Denby, Edwin (1903–1983)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Harris Feinsod
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Practical Experience ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
New York School ◽  
John Ashbery ◽  
Visual Artists ◽  
Frank O'hara ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Downtown Scene ◽  
James Schuyler

Edwin Denby is best remembered as one of the preeminent critics of dance modernism, yet he was also an accomplished poet and an experienced dancer, choreographer, and librettist. Both his poetic gifts and his practical experience in the theater informed his dance criticism, first collected in Looking at the Dance (1949) and amplified in Dancers, Buildingsand People in the Streets (1965). As the title of his 1965 volume suggests, Denby placed primacy on the pleasures of perception, recording what he saw rather than advocating for a distinct point of view, as did his contemporaries Lincoln Kirstein and John Martin. Denby’s sensibility was widely admired in New York’s postwar avant-garde milieus, and he became an important friend, muse, mentor, and tutelary spirit to visual artists—including Rudy Burckhardt, Willem and Elaine de Kooning, and Alex Katz—and to New York School poets—especially Frank O’Hara, James Schuyler, John Ashbery, Ted Berrigan, Ron Padgett, and Anne Waldman. In the last several decades of his life, Denby continued to be a key figure in the downtown scene across several performance genres.

Paris, Poets, and Poverty

Alive Still ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 41-58
Author(s):  
Cathy Curtis
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York School ◽  
John Ashbery ◽  
Frank O'hara ◽  
Chartres Cathedral ◽  
German Woman ◽  
Kenneth Koch ◽  
Fernand Leger ◽  
Village Voice ◽  
Freelance Work

Freelance income and frugality allowed Nell to embark on her first trip abroad in 1950. In Paris, she felt as though she had stepped into an Impressionist landscape. Bowled over by Chartres Cathedral and the museums, she also visited two of her art idols, Jean Hélion and Fernand Léger. She became involved with a German woman with whom she traveled to Florence and Rome. Back in New York, while living with Midi Garth, she enjoyed hanging out with several of the poets later known as the New York School: Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, and Kenneth Koch. Bebop records played at her boisterous parties, which often included marathon games of poker. In her painting, she had embarked on a period of experimentation with figurative imagery. Midi and Brook evokes a pastoral scene in Vermont, where the women vacationed. Meanwhile, her freelance work included serving as designer of the Village Voice.

scholarly journals German Romantic Tradition in John Ashbery’s "Where Shall I Wander"

2019 ◽  
Vol 57 ◽  
pp. 75-88
Author(s):  
Paweł Marcinkiewicz ◽  
Daniel Pietrek
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
American Literature ◽  
French Literature ◽  
Important Influence ◽  
First Century ◽  
Arthur Rimbaud ◽  
New York School ◽  
John Ashbery ◽  
Frank O'hara ◽  
Late Works

In popular critical and readerly reception, the New York School of poetry was shaped mostly by what Marjorie Perloff calls the tradition of indeterminacy. This was started by Arthur Rimbaud and, a few decades later, developed by Dadaists and Surrealists. Therefore, the tradition of French modernism seems to have been vital for John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara, James Schuler, and Barbara Guest, and the poets themselves appeared to confirm this fact. They often visited France privately and as scholars, and lived there for extended periods of time. In the case of John Ashbery, his year-long Fulbright fellowship was prolonged to a decade. Moreover, the New York School poets contributed to the propagation of French literature, being translators, critics and editors of French authors. However, as John Ashbery’s late works prove, literary genealogies are far more complex. German Romantic tradition always exerted an important influence on John Ashbery, and it inspired the New York experimenter to contribute two major poems to the twenty-first century American literature: “Where Shall I Wander” and “Hölderlin Marginalia”.

Getting Rid of the Glue: The Music of the New York School

1993 ◽  
Vol 27 (3) ◽  
pp. 335-353 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Nicholls
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York School ◽  
Visual Artists ◽  
Single Group ◽  
Jackson Pollock ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Willem De Kooning ◽  
Mark Rothko ◽  
Philip Guston

The term New York School is usually applied to a number of American visual artists working in and around Manhattan from the early 1940s through to the late 1950s. The group included abstract expressionists, abstract impressionists and action painters; among its leading lights were Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock, Philip Guston and Franz Kline. The typical features of New York School art were innovative individual expression and a rejection of past tradition. And while this led to the development of a number of independent styles, rather than a single group style, the overall result was a characteristic American avant-garde approach to art which had much influence internationally.

Charles Bernstein: Avant-Garde Is a Constant Renewal

boundary 2 ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 48 (4) ◽  
pp. 215-230
Author(s):  
Ian Probstein
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York School ◽  
John Ashbery ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Language L ◽  
Charles Bernstein ◽  
Private Matter

Abstract The essay explores the work of Charles Bernstein in light of constant renewal. John Ashbery, as one of the brightest representatives of the New York School, and Charles Bernstein, as a representative of the language (L = A = N = G = U = A = G = E), have similar attitudes toward language. They have much in common in terms of poetics: in the rejection of loud phrases, prophetic statements, emotions, confessionalism, and certain self-centeredness. Poetry is a private matter for both. Both have poetics built on the “oddness that stays odd,” as Bernstein himself put it, paraphrasing Pound's “news that stays news.” Both are aimed at renovating the language, and the verses of both are built on fragmentation, collage, moving from one statement to another without preparation. However, in Ashbery, whose poems are surreal, these transitions are smoother, based on an apparent connection, what Bernstein calls “hypotaxis” or “associative parataxis.” In contrast, Bernstein's poetry is built on parataxis; it is “bumpy,” in the poet's own words.

scholarly journals Vladimir Mayakovsky and Frank O’Hara: a Reappraisal

2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 144-185
Author(s):  
Ronald Vroon
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Second World War ◽  
New York School ◽  
World War ◽  
Vladimir Mayakovsky ◽  
Frank O'hara ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Abstract Expressionist ◽  
Second World

The “New York School” refers to a group of poets and painters, mostly of the Abstract Expressionist movement, who congregated in New York in the first two decades following the end of the Second World War. They constitute a coterie that has been characterized as America’s “last avant-garde”. Among its most prominent members was Frank O’Hara (1926–1966). Like other members of the New York School of poets, he was strongly influenced by the French and Russian avant-garde movements of the early twentieth century. He was particularly drawn to the works of Vladimir Mayakovsky, whose persona and poetry are frequently referenced in his own oeuvre. The present study seeks to establish the origins of O’Hara’s interest in the Russian poet, the sources he consulted in familiarizing himself with Mayakovsky’s work, and the trajectory of references to Mayakovsky that documents how his avant-garde aesthetic both accommodates and distances itself from that of his Russian forebear.

scholarly journals Beat women poets and writers: countercultural urban geographies and feminist avant-garde poetics

2016 ◽  
Vol 14 ◽  
pp. 47
Author(s):  
Isabel Castelao-Gómez
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Beat Generation ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Women Poets ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Literary Community ◽  
City Space ◽  
Contemporary Us Literature ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The One

The work of Beat women poets and their contribution to the Beat canon was neglected for decades until the late nineties. This study presents a critical appreciation of early Beat women poets and writers’ impact on contemporary US literature drawing from theoretical tools provided by feminist literary and poetry criticism and gender studies on geography. The aim is to situate this female literary community, in specific the one of late 1950s and 1960s in New York, within the Beat generation and to analyze the characteristics of their cultural and literary phenomena, highlighting two of their most important contributions from the point of view of gender, cultural and literary studies: their negotiation of urban geographies and city space as bohemian women and writers, and their revision of Beat aesthetics through a feminist avant-garde poetics.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document