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.

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.

Afterword

2017 ◽  
pp. 216-226
Author(s):  
Daniel Kane
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York School ◽  
The Dead ◽  
Multiple Lives ◽  
The Way

Making it onto the Billboard Chart’s Top 100 list in 1980, the Jim Carroll Band’s hit single “People Who Died” had – and continues to have - multiple lives. The fifth track on the Jim Carroll Band’s first album Catholic Boy, “People Who Died” is name-checked in novels (Jennifer Ball’s Catalyst; Michael Muhammad Knight’s The Taqwacores). It is summoned in autobiographies (Steve Rutz’s Renewing Your Mind; Vanessa Gezarri’s The Tender Soldier). We hear it in films as various as Steven Spielberg’s ET: The Extra Terrestrial; Fritz Kierch’s Tuff Turf; and Zack Snyder’s 2004 remake of George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead. And yet, despite the way Carroll’s “People Who Died” has resonated across the decades, few critics even bother to mention that Carroll’s song is inspired directly by Ted Berrigan’s poem “People Who Died,” first published in 1969. This chapter analyzes how the last great punk song on the last great punk album was actually modeled on a New York School poem.

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.

Alice Notley’s Inhabited Spaces

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yasmine Shamma
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Spatial Theory ◽  
New York School ◽  
Frank O'hara ◽  
The Way

Though Berrigan and Notley were married, this chapter moves away from addressing coterie (as it has received thorough attention) to instead consider the way that the intimacy enforced by living in small spaces shaped the school’s tone and form. This chapter treats the school’s domestic poetry, focusing exclusively on Alice Notley’s Mysteries of Small Houses, a collection of poems devoted to remembering the spaces Notley inhabited, while locating the tendency to address lived-in space as one promoted by Frank O’Hara. Integrating urban and spatial theory to offer a psycho-geographic reading of this poetry, this chapter utilizes material from an original interview personally conducted with Notley devoted to spatial discussions. In this way, this chapter pays homage to previous studies of the school by offering a space for the living poets of The New York School to speak for themselves, while testing the validity of this study, within the study.

Zen Influence, Inherence, and Denial

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gregory P. A. Levine
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Postwar Period ◽  
New York School ◽  
John Cage ◽  
The West ◽  
Postwar Art ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Rhetorical Patterns

Centering on the work and reception of the composer John Cage, famous for his “indeteminant” works, Yoshihara Jirō and his “Circle works,” and the filmmaker Ozu Yasujirō’s Tokyo Story, this chapter examines the twining postwar rhetorical patterns of Zen influence, Zen inherence, and Zen denial as they inform interpretation of works of postwar art produced by artists in the West and Japan. Contrary to certain practitioner narratives, at times beguiled by hagiography and inclined towards grand narratives, the chapter suggests a grittier sensibility that reflects the rhetorical tussles that emerged contemporaneously and have since continued. Doing so, it points again to the multifarious nature of Zen in the postwar period, including those forms espoused by the avant-garde and its advocates, as well as the parallax effect of affirmative orientalist reception in the West of Japanese artists—praised when their work looked Zen, otherwise dismissed as derivative of New York School artists.

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.

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