Ted Berrigan’s Stanzaic Spaces

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yasmine Shamma
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Second Generation ◽  
John Donne ◽  
New York School ◽  
Poetic Form ◽  
Verse Form

After suggesting (and agreeing) that Berrigan led the Second Generation New York School, this chapter treats the actual forms of Berrigan’s poems, focusing on his sonnets to show that these poets interpret poems as spaces in which to recreate rooms. Berrigan, perhaps more obviously than any other New York School poet, took deliberate steps towards integrating aspects of traditional poetic verse form: Where John Donne encouraged: “We’ll build in sonnets pretty rooms,” Berrigan retorts (repeated throughout his Sonnets): “Is there room in the room that you room in?” riddling the form with domestic, urban and aesthetic complications. Berrigan explained to an interviewer: “I always thought of each one of my poems, like the sonnets, as being a room. And before that, I used to think of each stanza as being a room.” Accordingly, this chapter examines Berrigan’s stanzas as rooms, arguing that this responsive poetic form functions organically.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yasmine Shamma
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Second Generation ◽  
New York School ◽  
Poetic Form ◽  
Historical Contextualization ◽  
Historically Situated ◽  
Critical Social

This introduction tells the story of the Second Generation New York School—one of aesthetic and academic lineage and, for at least a decade, intimate bond. The Second Generation New York School poets are historically situated as a bohemia (citing Geoff Ward’s use of the term) and theoretically situated as ecocritical. The ways in which the school engaged in ancestral hopping (of Modernists) are outlined. Following this, the introduction integrates existing discussion of postmodern poetic form, alerting the reader to critical agreements regarding New York School poetry’s “haphazard” form (according to Helen Vendler), while defining form for the purposes of the subsequent revisionist discussion. While much of the introduction engages in this kind of critical, social, and historical contextualization, it also argues that the title of the school, though a misnomer, is necessary, and that the complexities of this particular school’s constructions have yet to be fully apprehended.

Frankenthaler, Helen (1928–2011)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christa Noel Robbins
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Second Generation ◽  
Atmospheric Effects ◽  
Postwar Period ◽  
New York School ◽  
Medium Specificity ◽  
Materials Used ◽  
The Way

Helen Frankenthaler was an American painter known for her large, abstract stain paintings. Associated with the second generation of Abstract Expressionists, Frankenthaler is thought to have shown the way out of a quickly ossifying New York School "style" by developing a technique that emphasized large areas of color over gestural and expressionistic brushwork. As an alternative to Expressionism, Frankenthaler soaked thinned-out paint into raw duck canvas, a technique she first applied in her 1952 painting Mountains and Sea. In staining paint directly onto the canvas, Frankenthaler demonstrated that modernist painting need not be beholden to Clement Greenberg’s anti-illusionistic concept of "flatness," which Greenberg developed in theorizing medium specificity (the idea that the materials used to create an artwork determine its appropriate form). Frankenthaler re-introduced an illusive quality into her paintings not through representational devices, but through the atmospheric effects that result when applying large fields of color to unprimed canvas. Medium specificity is maintained, however, in that canvas and paint are still "laid bare," but a reductive emphasis on flatness is replaced with what Greenberg would come to call "opticality." As one of the few female painters during the postwar period to gain commercial and critical recognition, Frankenthaler was an inspiration for several generations of female artists that followed.

Spatial Poetics

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yasmine Shamma
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
First Generation ◽  
Second Generation ◽  
Urban Life ◽  
New York School ◽  
Domestic Spaces ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Spatial Poetics ◽  
Alice Notley

Emphatically coming after the enthusiastic, dexterous, and avant-garde First Generation New York School poets, the Second Generation New York School poets Ted Berrigan, Alice Notley, Ron Padgett, and Joe Brainard engaged with highways and byways of both the poetic line and Manhattan’s grid. These poets lived in and wrote from alternative domestic spaces—untidy, disordered, congested apartments in downtown New York City. This study argues that the forms of their poems are accordingly untraditional, highlighting how New York School stanzas often take on the contours of these spaces, becoming linguistic rooms riddled with the tensions of urban life. Building on recent urban and spatial theory, this book offers a history and close reading of Second Generation New York School Poetry, which reads into the subtle formal elements of this supposedly wild poetry, while also suggesting that the dimensions of lived in urban space inform those elements. This first examination of the formal ramifications of Second Generation New York School poetry aims to situate these later twentieth-century American poetries within larger critical narratives of postmodern American innovation.

Joe Brainard’s Collaged Spaces

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yasmine Shamma
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Second Generation ◽  
Contemporary Poetry ◽  
General Tendency ◽  
New York School ◽  
Text And Image ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Spatial Poetics ◽  
Letter Writer ◽  
First And Second Generation

Brainard was not only an illustrator and friend to many New York School poets, he was also an avid letter writer, collage artist, miniature artist, cartoonist, and serious poet. How is contemporary poetry involved in an overlooked dialogue with collage art? This chapter suggests a general tendency towards assembly across the disciplines of text and image which govern both first- and second-generation New York School aesthetics. This chapter showcases how Brainard’s work instigates and propels the collaged poetry of The New York Schools from the real and influential side-lines of their poems? This examination of Brainard’s work argues that though his work sat in the margins of New York School poetry, it informingly lined, bound, and shaped the spatial poetics of this avant-garde American school.

Bahá’u’lláh’s Influence on the New York School of Painting: The “Unapprehended Inspiration” of Newman and Rothko

1991 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 67-89
Author(s):  
Ross Woodman
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Divine Revelation ◽  
New York School ◽  
The World ◽  
Mark Rothko ◽  
The Veil ◽  
The City

As members of the New York School of painters, Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko announced not only the passing away of an entire creation but also the bringing forth of a new one. Though unaware that they were living and painting in the City of the Covenant whose light would one day rise from darkness and decay to envelop the world even as their painting of light consciously arose from the void of a blank canvas, Newman’s and Rothko’s work may nevertheless be best understood as a powerful first evidence of what Bahá’u’lláh called “the rising Orb of Divine Revelation, from behind the veil of concealment.” Their work may yet find its true spiritual location in the spiritual city founded by ‘Abdu’l-Bahá on his visit to New York in 1912.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document