. I didn't take this job for the money (the way Ron presented it to me). I took it because it's more important to me to help run the Poetry Project than to teach, etc. Also it was a chance for me + Lewis [Warsh] to live on the Lower East Side among all our friends.

Mayer continues, echoing a feeling she described to Berkson in a July 1981 letter--"I'm appalled by habits and having to be only one person":

I don't like to ever be treated like a person in a state or position of authority.... I guess maybe that is an exacerbating request--to ask to be treated as a friend, but I don't think the formality of our administrative tasks should so overwhelm us that the pleasure's not in it.... I don't like rules--in my life + in my writing I have always tried to at least see what it was like to flout them, thus perhaps my leniency at the smoking + drinking that takes place, willy-nilly in Parish Hall....I would guess I am not suited to my job because, within it, as you can see, I still want people to love me, as if it were the same as writing poetry. Maybe Ted is right + I shouldn't be the person doing this. It's true I'm not lacking for things to do. + if it begins to seem inappropriate + impossible, it won't be hard for me to cede to another.

But as it stands, I feel devoted to my task, if I can do it. Which means if we all can do it, obviously, since it's no longer autocracy.

I'm sensitive too, silly to say, + as a friend I'm begging you to know that, thus this silly letter, with all its pleading to you to be a friend + sillily help me.

It all settles, but squabbles and frustrations are ongoing. Not long after, Mayer and Holman are composing a dialogue by handing the notebook back-and-forth during a Gerard Malanga performance that both of them are particularly upset about. "This is a huge mistake," writes Holman. "I can barely stand to stay in the room," Mayer responds. The tension was interpersonal, as well. In her notes on an early Advisory Board meeting that included replacing current staff Mayer writes, "Ron doesn't want to comment on Eileen Myles." (In their novel Inferno, Myles responds in kind: "[Ron] was an American kind of phony. There are many kinds of fakery, and some are successful. I think I have Ron's figured out.") Next to the bitter, inevitable clashes and falling-outs--an ongoing narrative of all aesthetic and social communities--Mayer's own frustrations surface in other ways: "Oh poem I am so sorry / [...} / What time is it? / What was poem? / I want to weep when the men outside / Accost me + say, 'five dollars for the two of us?' / Perhaps I'm weak, we are in our 'work clothes' / [...] / All of me is forthcoming." Her authority, whether she relishes it or not, her title (Director or Directrix), and her accomplishments are nullified and tinged with self-doubt after being verbally assaulted. The invisible labor, stress, and abuse of running the Project as a woman, a mother, a poet, a friend are embedded in these lines, and evident throughout the notebook, and Mayer uses that pain to exceed the boundaries between her roles and positions: "All of me is forthcoming." Being forced to be objectified and forced to deal with some male poet's bullshit were daily practices. Mayer is there, and refuses. "I'm not you," she writes on the cover.

Read Szymascek's essay "A Good Job for a Poet" about her work and approach to directing the Project that went up yesterday at the Poetry Foundation's Harriet Blog:

I like being a minor public figure. It suits me. I like showing up in magazines, going to parties, being interviewed on the radio, and doing all the figurehead stuff. I also like paperwork and pencils, efficient online grant application systems, making budgets when other people set up the Excel sheet, and attending to the details that go into making poetry readings and writing workshops happen. I wonder what I would have made of the words “infrastructure poet” when I was a teen, if Anne Waldman had been my career counselor? Through our informal mentorship, I’ve come to understand this title as a call to strengthen the sites and discourse and etiquettes that are important for poets to thrive. Anne and I had a conversation about our work in the Brooklyn Rail in 2016. Like her, I have been inspired to make sure the Project represented a larger voice than my own so that its usefulness to the community would outlive my tenure. Sometime people have rightfully said that I have been selfless, the job thankless, that I have been a caretaker; however, it is also important to note that the Project has given me a surplus of self (future?), and I can now envision anything—even writing books that have nothing to do with my life as a nonprofit arts administrator. In June, I will leave the Poetry Project, and I will feel the best kind of lost.

With a Taurus twist, I'm sure Mayer would agree.

Crystal Set #13: In February I Think by Elio Schneeman (C Press, 1978)

Easter Sunday, Staten Island, 1968. Elio Schneeman with ball cap in lower right corner. Photograph by Larry Fagin.

In February I Think by Elio Schneeman (C Press, 1978). Side stapled, 22 mimeographed pages with covers by George Schneeman. 

In New York School Painters & Poets: Neon in Daylight, Jenni Quilter illustrates a distinction between the personal and aesthetic worlds of first- and second-generation New York School poets by pointing out that in the photo to the right, in contrast to most group photographs of Ashbery, O'Hara, Rivers, Freilicher, and the like, adorned with khakis, cocktails, and pressed collars, in the photograph of the second generation poets "the children almost outnumber the adults, they are in the middle of a softball game at Staten Island, and a certain scruffiness is de rigueur." The families, partners, and children of the poets of the younger New York School artists have always lovingly crowded my own reading of their work, not only because so many of their relationships were with other poets but because some of their children, now adults, are also established writers and artists. I'm thinking of Ada Calhoun, the daughter of Brooke Alderson and Peter Schjeldahl, whose terrific St. Marks Is Dead: The Many Lives of America's Hippest Street was published in 2016, or when I recently walked into a gallery in Atlanta to be surprised by a set of photo collages by Max Warsh, the son of Bernadette Mayer and Lewis Warsh. From Amiri Baraka's haunting, anxious, traumatic "Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note," in which "I tiptoed up / To my daughter's room and heard her / Talking to someone" to Alice Notley's Song For the Unborn Second Baby that begins "Pregnant again involucre / (sounds gorgeous)," studying these poems also means studying families. 

Elio Schneeman wearing t-shirt with George Schneeman print

Elio Schneeman, the son of artist George Schneeman, pictured wearing a baseball cap in the right corner of the above photograph, is one of the New York School children who became a New York School artist in their own right. Born in 1961, Elio was a teenage poet when Ted Berrigan and Alice Notley moved back to New York City in the mid-70s. The Schneeman's St. Marks Street apartment had been a social and artistic common ground since the mid-60s and George's increasing collaborations with Ted and Alice upon their return to New York put Elio in intimate proximity to his father's friends. In the fall of 1978, when he was 16 years old, Elio attended a series of workshops led by Berrigan at the Poetry Project, a friendly and serious occasion for mentorship and aesthetic education that led directly to his first book, which would be published by Berrigan. "Last night Elio Schneeman came over and said he’d like me to do a 'C' Press book by him," Ted writes in his journal on October 4, "I said sure." Reading Ted's journal over the next few weeks is a dreamy illustration of just how casual and collaborative the publishing process could be among the Lower East Side poets. October 16: "Tonight we took presents to the Schneeman’s for Elio’s [17th] Birthday. I gave him NO BIG DEAL, Tom Clark’s Mark Fidrych book. Alice gave him an opal, and the kids made pictures for him." A day or so later: "Tomorrow Bob [Rosenthal] + I run off Elio’s book at the Church, a 'C' Press book now called IN FEBRUARY I THINK. I finished typing the stencils tonight....George did a terrific cover and back cover for Elio's book." October 20: "George, Elio and I collated half of Elio’s book, which is beautiful with George’s front and back covers, tho my typewriter leaves a lot to be desired." October 21: "Today Alice + George + Steve [Carey] + Elio + I finished collating Elio’s book."  From start to finish, In February I Think was planned and printed in less than three weeks, just in time for the St. Mark's Church Fire Benefit event at CBGB on Saturday October 26, for which Berrigan was the MC. A fire had badly damaged the Church in late July 1978, more than a dozen years into the experiment of the Poetry Project. Poets like Paul Blackburn and Carol Bergé had helped established the Project in 1966, but the fundraiser at CBGB was a punk-driven reconfiguration of the East Village scene of the '60s. In his notebook after the event, Ted lists his “Heroes,” “Losers,” “First Team,” “Winner,” and “Rookie of the Year” for the CBGB reading. Among readings and performances by Allen Ginsberg, Anne Waldman, The Erasers, John Ashbery, The B Girls, and Richard Hell and the Voidoids featuring Elvis Costello, Elio earns the title "Rookie of the Year," the same distinction Ted half-jokingly gave himself after his reading at the Berkeley Poetry Conference in 1965. It's fitting then that In February I Think would turn out to be the last ever "C" Press publication, the final title in a mimeographed hall-of-fame list of books that began with Ted's own The Sonnets in 1964.

Elio's is the first "C" Press book I've actually owned, thanks to Kevin Killian, who generously gave me his own copy of In February I Think, a copy signed "For Bob Callahan / Love, Elio." Callahan was a Bay Area poet, editor, publisher, and "raconteur extraordinaire," according to his 2008 obituary, who co-founded the Turtle Island Foundation, a press whose catalog includes the elegant first edition of Bernadette Mayer's Midwinter Day. George Schneeman's front cover, a casually tossed off pair of black Converse sneakers, and back over, a stoic, handsome portrait of Elio, convey the mixture of adolescent spirit and the timeless, archetypal imagery that color Schneeman's poems. From the book's opening line, "Future references lead us nowhere," Elio marks an interest in looking at the now but not through his parents' friend's versions of New York School dailiness. While these poems are very much in New York, or "Soot City" as one poem names it, they portray the city as an environment to unfix with imaginative leaps into more unmappable, unconscious spaces. For example, the poem "Unstable Life Form State" begins on First Street and quickly moves to "a cove or inlet of the sea / where mountains once capped the snow towers." These grand, archetypal environments that appear throughout the book--the sea, mountains, a green land--are spaces of possibility and perspective, "adjoining landscape[s]" parallel to daily life and the street. The last lines of this poem are Schneeman at his best, gathering an enigmatic and dreamy sequence of images that reorder scale and sight: "outside, black / figments of the day thru a glass jar / stamp their effects on your periphery."  Adding to this movement away from city sidewalks and the need "to shield the world of traffic," In February I Think is full of similes, simultaneously direct and indirect, that gain momentum in their comparisons until the "like," the technical hinge, begins to fall away, and Schneeman's cascade of comparisons transform into a gathering litany of generative associations. It's difficult not to enjoy a simile as joyfully incongruous and correct as "the business of relatives like some amber / hoax" from "The Jewel Staircase." I'm stunned at how completely the truth this line is, at the thinking that allows it to accumulate on the page, and at the wild textures of "some amber hoax." There's something wonderfully liminal in these poems, written within the strange growth of being 16 years old and yet in proximity to so many incredible older artists. The writing reminds me of those addresses that include half numbers, a residence complete unto itself, full and lived in and unique, but also irreducibly between. And while In February I Think is between generations, is in fact generational within the New York School, it also erases our odd, beloved dependence on "generations" to describe the New York School. "This relevance completely dumbfounds us," Schneeman writes, propping up a disregard for categorization, "who go on baffled by the instances / of time." From the end of "Channels": "The time sequence is of a new order / you really aren't where you think etc." I'm imagining that last line floating into view throughout the day, uncannily repeating on street signs, marked on walls, scrolling through a news feed, as a kind of wisdom or resistance or both. Funny and terrifying, it'd keep us alive. 

I'm particularly interested in Schneeman's "Sonnet" dedicated to Berrigan, a formal sonic wobbling that begins with an off-balance, humorous near-statement of poetics "Symbolism objects equal footwear" and ends with the Spicerian "on the poem that never ends." Thinking of how instrumental Ted is in these poems, from Elio's workshop with Berrigan at the Church to In February I Think being published as a "C" Press book, it's hard not to read the line "you feed me lunch of cabbage and orchids" as a nod to Schneeman's personal and aesthetic apprenticeship to Berrigan where the common and the dazzling continuously mix and sustain, allowing one to "wrap [and] unite stuff." Whether in a "chintzy daze" or looking out of "hornrimmed glaciers," uniting stuff is exactly what the poem allows us to do. Reading love is reading "Sonnet" next to Elio's "To the Muse," a poem for Ted written after his death that appears in Nice to See You: An Homage to Ted Berrigan. The earlier orchids seem to magically reappear: "I'm always around if you want to visit. / We'll make each room our own, / Where I'll exhale fresh flowers, / Because of you." Fiercely devoted, near, and complexly aligned, I am totally overcome and in love with this poem's articulation of lineage and grief. "I need you to get me into the sky." In 1997, a few months after the death of Allen Ginsberg, Elio would die at the age of 35. His obituary in The New York Times describes him as "Poet. Son of George and Katie Schneeman." His funeral was held at St. Brigid's Church on Avenue B and 7th Street, the same church memorialized in Frank O'Hara and Bill Berkson's collaborative Hymns of St. Bridget ("My heart is corresponding oddly and with odd things," they write), a landscape, it seems, where the poem never ends.

One of the few descriptions of Elio's poetry comes from Vincent Katz, another son of the New York School born just a year before Schneeman. The following is Katz's blurb for Schneeman's A Found Life (Telephone Books, 2000), a posthumous collection:

George Schneeman with Elio Schneeman: "We lie in thick forests...," 1991 ink and collage on illustration board, 11'' by 8.5'' (from George Schneeman: Painter Among Poets).

Elio Schneeman's poetry, while filled with emotion and clear-eyed as to his own motivations, still seems to want to exist in a realm apart from daily life. Dreams, mists, evanescence are the dominant forces. It's difficult poetry to categorize --- poetry of nothingness which is not Zen but rather candid observation of daily patterns: 'the delicious drowsiness / of late afternoon, that slips / invisibly into evening,' as one poem concludes. His word patterns and rhythms are sure; they lull the reader into a dreamlike state, which is sometimes broken by odd turns: 'I want to caress / each layer of skin / like a fine fabric / to encase me in...' An almost Surrealist tone brings to mind Phillipe Soupault's Last Nights of Paris, which also traced visions vanishing on city streets. Elio Schneeman's poetry stands on its own and will.

In addition to In February I Think (1978) and A Found Life (2000), Elio's work also includes Along the Rails, published by United Artists in 1991, about which John Godfrey writes:

Elio Schneeman turns some interesting corners in ALONG THE RAILS. His writing is strong, often quite sophisticated. He is sometimes boyish or raw, but he writes smart, and his perceptions of feeling--real feeling, oblique feeling--are only self-conscious enough to be smartly written. I am impressed by how substantial he sounds, and how solitary.

Photograph of Elio Schneeman by Greg Masters. Courtesy of Greg Masters.

"Words For Greg" by Elio Schneeman, on print by George Schneeman. Courtesy of Greg Masters.

Tom Weigel (1948-2017)

Poet Tom Weigel passed away at the age of 69 earlier this month. While I'm not very familiar with Weigel's work, his poems often appear in issues of The World, Mag City, and other New York School-related magazines that are a regular part of my research. Weigel's obituary describes him as an "artist, poet, and playwright [who] lived on NY’s lower east side during the 1970's and 80's and is recognized as a member of the 3rd generation of New York School Poets" and "an active participant at the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church in the 1970’s and 1980’s." Poets and scholars familiar with the mimeo culture of the 70s and 80s might be more familiar with Weigel as the editor of Tangerine magazine (1981-1986) and publisher of Andrea Doria Books, which published books by Helena Hughes and Michael Scholnick as well as The Full Deck Anthology. Issue number 5 of Tangerine is a memorial issue for Ted Berrigan designed in the style of what would later be published as Nice To See You: An Homage to Ted Berrigan (Coffee House Press, 1991). It's a copy I've always wanted to see but haven't been able to find in the archive. The local New London, CT paper The Day has a full article on Weigel's passing that describes his past and recent life in more detail. 

My connection to Weigel is totally serendipitous. Last February I stopped in at A Book by Its Cover bookstore in Louisville, KY while traveling for a conference. I had corresponded with the owner about any New York School material he might have -- he had recently acquired a small collection of mimeo magazines and books, mostly copies of Mag City and a few issues of The World. I bought a couple pieces from him and before I left he handed me about a dozen loose sheets of paper that had been slipped into the mimeo magazines when he got them, saying he thought I would appreciate having them. In the stack there was a flyer for Mag City 5 with a Weigel poem and copies of letters from Gerard Malanga, but more surprisingly, there were six original typed poems by Weigel from throughout 1979, including at least two poems that Weigel wrote for a workshop with Alice Notley at the Poetry Project. As Alice says about the workshops she led at the Church at that time: "I don't remember my workshops in detail and didn't keep handouts or notes etc. The most extraordinary ones were probably the first and last ones. In the first one were people like Eileen Myles, Bob Holman, Susie Timmons. In the last one I assigned everyone to write and publish a book, which they did. We called ourself, as a press, Unimproved Editions Press, which I used as a rubric to publish on my own Steve Carey's 20 Poems. Between those two were several others, but god knows what we did -- it was always interesting, there were always a lot of weirdos around in the workshops and a sense of the Unprofessional. I mean really crazy people dropped by, all you had to do was show up -- not even enroll. Or pay."

The two poems for Notley's workshop are pictured below, the first written, as Weigel notes, for Notley's assignment to "Write a Creation Myth" and the second written on December 30, 1979 and signed. I've treasured both these poems since rather suddenly and unexpectedly being given them. The bookstore was our last stop before getting on the highway to drive home to Atlanta, and I remember reading the poems in the car and it seeming as if I had been looking for them. More than ephemera, they're rare association pieces that offer a little window into the aesthetic, social, and shared writing spaces of the Poetry Project in the late 70s in the midst of the national downturn in federal funding for arts programs and publishing. In fact, Weigel's poems for Notley's workshop were written after Ronald Reagan had been elected to his first term as President but before he had taken office, a liminal cultural space in a still thickly experimental, ever-changing Lower East Side. Of the two poems, I'm partial to "A Creation Myth," which for me is really lovely from "As a tribe spits back righteous & variable" all the way down. The last stanza is just great. While the second poem doesn't note what Notley's assignment was, it could have been to write a poem that begins and ends with overheard speech. If so, those are great lines. If you look closely you'll notice that both poems included spots where Weigel has used wite-out to correct typos -- on "Creation's" in the first poem and "serious" in the second. Archives are continually revealing the artist's hand, and its great to see the details of artifacts like these that hold so much wayward, living, personal energy.

RIP Tom Weigel: "When you wake / You'll be sand, yet whole"

Crystal Set #6: Memorial Day by Ted Berrigan and Anne Waldman (Poetry Project, 1971)

Memorial Day by Ted Berrigan and Anne Waldman (Poetry Project, 1971). In the last few years Memorial Day has received some attention, first in 2012 when the audio recording from Ted and Anne’s initial reading of the poem at the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church In-the-Bowery on May 5, 1971 was found in Robert Creeley’s audio archives and posted on PennSound. Michael Hennessey has an article, “Recovering ‘Memorial Day’” at Jacket2 about finding that recording: https://jacket2.org/commentary/recovering-memorial-day. What I love most about the article is Anne saying she had “a recording of a recording of a recording” of the poem made by Clark Coolidge. This note, along with the tape showing up in Creeley’s archives, especially after it had been considered lost for so many years, shows how valuable this poem was to a wide variety of poets. And not only the poem itself, but the event of its being read and heard. It is a poem that needs to be heard.

Then last year a video of Ted and Anne reading Memorial Day was posted on the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art channel. I don’t think anyone had any idea it existed. The video description says: “This reading of Waldman and Berrigan’s poem "Memorial Day” was performed as part of a reading series at 98 Greene Street Loft curated by the poet Ted Greenwald. The video was shot by Sandy Hirsch on the only video format that existed at the time, ½ inch open reel video, often referred to as Portapak, and like any video shot in this format from the late 1960s to early 1970s, it is now a very fragile historical document. Digital preservation of this video allows us to now view it and share it with the public for the first time in decades. The Archives thanks the Berrigan estate, Waldman, and Hirsch for their generous permission to share the video on our YouTube channel": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CjfWeiTTvnw. I had just found the audio recording of Memorial Day last year like a week before this video surfaced, so my seduction at the hands of the recording immediately became an obsession as I watched the video over and over.

In Ted Berrigan: An Annotated Checklist, Aaron Fischer quotes Anne Waldman about the making of the book:

“Ted & I were scheduled to read several months in advance at The Poetry Project on Memorial Day. Not sure we originally requested this date, but the day fell out that way and we were psyched, having an 'occasion’ to focus on that would also jar some collaborative writing. We were both living that spring in Long Island. I was in Bridgehampton, renting a house with Michael Brownstein Kenneth Koch later bought. Ted and Alice Notley were in Southampton in Larry Rivers’s place there. Ted was always somewhat 'charged’ by the subject matter(s) of death, loss, friendship and the energy & challenge of bumping up against another poet in 'making’ work. Some friends of ours had died by then and we saw the potential piece as an homage, a commemoration, a meditation, and we definitely composed it with the oral reading of it very much in mind. It was kind of a psalm, hymn, litany all blended together that allowed for story (epic that you tell the heroes’ tales) - some decidedly musical form. We weren’t living far away from each other but decided to collaborate through the mail. So we went back and forth at least five times. As the time for our performance drew near it fell on me to 'organize’ the text which were 'clusters’ to my mind out on the Bridgehampton studio floor and letting my eye and ear jump around with scissors and paste. I think we both (after the initial organization) looked it over & Ted went with my arrangement with very minor emendations. The decision on the last part (’& Now the book is closed’) was mutual and we orchestrated it with great intentionality (pretty much alternating lines) for our public performance. The 'closed’ chant originally came from hearing Chris Gallup (Dick & Carol Gallup’s daughter) saying that things were 'closed’ as she drove a street or highway in a car (possibly on Long Island?). Ted had picked up on this and I went with it wholeheartedly. Larry Rivers did a terrific collage work that we translated into a flyer for the event (Nice To See You, p.119). We were in great form, the performance felt exhilarating and powerful. Ted 'borrowed’ the audio tape made that night which he played on numerous occasions. Where is it now?

The cover is by Donna Dennis who I think has a section in Nice To See Youwhere she talks about spending time with Ted and making the cover for Memorial Day. There’s an alternative cover included there, too. The line "Nice To See You” comes from Memorial Day; the words Ted says he’d like on his grave. Frank O'Hara’s death is a huge part of the poem, too, and I’m sure the idea to write a Memorial Day poem had a lot to do with Frank’s “Memorial Day 1950.”

The audio and video recordings are breathtaking, each in their own way. I feel like I’ll never get over this poem, but that’s just as much about the poem as it is the banter at the beginning of each recording, especially the audio. How Ted and Anne joke with one another explaining the poem’s process, Ted putting on his tender bravado, Anne’s wit mixing with his performative masculinity. Then this incredible joke: “Anne and I have been married for twelve years now and we’re living testimonial to how marriage can work,” Ted announces. Everyone laughing. “Go ahead, honey.” “Ok, baby.” And they start reading, exchanging sections of the poem back and forth as they read. “Today / Open: Opening: Opened:” says Anne. And then Ted: “The angels that surround us / die / they kiss death / & they die / they always die.” It’s so clear how much they love each other.

I had been obsessively listening to the 1981 recording of The Sonnets for a while before I became familiar with Memorial Day, but it was really Memorial Daythat bound me to Ted’s work. Last summer Carrie and I wrote a long poem after Ted and Anne’s poem called Labor Day, which is about work in the way that Memorial Day is about death, that was recently published as a double collaborative chapbook, along with Tyler and Layne’s Collected Feelings, by Forklift, Ohio. Writing with the people I love is such a part of that love. Ted and Anne are so good at showing us how our love existed before we did. It’s significant that Memorial Day is included in Ted’s Collected Poems, a rare inclusion of a long collaborative work in a space that is typically restricted to a poet’s singular output. One imagines Ted would have insisted it be included, too.

I ILLed the original stapled mimeo pamphlet, which is the one handed out at the initial reading in 1971, and read it today, Memorial Day, while listening to the recordings of them reading the poem. I sat on this couch and Carrie sat on the other couch. The original is so gorgeous, the lines spread out on the large pages, all the little typos, the shaky, uneven typewritten font, how the ink bled through onto the back of the pages. Maybe the most amazing thing about it is that the back cover is another front cover, as if the book’s beginning and ending had been confused, as if it didn’t end. Ted believed in cycles, and this object bears out that sense of how time collects, returns, and is revoiced. Carrie just said to Jared on the phone, “I’m glad you’re okay. I’m glad you’re okay.” Later we’re going to eat a watermelon we took from a dumpster last night. Our grave is going to say THE PONIES WERE JUST HERE.