This time around, I’m chatting with Tony Towle, a native New Yorker whose career as a poet and arts writer stretches from 1963 to the present, with 14 books of poetry and four volumes of prose to his name. His awards include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts, the Poets Foundation, and the Ingram Merrill Foundation. The poet John Ashbery noted that, “Tony Towle is one of the New York School’s best-kept secrets,” while the poet Kenneth Koch stated, “Tony Towle’s is one of the clear, authentic voices in American poetry.”

TT: I do consider myself to be in the second generation of the New York School of Poetry, and I do have a limited notion of who is in there with me, and a general idea of when the third and fourth generations kick in.** But even when less restrictive than I tend to be, the term “second generation” is used in an overly extended, careless, and ultimately meaningless way. In some venues and narratives, it seems to stretch from its beginnings, c. 1962-63, to the present, and into the future, too, and including poets who happen to work in New York and who gave a reading or performance at the Poetry Project — but I’m up against the power of overgeneralization and simplification, so ultimately I have to forget about it and write my poems — I’m a practitioner, after all, not an academic.

DB: So, where do you find dividing lines between successive generations?

TT: Let me point out one pair of accidentally sequential events that, early on, changed the New York School scene irrevocably: the premature death of Frank O’Hara in July of 1966, and the beginning of the reading series at the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church that same year in September. Frank was looked up to and socially accessible, and it’s hard to know what kind of influence he might have had; at virtually the same time, the Project was creating a welcoming destination for young poets that became known as a center, with justification, for New York School poetry. Being on the scene before Frank died and before the Poetry Project was founded was definitely one of the hallmarks of the second generation, but not the third. For me, it was a strange feeling when I first began to meet young poets around the Project who couldn’t have known Frank O’Hara — because they could have, if he had lived — and the fact that I did, gave me a historical dimension I wasn’t expecting.

There’s also the matter of style. I would like to point out that the four foundational, first-generation poets—Koch, O’Hara, Ashbery, and Schuyler—each has an individual style that cannot be mistaken for anyone else’s, yet they are all bunched together with such comments as, “Oh, they just write poems about their friends.” That’s a dismissive description referring only to O’Hara’s famous, and trivialized I do this, I do that poems, a witty, self-deprecating categorization made by O’Hara himself. There are maybe fourteen clear examples of these, written non-sequentially from 1956 to 1961, in his Collected Poems — out of a total of hundreds.

I think of these poems as achieving a kind of “colloquial sublime.” This style had a strong influence on the second and third generations. Ted Berrigan’s “Sonnets” were an undisguised homage, and Ted passed on his enthusiasm to the young poets who came to the workshops he conducted at the Project. Those are easy poems to imitate, but hard to replicate Frank’s original, off-the-cuff inspiration. And I don’t think that John Ashbery or Kenneth Koch ever wrote a poem in this style, and Jimmy Schuyler’s “dailiness” is much different — quiet reflections and observations, not nervous activity and thoughts crowding each other for space. I’ve never written a forthright one of these either, but I think I got to the concept by other means — other than by raising to poetry the autobiographical specifics of the moment, the way Frank was able to do.

DB: You kind of anticipated my next question because I’ve read your work for a number of years, and I’ve always felt that although one could place you, as you do yourself, as a second-generation New York School poet, that it seems that your sensibility... and also just in the way that you write your poems, leans much more towards that first generation.

TT: I think that’s certainly true. I felt I was influenced by them, both at the beginning — in 1963 — and up to and actually including the present. As soon as I started Kenneth Koch’s and Frank O’Hara’s poetry workshops — especially Kenneth’s, as he was more usefully didactic as a teacher — I realized everything I had written since I started writing in 1960 was simply not good enough, so 1963 was my debut. Anyway, I don’t know where those poems came from in the first year. They were personal to the point of eccentricity, but I don’t know if any influences from my two “teachers” could be pointed out, yet they must have been there somewhere, at least subcutaneously. And John Ashbery, too, though he himself wasn’t around yet, and Jimmy Schuyler had not even published his 1966 Tibor de Nagy pamphlet, let alone an actual book. Sometime between late spring and early fall, 1964, Kenward Elmslie, who lived in a tiny house on Cornelia Street in the Village, gave a party to introduce Jimmy Schuyler to some of the young poets. I know me and Ted [Berrigan] were there, and also Joe Brainard, because of a poem written to Joe by Jimmy, where he refers to “Ted and Tony” as two of the invitees. This was apparently the beginning of Joe transferring his affections to Kenward from Joe LeSueur.

[CALL DROPPED]

DB: We were talking about the fact that your own work in terms of its style seems to align more with the first generation than the second. And you were saying that you were hanging out with those older poets more than with the other poets that fell into your age group.

TT: Well, I did socialize a lot with Frank and Joe [LeSueur]; I often dropped by their loft on Broadway to talk and drink – yeah, that is hanging out, isn’t it? I also spent time with Frank Lima and his wife, Sheyla, in their apartment on Second Avenue. I socialized with Allan Kaplan and also with Jim Brodey. Joe and Rosemary Ceravolo invited me to their place in New Jersey for dinner once, where David Shapiro played the violin at a professional, concert-level quality. I was getting to know Ted Berrigan and Ron Padgett, but we didn’t hang out, partly because they didn’t drink, they smoked, and I didn’t smoke (except for Marlboros) but drank. And after June ’64, I had a full-time job, and after the spring of ’65, I was living with Irma Hurley, who became my second wife, and after 1967, we had a daughter, Rachel — still with the job and also still writing poetry, so I socialized, but there was no longer time to “hang out.” I would say that the third and fourth generations of the NYS hung out a lot around St. Mark’s Poetry Project. I didn’t hang out with them, but I met them at poetry readings and became friends with many — and still am.

I’m not sure if Frank [O’Hara] was an actual mentor or not, but he recommended me for things. There was a TV program, New Voices, on the precursor to Public Television, in which various kinds of artists (reading their poems, in the case of poets) got to present their work to a theoretically wider audience than normally. He also recommended me for the Spoleto Festival for 1965, though I didn’t go because of a lack of airfare. I missed quite an interesting event. [Spoleto: Festival of Two Worlds, 1965]

I did go out drinking with Frank, in a group or just the two of us. After June 1964, I had more money. I could hang out with Frank because I could drink as much as he could. [LAUGHS]

DB: I don’t think anybody could from what I’ve read!

TT: It must have helped that I was like 13 years younger. Well, that doesn’t always mean anything, does it; you either can hold it or you can’t. You could drink as much as you liked at Frank’s parties, but don’t fall down, don’t fall asleep, and do be able to hold a conversation. Nobody criticized anybody’s drinking, except whether you could handle it. One reason I indulged in it, other than the fact that I enjoyed it, was that it could eliminate my self-consciousness. It was a convenient escape.

So, what was I saying? Oh yes. I’d like to think I’m influenced by all four of the first generation in their different ways. In principle, I’m influenced by John [Ashbery] as much as Frank in a way. Anyway, I think my breakthrough, once-removed, versions of Frank’s “I do this, I do that” poems came in the early 70s. “Addenda” and “Nearing Christmas” use Frank’s colloquial jumping around from this to that, but still keep a poetic whole. I think maybe where I have been influenced by both Frank and John is in surprising transitions, which may seem to be gratuitous at first, but can open up the poem in unexpected ways. There were three other poems written at about the same time, which fall into the same category: “Moral Courage,” “The Sea and the Wind,” and “Swinburne: End of the Century.” They each had a sense of excitement and discovery while I was writing them, and it just occurs to me that “Addenda” has a spur-of-the-moment encapsulation of what I was just talking about. I’ll send it to you after we get off the phone, and you can insert it.

From Towle’s “Addenda:”

. . . I know from Frank O’Hara that the poem and its setting

are completely at your disposal,

from Kenneth Koch that the resources of language

are greater than oneself and thereby liberating,

from John Ashbery that the mysterious and beautiful

are still supremely possible

and supremely inspiring —

and James Schuyler’s blinding exactitude of observation,

its serene and tremendous burden.

I am fortunate to know even the alphabet,

my mind sticking to nothing for very long, . . .

DB: That’s a very nuanced set of influences!

TT: Those little elucidating phrases came to me out of the blue, one after another, in a delayed influence from Frank O’Hara. They were personal but only sporadically so. They often were about, or referred to, New York, but they weren’t actually autobiographical like Frank’s were, and I wasn’t walking around. Frank could walk around, detail that present moment with what he was seeing, plus what he was thinking, and something brilliant would come out of it. I’ve always been more of a desk poet, more using my imagination to invent things.

DB: I have scribbled down here in my notes that in one of your interviews, you say, there’s no one way to read a New York School poem, which I take to mean that it’s a mistake to codify New York School poetry. The work of these poets is just too diverse.

TT: Yes, I think it is, and yet paradoxically, when asked whether I think there is such a thing as a New York School, I also answer yes, and it’s based on a poet’s style. That’s easy for me to judge on an individual poem with a yes or no, but difficult to describe with certainty what to look for ahead of time. Show me the poem, and I’ll tell you what I think. A poet who is not New York School is James Tate; his sensibility and style are different. But so what? It’s a neutral designation as far as quality and certainly reputation are concerned. John Ashbery thought he was the greatest living poet anyway. But then John is on record as saying there was no such thing as the New York School. I think Jimmy was also sort of skeptical. It would be very interesting to know what Frank would have said about it. I always found that you could not predict that; he might easily say what you did not expect.

I remember once that I made some sarcastic remark about Catholic priests giving advice on marriage. I was never Catholic, but Frank was famously an ex-Catholic, so I was surprised he chided me for my remark, saying, “You’re ignoring the power of the imagination.” And he was absolutely right. A priest might give excellent marital advice, even though celibate; it was narrow thinking on my part. So you never knew what Frank was going to say.

DB: What a terrific story!

TT: I don’t think I’ve ever mentioned it to anyone. Bill Berkson mentioned to me, not too many years before he passed away: “I wish we had recorded what Frank actually said.” A good idea, but the fact is, when you were with Frank, you were participating in the conversation; it was active. Frank was not a sage sitting at the base of a tree dispensing wisdom, or even incisive wit, to acolytes gathered before him, styluses and tablets at the ready. Bill knew that, of course. What he meant was: Wouldn’t it be nice if we remembered and wrote down . . .

DB: To your point, what you just talked about in mentioning James Tate, that you can recognize the sensibility and style, I often wonder if there was a collective poetic during those 30 years or so? Or was it just a shared sense of identity, just because everyone was in the same place at the same time?

TT: It’s not that I recognize his style as much as I feel strongly that it is not New York School style. Which thirty years are we talking about? I wasn’t around for the early – often described as the “heroic” – years of the 1950s. I was in grade school, high school, and then, from ’57 through ’60, in Washington, D.C., for my first marriage. Interestingly, the day I wrote my first poems in August 1960 marked the end of my marriage, which was in trouble anyway. In fact, I had never written any poems before I was 21. I didn’t know anybody who wrote. My interests were basically military and political history. I still know a lot of arcane facts that most poets would not. And I like foreign languages as well as history, which is why I had started going to the Georgetown Foreign Service School before I got married.

In the 50s, John, Kenneth, and Frank went to Harvard, and afterwards, Kenneth settled in New York first. Then they sort of gathered there and got to know some of the New York painters who were not so famous yet, like Joan Mitchell and Grace Hartigan. These poets stuck together because they were looked down upon, and still are, by the academic poets — the ones who really control the prizes and get the publicity, by and large. The “academy” had contempt at best for John, Kenneth, and Frank, who were out of the mainstream. Only later did that begin to change, and mostly with John, as he began to pick up awards.

DB: Since we’re shifting into your timeline, how did you first encounter that “heroic” generation?

TT: How I learned about them originally was through Donald Allen’s anthology, The New American Poetry, which appeared in 1960. I bought it in early 1962. I was taking some courses at NYU and working in the library there for the minimum-wage $1.10 an hour. So I dipped into the book, and wow! Coming from a position of knowing very little about contemporary poetry, it was an awakening. Lawrence Ferlinghetti was the only contemporary poet I knew slightly, because in Washington, after my marriage broke up, I had an affair with a young woman who knew about the Cedar Bar in New York, and had met the famous painter Willem de Kooning there. She had a copy of Ferlinghetti’s A Coney Island of the Mind, and she read some of his poems to me in her hotel room.

Anyway, in 1962, I’m reading the Allen anthology, and the section on the New York poets was the one that I felt most akin to. They themselves weren’t like each other (Barbara Guest was the fifth interesting poet in the section), but they each were writing poems that I found fascinating because the work went far beyond what I thought I could achieve, but that made it tantalizing — and beckoning.

Then, in the late spring, I saw in the New York Times that there was going to be a series of six poetry readings at the New School that summer. The fifth poet out of the six was Kenneth Koch, and the sixth was Frank O’Hara, both of whom were in the Allen anthology. I wanted to go, but the admission was steep – two dollars. You could spend an evening at the Cedar for that, with short beers at fifteen cents, and thirty cents for a pack of cigarettes from the deli, rather than the exorbitant thirty-five cents from the bar’s cigarette machine!

I wanted to attend all the readings — Marianne Moore was the first — but I missed it. I missed the next three, too, but I finally made it to the fifth one, Kenneth Koch’s. I didn’t really get the poems, but everybody laughed, so I knew they were funny. I didn’t see the humor, but I started trying to anticipate the laughter so I wouldn’t look like a jerk. I went to the next reading, too, which was Frank O’Hara’s, who read his “Odes,” which are not funny. Everybody seemed very respectful, but nobody laughed. So I thought it was a great failure. I felt sorry for this poet.

Then, about ten days later, around August 8th, Ramón, one of my Colombian roommates, wanted me to go with him to the Cedar; he was hoping to run into a girl he had met there a few days before. I didn’t feel like going, but he talked me into it. When we arrived, Ramón disappeared to the back, where the tables were. When we arrived, I had noticed Frank O’Hara, the poet I had seen read at the New School. He was seated at the bar, talking to an elderly-looking man with white hair whom I later knew as Edwin Denby.

It was out of character for me to talk to strangers, but I went over and said, “Excuse me, are you Frank O’Hara? I really enjoyed your reading.” He said, “Oh, thank you very much.” And that was it. He went back to talking to his friend, and I didn’t hover —I didn’t want to butt into their conversation. So then I decided I would have a beer, and I was not happy that the only empty barstool was next to O’Hara, because I didn’t want him to think I was seeking acquaintanceship, which I was not. Eventually, the white-haired man left, and Frank turned to me and said, “You know, you made my evening, recognizing me. I’ve just come from the funeral of my best friend’s girlfriend.” So, we started talking, and I realized that O’Hara was gay, but he wasn’t coming on to me or anything. He just started chatting.

The next month, I took this quixotic trip to L.A. with two other people in a drive-away car. I spent three months bumming around in L.A., with no money. But I wasn’t trying to become an actor. It was just sort of crazy. While there, I purchased Kenneth Koch’s just-published book of poems, Thank You, from Grove Press, but Frank O’Hara’s only available publication was Second Avenue, a long poem in a sixteen-page pamphlet published back in 1953. I was initially disappointed by this dense, rather difficult poem, but there was nothing else of his in print, so I really got to know Second Avenue and have always felt an affection for it.

I came back to New York City over Christmas, on a non-stop Greyhound bus, as I had intended to take Kenneth Koch’s poetry workshop at the New School, which began at the end of January, 1963. (My mother financed it, as I certainly couldn’t afford it.) I went to the Cedar, and there’s Frank O’Hara talking with this young guy, Frank Lima, a poet whom I got to know later, and the older Frank introduced us.

To make conversation, I said, “I’ve been in L.A.,” And Frank said, “How wonderful!” Then I realized I couldn’t tell him about this brainless trip, so I sort of changed the subject. But much later, I realized he would have adored hearing about it. I mentioned that I was going to take Kenneth Koch’s workshop at the end of the month. “Oh!” Frank said, “Kenneth’s right over here at the bar!” So he goes over, gets Kenneth, and brings him back, which I did not want him to do, because I had no idea what I would say! In fact, I was completely tongue-tied, so I ended up saying something that was totally insulting, because I was looking for the “right word.” Kenneth turned and went back to the bar. Frank thought it was hugely amusing. I thought, here I am, getting acquainted with two major poets from the Allen anthology, and I just torpedoed myself with one of them!

DB: What did you say?

TT: I had been reading Thank You quite a bit in Hollywood, and I wanted Kenneth to know I was familiar with his work, because he would be my teacher. So I said, “Oh, Mr. Koch, I really enjoyed your poems. They were so . . .” And I was looking for a word like “sophisticated,” but I knew there was a better one, and I ended up blurting out, “superficial!”

Now, when I make a gaffe, my reflexive reaction is not to show a reaction, even though I know I’ve made a blunder, so the person on the receiving end of it thinks that I meant exactly what I said.

After Kenneth walked away, Frank followed him, and I think he was trying to mollify him. “Oh, you know, this guy, he’s young. He doesn’t know what he’s saying. Don’t worry about it.” So I’m left a couple of minutes with Frank Lima, and we had a desultory conversation. And I realize I humiliated myself in front of this other poet whom I don’t know and don’t think I like, but he said nothing at all. After O’Hara came back, I learned that he was also giving a poetry workshop at the New School this semester, so I knew I had to take them both — there would be one that I hadn’t insulted!

That was the beginning of my association with the New York School. Kenneth was a great teacher (and never referred to my gaffe). Frank was an interesting teacher, too. He was ahead of his time because he allowed the students in his class to talk more than Kenneth did. He asked their opinion more often, about which I often thought, I don’t care what their opinion is, I’d like to hear yours. But after class, any student who would care to could walk over to the Cedar with him, have a beer and talk for about an hour. The only two poets who took advantage of that besides me were Alan Kaplan, with whom I’m still friends today, and Jim Brodey.

Once after class, I was invited back to Frank’s place on 441 East 9th Street to have a drink. I had a certain amount of trepidation because I was thinking, I hope he’s not going to try and seduce me, because I was straight both then and now. But when I saw that someone else, Joe LeSueur, was also there. I thought, " Oh, good, he has a roommate, or perhaps even a boyfriend.” So, me and Frank listened to Prokofiev — a mutual favorite composer, and Frank turned it up louder than Joe LeSueur would have liked. In fact, I think he would have preferred silence and me gone! But after the composer played his own Third Piano Concerto, and Horowitz played the maestro’s Sixth and Eighth Piano Sonatas, and I had a second bourbon on an empty stomach, I thought it was time to take my leave. I had no idea that later that year, the apartment would be my own, and that my roommate would be my by-then good friend, Frank Lima, the young poet who witnessed my gaffe with Kenneth at the Cedar.

After the workshops early in ‘63, I got to know Frank O’Hara better socially, and I attended Kenneth’s summer workshop at the Wagner College Writers’ Conference on Staten Island. And then that fall, that’s when I really began to fall in with Frank’s art and poetry circles. He would tell me parties I could go to, and I began to meet people (some of whom were in his poems) — you know, the painters Norman Bluhm, Mike Goldberg, Larry Rivers, and Jane Freilicher, among others. Frank would give me entrée to these parties and openings, but I had to make my own relationships, which was fine with me. I wasn’t just tagging along with Frank, and I wasn’t his boyfriend. I was a young poet on my own, and I was treated as my own person by everybody.

DB: People then seemed pretty open to meeting anyone. There wasn’t like a hierarchy of any sort.

TT: No, there was no one in those circles who was too important for you to make conversation with. If they didn’t like you or, more to the point, didn’t think you were interesting, that was on you. There was no reason to aggrandize yourself. That would have been looked down upon. You know, just be yourself. Well, you know, I have always been able to be pretty amusing, especially with a couple of drinks back then, because I was rather shy and self-conscious. And a couple of drinks always did help.

DB: Beyond the workshops themselves that you attended, were you able to get feedback on any of your work? Did you share any of your work with any of these poets?

TT: I didn’t ask. I’m not sure I wanted it. Only from Frank O’Hara, whom I saw a lot throughout 1964. Now, Kenneth, besides his ongoing workshops, was also a professor at Columbia University, where Ron Padgett was an actual matriculated student. After the workshops, I didn’t continue to show Kenneth my poems. I would have had to call him and arrange meetings and so forth. I guess I didn’t want to go through that, although it might have been worth it — who knows? — that is, if Kenneth were interested. But it didn’t compute; I never saw him outside of parties and openings. But I sent him my first book, of course, my Tibor de Nagy chapbook, After Dinner We Take a Drive into the Night (1968), which he included in a short list of New Books for the New York Times—my first “publicity.”

In September 1963, John Ashbery had come back to New York for a visit after being in Paris for five years. Frank gave a party for him and invited some of the younger poets to meet him, including me. After John went back overseas, I got a postcard from him asking to see some of my work. So I sent him four or five very recent poems that I hoped were as interesting as I thought they were. I did have the confidence that my poems were going to get better, that I was going to do more interesting work than I had done. I was floating on air when I got another postcard from John Ashbery, informing me that he was accepting three poems for a new publication, Art & Literature. I had thought he just wanted to see my work, so I was thrilled. Then in the spring of ‘64, I happened on a style, a mode of writing, which I would come to call “pop collage.”

DB: If I recall, Joe Brainard was rooming with you at the time, and you found the magazines that he brought home for collages interesting.

TT: Right, inspiring and useful for the kind of style that it supplied continuing and varied material for. It was sort of a literary equivalent of the Pop Artists, who burst forth and dominated a good part of the New York art scene in 1964, but not so much Andy Warhol’s segment of it; his images were serious and iconic, but Roy Lichtenstein’s, whose blown-up cartoons, excised from their surroundings, were satire personified. But the first one of my poems in this style was written before I knew Joe, by about a month. I was at my parents’ house in Rye for I think Thanksgiving. I was browsing through a women’s magazine of my mother’s, and I came across an article that was almost a self-parody in its pedestrian style and unintentionally funny. Was this elitist? You bet! I composed what was primarily a rather odd, surreal collage poem from lifting sentences out of context and tampering with them slightly [“Days of Central Oil Heating”]. This was in November, a month before Joe moved into my East 9th Street place. Then, I was inspired to write another one using this method in March, using Brainard-gathered material. After that, I could write in no other way until the summer of 1965!

To go back a little – toward the end of 1964, Ted Berrigan talked me into letting an artist friend of his be my roommate, since he knew that Frank Lima had left to move in with his girlfriend. Persuasion was necessary, but I finally agreed, and Joe Brainard moved in in December. Joe went on nightly excursions in the neighborhood to gather objects for his collages and assemblages, which he transformed into strange and wonderful art. He also picked up the kind of “popular” printed matter that he didn’t use, and had no use for, a kind of collateral scavenging. And as the piles of these comic books and magazines that I never would have paid money for — war, superheroes, romance, wrestling, you name it—I would use their narratives and dialogue out of context, for poetic effect. Actually, I had a challenging time stepping away from my pop-collage style. It had gotten to be an almost unbreakable habit, but I began to do that in the fall of ‘65.

But back in the spring of ‘65, I saw a line from a children’s book or something that read, “The first day of January is the first day of the new year,” which became the first line of “Lines for the New Year.” In itself, that sentence is like, well, duh. But I thought, nonetheless, taking that sentence just by itself had a certain charm. I found the obvious like that sort of interesting. So I started just working from that. At the same time, I was having long phone conversations with Frank, like he had with a number of people. These calls could last an hour or more, and you didn’t think of it as a waste of time. There was always one more thing to talk about. I had longer conversations with Frank than I ever had with my high school girlfriend, and those were long! It was an incredible phenomenon. Talk about telephony--you had to get a drink and a pack of cigarettes, and you were there for the duration. Eventually, my ear would feel like falling off! But you didn’t feel you wasted your time, and you weren’t trying to get him off the phone, and he wasn’t trying to get you off the phone, and there was always something more that was worthwhile talking about, usually about other people and other things that we both knew. It wasn’t about Buddhism or God, nothing like that. But anyway, it was extraordinary.

So anyway, as I said, I did show Frank my poems. And then, like February ‘65, when I had never written anything longer than a page, I finished the first draft of “Lines for the New Year.” I said to Frank, “I have a perfect two-and-a-half-page poem. I think I should stop.” And he said, “What do you mean, perfect? Why don’t you see if you can make it longer? “ He kept doing that. So finally I’m playing with somewhere around 340 lines. And he said, teasingly, “You know, if you get to 500 lines, it’ll be as long as Second Avenue.” So during the summer, I got to six-hundred-and-something, max, but then eventually trimmed back to 524, and there it has remained since the turn of the century.

A footnote to that: in the early 50s, Frank and Kenneth decided to write long poems and keep each other informed by phone of how many lines they could add each day. Kenneth said that he had wanted to stop, because he had the perfect two-and-a-half-page poem, but Frank pushed him to continue, to make it longer — the same thing he did with me. Or, rather, he did the same thing with me that he had done with Kenneth. In Kenneth’s case, his poem, “When the Sun Tries to Go On,” eventually got to, I think, 2,400 lines? And Frank, in creating “Second Avenue,” got to 504 lines, but that was the right length for it. Kenneth and I, twelve years apart, were the recipients of Frank’s generosity.

DB: Back at the beginning of our conversation, I’d asked whether you felt the New York School poets recognized that they shared a sort of collective poetic, or a shared sense of identity?

TT: I think some of them — us — do, but any individual poet shares that identity and poetic more with some of the others. Like any group, no one’s going to feel the same way about everyone else.

So John [Ashbery] didn’t think we exist as a group. Jimmy was at best skeptical (so I understand). Frank is an unknown quantity. But Kenneth [Koch] did, however, as the following anecdote from the mid-70s, even if mostly apocryphal, gives evidence for: The scenario is, Allen Ginsberg has just come back from a lengthy religious retreat in India, and he and Kenneth are walking around St. Mark’s, and Allen says, “Gee, Kenneth, everybody seems to know who you are, but nobody seems to recognize me anymore.” And Kenneth replies, “That’s because you teach your students how to live, Allen. We teach them how to write.”

DB: Wonderful.

**NOTE: In reviewing this interview, Towle asked to insert the following footnote:

In my opinion, the second generation of the New York School of Poetry, in its “beginning years” of 1962-65, was composed of Bill Berkson, David Shapiro, Frank Lima, Ted Berrigan, Ron Padgett, Dick Gallup, Jim Brodey, Tony Towle, Allan Kaplan, Richard Kohlmar*, Aram Saroyan**, Joe Ceravolo, John Perreault***, and Peter Schjeldahl.

*Dropped out of poetry by 1965

**Could such a minimalist style be considered NYS poetry?

***John announced to several of us walking down Broadway after attending a poetry reading at Columbia in 1968, but addressing his increasingly vehement declarations mostly to me, that he did not want to be a part of the New York School, that he hated the idea of it, and from that very moment, he should no longer be considered, etc., etc. I certainly wasn’t going to argue with him, but his expostulations were completely belied by the New York School style of his poems.

In April’s Part 2 of my interview with Tony Towle: Inexplicable poetics, O’Hara’s greatest poem, working at Universal Limited Art Editions (ULAE), and more!

This time around, we are having a chat with poet Maureen Owen, an exemplary writer, publisher, and educator who played a seminal role in the early days of NYC’s Poetry Project, while bringing forth a new generation of women poets and others through her small press, Telephone Magazine, and Telephone Books. The poet Anne Waldman has said, “Maureen Owen is one of our most exploratory poet inventors…”, while the late Alice Notley called her, “…one of those American originals whose work could never be mistaken for anyone else’s: her rushing phrasal line, her architectonic wit, her conjunction of elegance and down-to-earthiness, the intelligence and edge of her sensibility…”

DB: You know, despite your years in NYC, I’ve always looked at you as a westerner.

MO: Well, that’s partially kind of true. Yeah. Because, you know, I was born in Minnesota, but then moved to California when I was about 5 or so. Then I really was on the West Coast.

DB: Do you feel that that locale informed your sensibility early on as a poet?

MO: Everything in your life informs you being a poet in a sense. But thinking in terms of poetic influences, I would say I’m more of an easterner because I think coming to New York was such a big event for my work and for me.

So I did grow up in California. Because my parents were horse trainers, we moved around a lot. We usually wintered in Duarte or Monrovia, north of Los Angeles. By the way, Sam Shepard is from Duarte. And I was so grateful and wonderfully amazed to hear that, that I have to mention it! Because there wasn’t much else in Duarte. When I moved there, we didn’t even have a library. But then the town took a big old house, probably some estate, and made it into a library. So that was my first library. It was very exciting!

“I had the job of washing and ironing the uniforms of my brother and me. So I’d put a poem on the end of the ironing board. I memorized a gazillion poems doing that.”

DB: When did you start writing?

MO: I’d always been writing and painting since I was like five. Just, you know, kid stuff. I was actually more into my art. I really loved art. I did a lot of painting, oil paintings and drawings.

We were pretty poor, so my brother and I went to a parochial school. The idea, you know, in Catholic schools, is that you wear a uniform, so you can’t tell if you’re rich or poor. Which, of course, is a joke, because rich kids had a new uniform for every day of the week, while the poor kids had to wash theirs like three times a week. So I had the job of washing and ironing the uniforms of my brother and me. So I’d put a poem on the end of the ironing board. I memorized a gazillion poems doing that.

Eventually, I went to Seattle University for year and then a year at San Francisco State, but the poverty of my family was such that I quit school to get a job and help support my mom and my two brothers. So I didn’t have that academic intro into poetry either. I just had myself, you know, reading and memorizing poems and writing.

DB: Please talk a little bit about why you decided to move to New York in 1968 after returning from Japan.

MO: After arriving by boat in 1965, Lauren Owen and I spent over two years in Japan, occasionally teaching English. At that time, I was really interested in haiku. Because people there would just recite haiku and make up haiku on the spot. Everybody was very casual about it. It was sort of wonderful.

When we came back from Japan in 1967, we were in San Francisco briefly and stayed with my mom for a few weeks. Then we went to Missouri, where Lauren’s dad had a little cabin just outside of Branson, Missouri, which was just a thumbprint at that time. This beautiful little cabin was out in the wilderness--no running water or anything like that. We were very hippie then, so we kind of lived off the land for a year. So we just picked wild asparagus and did crazy hippie things. It was great!

There was a bathtub with a spigot outside from the house, where we all took baths wildly. No one was around, but there was an airport on the other side of Branson, so occasionally a plane would fly over while we were taking a bath. That was pretty funny.

Then we decided we wanted to leave the cabin. We felt like in the middle of the country, I guess. So we thought, should we go back to San Francisco? But San Francisco had been mostly the Beats, which was kind of a boy’s club.

Lauren was from Tulsa, so he knew Ron Padgett and Ted Berrigan and all the Tulsa boys who were in New York at that time, in 1968. So he said, well, I have some friends in New York--maybe we should go there. And I thought, oh, what a great idea. I’d never been east, really. So that’s why we went to New York. Just an impulse, then. It must be a Midwest thing. Somebody gives you some advice, and you’re just like, not a bad idea!

“Poetry was everywhere in New York at that moment. All of the people I was meeting were writing and talking about it and experimenting and it just blew my mind!”

DB: Once you arrived in New York in 1968 and got settled there, how did you happen to fall in with the Poetry Project and the surrounding community of poets there?

MO: SO we actually stayed at Ron and Patty Padgett’s apartment one night when we first arrived. Then Ron introduced us to Johnny Stanton, who worked as a super for a building on the Upper East Side, who just put us up in one of his empty apartments while we looked for a place. After a couple of weeks, we found an apartment on 13th Street, between B and C, not too far from Ron and Patty. Everyone was right in that vicinity, really. The Schneemans were over on St. Mark’s Place. Also, Tompkins Square Park was right there, where I met several women poets, like Rebecca Wright and Sandy Berrigan, with their kids. It was just a small area packed with amazing people, close to the Poetry Project and to the whole Lower East Side.

And so many artists, too! I think it was a point in time where there were so many poets and artists living very cheaply on the Lower East Side and all going to the same events, including readings in galleries and the Poetry Project, and a lot of readings in various bars, meeting each other and talking about work and little magazines. It was just such a great epiphany for me. I’d never ever been anywhere where poetry was in any way important. It was unbelievable that there was this vast community of poets gathered in this one magical place.

Poetry was everywhere in New York at that moment. All of the people I was meeting were writing and talking about it and experimenting, and it just blew my mind. I didn’t finish college, so I would say it was the best education in poetry I could even imagine ever having. Once I discovered the St. Mark’s Poetry Project, it just opened up my world in writing fantastically. I went to a zillion readings and met all these exciting, innovative, experimental writers, and it was like a thousand universities swept up in one.

DB: But who were the first poets that you not just met, but sort of connected with as kindred spirits?

MO: Well, I’d have to say Anne Waldman, who was the Poetry Project’s director at that time, after Joel Oppenheimer retired. Women poets like Sandy Berrigan, Rebecca Wright, Bernadette Mayer, and Rebecca Brown. And then of course, Dick Gallup, Ron, and Ted--all that Tulsa group. Those are the first folks I met. Then I started going to all the readings, because I was very close by and met many more.

DB: You know, it’s always been strange to me, Maureen, how so many poets ended up in the same place. What was the attraction?

MO: Well, it’s interesting—I’ve thought about that too. I think it was just one of those amazing, magical moments like Black Mountain or something. But this was different, because there was no cohesive organization drawing them there. Everybody just kind of arrived on their own. Of course, the Lower East Side was a natural, because it would cost hardly anything to get a little railroad apartment. I just think it was one of those moments in time where a whole lot of people got the message and showed up at this one place. It was just transformative. It just was like a movement, almost, in a kind of a loose way.

And I think a galvanizing part of it, intrinsically, not so much as a draw, but you know, was that group of first-generation poets, like Kenneth Koch, Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery--Ted and Ron really were in that too. That was a very exciting moment in writing and poetry, I think, that really ignited what happened after, and so informed poetry today, because they had, especially Kenneth, John Ashbery, and Joe Brainard, too, in his work, they had this wonderful way of being sort of absurd, and like it was okay to be humorous. And it wasn’t like you’re writing funny poetry; it was just okay to kind of pull out the stops, you know, and just write crazy stuff!

Not even surreal, it’s beyond. It was a whole other concept, really, and I think that filtered in. Then the Tulsa poets came in, and they had that wide openness, too. I have to say about myself, coming from the West, and even the Midwest, Minnesota, there’s a different way of looking at the world, like there are no boundaries. Part of it is, like Elinor Nauen coming from the Dakotas, you’re standing on the Great Prairie. It’s a flat plain, you can see for miles, you know, it’s boundless. I think that kind of gets into your being, that boundlessness, like anything goes, you know, a just go for it sort of feeling that’s just thrilling. I think that feeling was there because a lot of people came from the Midwest, like Peter Schjeldahl as well as George and Katie Schneeman from Minnesota were, bringing that sense of boundless geographies.

DB: Of the three post-war experimental writing “schools”—the SF Renaissance/Beats, Black Mountain, and New York, the New York poets stand out to me because they were so engaged in publishing. It just seemed like everybody felt the freedom to self-publish or publish others. What was that all about?

MO: That’s a really interesting observation. Yeah, because even I never thought about publishing before we moved to New York. It wasn’t even within my realm, because I had no money, I had two children and was living on the Lower East Side. Maybe it’s because New York has such a publishing industry, known as a place where things are published.

I guess I would have to say that part of my inspiration at the time was the Poetry Project’s mimeo magazine, The World, that Anne Waldman was editing at the time. Those big floppy Worlds, man, those things were huge. I also was talking to all these women poets in the park with their kids and at readings and places. I think New York was more open to women writers than, say, San Francisco, in those days. There were just a lot of women writing, but a lot of the time, they were having a hard time finding publications to take their work.

So that’s when I started thinking, well, gosh, I really like the work of so many of these people. Maybe I could do a magazine, right, which was a completely crazy idea. No money, no knowledge of how to do a magazine, you know, but I thought, well, maybe I could so I go over to the Poetry Project, because they had a large Gestetner mimeograph machine that they printed The World on.

So I asked Anne, do you think I could use the Gestetner to put out a little magazine? She was like, sure, absolutely, you can do that. I was sort of astonished that she agreed so easily, and I was like, oh my God, I have no idea how to do this. I think I said, well, okay, what do I need to run the Gestetner?

And she said, stencils.

DB: Oh God, stencils. It’s like the one word that makes older poets’ blood run cold.

MO: It’s so true! But anyway, sweetly, Larry Fagin said, well, I’ll show you how to do stencils and where to get them and stuff. So I had help with that whole process.

“Early on, I knew I wanted to call the magazine Telephone. But I was walking down the street, and suddenly I looked at some telephone booths and thought, oh, I should make it the same size as a telephone booth.”

DB: This is when you did the first Telephone Magazine in 1969, right?

MO: That’s right, yes. So then, when I finally got the stencils in order, I set up a time to run them off. I had no idea how to run them off. Then the graphic artist Tom Veitch was around at that time and said, I’ll come and help you. So anyway, he practically ran off the whole first issue, and I just stood there in amazement that the stencils worked.

I could hardly believe how that first page came off the roller. To just stand there, and the imprint was actually on the paper. I know, it’s crazy. And it’s so beautiful, that black ink and the white sheet, all kinds of not quite dry yet. So then, once we got the whole issue run off, most of the people in that first issue were right there on the Lower East Side, because I didn’t know anybody out of town yet. So everyone came to the St. Mark’s Parish Hall and helped to collate.

It really was a big party—a lot of issues we did that way. People just showed up, tons of people. We’d get pizza and Cokes. Sometimes, covers would be upside down or doubled, or pages would, you know, but it was awesome. And then some people would be stapling. So it was a whole community effort. Telephone was just like that always.

DB: That’s amazing. I read somewhere that you printed Telephone on 8 ½ x 14-inch paper because you wanted the magazine to resemble a telephone booth. True?

MO: Yes, yes. You know how in New York in those days, there were telephone booths on every corner. A lot of them were messed up, because people went in and ripped out the receiver, but they were everywhere. Early on, I knew I wanted to call the magazine Telephone. But I was walking down the street, and suddenly I looked at some telephone booths and thought, oh, I should make it the same size as a telephone booth. You know, just that legal paper size. It was great because I could get more on the page, too, without squeezing people’s work.

DB: Did you have an editorial process?

MO: Yeah, totally editorial. And the books, too, were like that. I would go to a lot of readings at the Project, along with other readings around town, just to hear people. If I liked their work, I would just invite them, you know. The one thing I did that was very singular was being the editor. I did all the choosing. I didn’t even ask other people’s advice. I don’t know why, exactly. But I think it was because I had started out with that idea to publish people whose work I liked who just weren’t getting published.

The first time I heard Susan Howe read, I was just transfixed. I was like, oh my God, I love this woman’s work. And she has this beautiful Irish kind of lilt to her voice. So beautiful. And I didn’t know her from anybody. So actually, I’m shy, but on the other hand, I’m not. I can’t explain it. So it’s hard for me sometimes to get motivated to talk to somebody I don’t know. But I went up to Susan after her reading, and I said, I have this little magazine, and I was wondering if you might be interested in giving me a few poems. She was, like, so excited because nobody was publishing her. I couldn’t believe it. I mean, her work is amazing.

I was so unbelievably fortunate to have landed in New York City when I did, because everybody was there or coming there, and all these things were happening, like the readings and little magazines and the Poetry Project. I don’t know how it could have been a more perfect spot on earth for me than in this community of poets and artists. I don’t think I touched the ground for about ten years.

DB: When you decided to publish individual books, how was that experience different than doing the magazines? Because doing an individual book is a different thing entirely...

MO: It is. But I loved doing the books, especially doing a book of someone who maybe had been in the magazine a couple of times. I have to say, every book I ever published, I loved that person’s work. Not only loved, it was so exciting to me. There were so many great artists at that time on the Lower East Side or in that area. And the artists I knew were generous and willing to do cover art so freely.

I think publishing books harkened back to my love of making things. That’s what I loved when I was an artist, that you could actually, with your hand, make something. And so to me, publishing was like a construction. To do a book of someone’s work was just, it was more than a book. It was like a painting, and I labored over the poems that I would put in an order, and I totally worked with the poet.

I mean, everybody had absolute final say. Most people were there, you know, close by, so that I really worked with them doing it. I love that kind of community and working with other people. I just loved publishing.

DB: And then, at least, the inevitable question of why you stopped.

MO: Money.

DB: Yeah. I guessed that.

MO: Yeah. Well, you know, originally, too, it was so inexpensive, like the first issues of Telephone, because the artists did all their work, you know, everybody did everything for free.

When I was about to get some paper to print the first issue of Telephone, someone told me there were these two or three huge paper factories just down in the Soho area, where you could get cheap paper because you could buy remnants. I’ll just never forget when I walked into this gigantic warehouse of paper--all kinds of paper, all sizes, all colors, stacked to the ceiling. That’s where I got paper for the first issue. If it cost me a penny a sheet, I’d be surprised. More than I could carry for, like, $5.

So anyway, everything was so cheap back then. I could mail a copy of Telephone for around eight to 12 cents. Not anymore. When Elinor and I mail Julebord now, it’s like $3 a copy. And it’s not nearly as heavy as Telephone was!

DB: Speaking of Julebord, how did you decide, after stopping in the early 80s, to take up magazine publishing again?

MO: I live in Denver, but I try to get to New York once or twice a year to see people, maybe give a reading or two, and visit. About three years ago, I was visiting, and I had a list of people I definitely wanted to see, Elinor being one.

I was staying with Barbara Henning and then with Barbara Einzig, who both live in Brooklyn. So I talked to Elinor and said we have to get together before I leave. We met at this nice little cafe at the Brooklyn Botanical Garden, The Yellow Magnolia. We had lunch and were reminiscing and got onto the subject of publishing (I think we might have been having a little wine at this point!), because she had done Koff Magazine with Maggie Dubris, about how much fun it was to really make a product with staples and all that. Now everything is online and digital, and how, alas, you just couldn’t do that kind of publication anymore. It wasn’t acceptable. Nobody was interested.

Then we sort of looked at each other and said, well, we could do it! So that was that. Then, right there, we said, well, we have to, because I think we’d had a little more wine at this point. We said, well, we have to give it a name. And so we threw out a few names. And then Elinor said, I’ve got it. There’s a Norwegian word, julebord, that means a smorgasbord of feast things. But it also has another colloquial meaning that is “anything goes.”

And we thought, oh, that would be perfect. So that’s how Julebord got its name. Yeah, it was really spontaneous. Julebord was born in about half an hour. I guess it’ll go as long as it does. We just do it ourselves, and we split the cost. So probably go as long as we can afford it.

“… everywhere we went, we found kindred spirits who were totally into our work, which so much is in the New York School style. It was kind of fabulous that all across America, you can find these pockets of poets and poetry and bookstores that are completely influenced by that era.”

DB: You know, another aspect that seems to be kind of seminal to the New York poets is the collaboration piece. I don’t see that as much with the Beats or with the Black Mountain writers. Was it sort of part and parcel of the whole community vibe that poets just felt comfortable doing that? How would you characterize it?

MO: Well, yes, it was part of the community vibe because people hung out together, you know. I think the first time I was really aware of collaboration was Ron and Ted’s book of collaborations, Bean Spasms. But you know, I think the collaborations sort of started between painter and poet, like Larry Rivers and Frank O’Hara doing those lithographs. Also, George Schneeman did tons of collaborative work with many different poets. Collaboration was in!

It just seemed to be a natural extension of what you were already doing on a solo basis—and also a way of continuing to do things together. You know, like not so much ownership of a piece, but that it belonged to both of you or three of you. With that kind of joyful magic of being in the community where everybody’s an amazing, creative person, it just caught on.

DB: You taught at Naropa for a number of years. Naropa’s pedagogy, especially in poetry, is drawn from the Beats, but also from the New York poets. Do you think that sensibility or aesthetic of the New York School is still impacting younger poets today?

MO: Yes, I definitely think so. For instance, there’s the Woodland Pattern Bookstore in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, which was started by Karl Gartung and Ann Kingsbury in the late 70s. The store is completely connected to the New York School, and they have, I think, the best poetry library bookstore in America.

Over the years, they’ve done huge projects on the poet Lorine Niedecker, as well as workshops and readings, and they draw greatly from the New York poetry scene. Now, younger people are running it, and they are committed to that sensibility of the poetry coming out of the New York School, for sure.

You know, Barbara Henning and I did that cross-country reading tour in 2019, right? That was amazingly interesting, because everywhere we went, we found kindred spirits who were totally into our work, which so much is in the New York School style. It was kind of fabulous that all across America, you can find these pockets of poets and poetry and bookstores that are completely influenced by that era. You know, I think that time in the 50s through the 70s was a real turning point. Manhattan’s an island, so it was condensed in New York, but it wasn’t just in New York. It flowed out—people went to Bolinas, so then it was on the West Coast. It spread quite incredibly, that whole way of looking at poetry and being a poet and then expressing yourself. I think it definitely changed American poetry, along with the San Francisco Renaissance and Black Mountain. It was all that, because nothing ever happens out of a vacuum, right?

Things like that have their way of just growing outward, you know, so I think the influence of the New York School is still very strong, and it’s an influence away from academic poetry. You know, though I only went two years to university, I specifically did not study poetry in that period, because I didn’t want to be influenced by the academic poetry scene. Probably a good thing. I was pretty young, and how did I even know that? I don’t know. I just knew I didn’t.

DB: So, what does this sort of sensibility that we’ve been talking about, the New York sensibility, what do you think it offers this crazy country that we live in today?

MO: Oh god, our country has gone so crazy. That is such a good question, because I think we’re all feeling kind of helpless in this awkward time, but I guess poetry is sort of like a life preserver. It’s just like some days I just think, well, what can I do about that? And it just comes down to, well, just keep doing your work.

I think poetry is a strong force. I do, but I know in saying that, it sounds totally romantic, and as my kids would say, really impractical. But I do believe in it. But clearly, there are political powers that are in charge, apparently, and god knows what they’re going to end up doing.

DB: I think they’ll end up going down the tube, actually. At their pinnacle of power, you know, bad people, suddenly, they collapse under their own weight.

MO: Well, that’s true, and that’s my hope. I hang on to that same kind of philosophy. But in the meantime, they’re doing a lot of damage, that’s for sure. It’s like, god, can I wake up one day without hearing the word Trump? Or just even one afternoon or one hour. But I agree that nothing lasts forever, so we just have to keep up the good fight now. What is it that Anne Waldman always says? Make the world safe for poetry.

                                                            IN JUNE

                                                    For George and Katie,
                                                                 Yvonne and Rudy, Hugh, Ted, Carol,
                     Rebecca, Patrick, and Ulysses, Ron & Patty, Tessie, for 
                     David and Turan, Barry & Sylvie, Hiro, Anne, and Michael, 
                     Billy, Linda, Alice, Peter & Brooke, Chuck and Cherry, and 
                     Larry, Miriam and Zachary, Ruth, Dolly, Thomas and Mimi & 
                     Elio & Paul, Michele and Chris & Lee, Bill & Claude, Ed, 
                     Bernadette and Lewis, Susan, Rachelle, Steve & Joanne & 
                     Anna, Charlie and Charles & Paula and Pam and Elizabeth, 
                     Anselm and Bill and John, Ron & Evelyn and Ted & Joan, 
                     Dick and Joe and Eugene.



                                                   I love a day 
                                                   when you can go out
                                                   & the beauty of your friends 
                                                   astounds you
                                                   There are these people 
                                                   in frilly nightgowns 
                                                   eating breakfast 
                                                   painting pictures 
                                                   mailing books 
                                                   they are there 
                                                   & growing 
                                                   all around you


                     - Maureen Owen, 1979 (originally published in Hearts in Space, from 
                        Kulchur Foundation, 1980

Maureen Owen’s latest title is everything turns on a delicate measure from BlazeVOX Books. Recent publications include let the heart hold down the breakage Or the caregiver’s log from Hanging Loose Press and Poets on the Road, a collaborative reading tour blog with Barbara Henning in print from City Point Press.

She is the former editor-in-chief of Telephone Magazine and Telephone Books, currently celebrated in a two-volume recap in the “Among the Neighbors” series published by The Poetry Collection at the University at Buffalo.

She is the author of thirteen books of poetry, including Edges of Water from Chax Press. Her title, Erosion’s Pull from Coffee House Press, was a finalist for the Colorado Book Award and the Balcones Poetry Prize. Her collection American Rush: Selected Poems was a finalist for the L.A. Times Book Prize, and her work AE (Amelia Earhart) was a recipient of the prestigious Before Columbus American Book Award. Other books include Imaginary Income, Zombie Notes, a brass choir approaches the burial ground, The No-Travels Journal, and Untapped Maps.

She has most recently published work in Three Fold, Dispatches, Positive Magnets, Hurricane Review, The Denver Quarterly, Blazing Stadium, The Brooklyn Rail, The Cafe Review, and Posit.

An instructor of numerous workshops and classes in poetry and book production, her awards include grants from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, the Fund for Poetr,y and a Poetry Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.

She has taught at Naropa University, both on campus and in the low-residency MFA Creative Writing Program, and served as editor-in-chief of Naropa’s online zine not enough night. She can be found reading her work on the PennSound website.

This time around, we are having a chat with poet Phyllis Rosenzweig, whose life experiences have led her from New York City to Washington, D.C., where she worked as a key curator at the then-new Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, while being a central participant of the now-celebrated Dupont Circle poetry scene. As she wrote in an early poem, “…because we all advance from scene to scene/ not by any inner sense of direction/ but because each of us/ at a particular time/ finds himself at a loss/ for what to do next…”

[An earlier version of this interview appeared on the Best American Poetry blog.]

DB: Over the years, I’ve known you primarily as a poet. Was that always the case?

PR: No. My background was in studio art as a painting major, before I switched to art history in graduate school. I have no academic background in literature or writing. It’s really funny looking all the way back. I was born and grew up in Brooklyn. My dad was a Sunday painter, and my older sister used to draw a lot, so I certainly wanted to copy her

I moved to Manhattan and was working at the Museum of Modern Art bookstore to support myself, while taking graduate classes as a part-time student at the Institute of Fine Arts, part of NYU. . For a brief time, probably around 1964, I worked in one of MoMA’s curatorial departments as a secretary. I was typing people’s letters, and one of those people was Frank O’Hara, whose office was just down the hall. I remember being told, that’s Frank O’Hara, he’s a poet. But it meant nothing to me at that point. A wasted opportunity!

DB: Once you graduated from the Institute of Fine Arts, where did you go then?

PR: Well, I didn’t graduate from the Institute of Fine Arts then and didn’t finish my degree until later. I basically dropped out around 1970. Before that, I was trying to write a seminar paper, and I just couldn’t get it done. You know, I was like frozen, and I picked up the Village Voice, and I saw a notice about a writing workshop at St. Mark’s Church, not far from where I was living on East 10th Street. And I thought, oh, well, maybe that’s what I need, a writing workshop. So I went, and it turned out to be a poetry workshop run by Peter Schjeldahl!

The minute I got there, I was like, Oh, I’m home. You mean, it’s really okay to write like this? A whole world opened up to me, a world I just felt immediately that I wanted to be in. The writers in the workshop were the people I hung out with. We would all go out after the workshop and go to a bar or something--it was just so friendly and congenial and fun. It became my entire life.

After Peter’s workshop, I took another workshop with Tony Towle. Then after that, I went to lots and lots of readings. And you’d bump into people on the street and have coffee or whatever. It was a real community because almost everybody lived in this little section of the East Village.

I became good friends with the poet Paul Violi and was friendly with writers like Rebecca Wright, John Godfrey, and Dick Gallup. And of course, Maureen Owen was there then, a big connector between all of the poets. She’s the first person who ever published me in her then-mimeo magazine, Telephone. I’m very grateful to her.

Our gods were John Ashbery and Frank O’Hara. But, you know, I just thought of them as writers and all of us as writers, as poets. I never even heard the term ‘New York School’ until much later.

DB: So, how did you decide to get involved with this new museum called the Hirshhorn in Washington, D.C.?

PR: When I was still in grad school, I saw a job posting on the bulletin board there, saying, “Hirshhorn Museum hiring research assistant.” The only thing I knew about the Hirshhorn’s collection at that time was that it included some paintings by Arshile Gorky, an artist I was very interested in. I applied for the job, and then I didn’t hear from them until about a year later, when they called me back and hired me.

At that time, the collection had already been purchased by the Smithsonian. The works of art were in a warehouse on the west side of New York City, while on the other side of town, our little team, all technically Smithsonian employees, worked in a small office doing very basic research on the collection, organizing information about where and when different works were purchased, had they been published, all basic archival stuff.

One of the big reasons the job appealed to me was that I knew it was temporary, as things would eventually move down to D.C. I was in my 20s, kind of commitment-shy, so I thought, okay, I’ll do this for just a couple of years, perfect!

When the time finally came that the Hirshhorn’s operations in New York were closing down, the Smithsonian offered all of us a choice: receive severance pay, or else relocate to D.C. at the government’s expense. I had started job hunting in New York at that point and couldn’t find anything except bookstore jobs. Since I felt like I was more of a professional at that point, I decided I’d move down to D.C. for a year.

That first year of 1974 was sort of great, because you’re in at the beginning of something, helping to form a new museum. But it was also hell. I hated being in Washington; I missed New York. I was basically homesick--I kept coming back to New York every couple of weekends to visit people and to go to readings at St. Mark’s. I was horribly miserable until I met Doug Lang and started attending the poetry readings he organized at Folio Books at Dupont Circle, along with informal workshops in his home.

Before I left New York, Bill Zavatsky told me to look up the poet Terence Winch in D.C. So, I did. Terence must have introduced me to Michael Lally, who in turn published my first chapbook, 17 Poems. I then met Doug Lang when I bought a book at Folio, and he recognized my name on the check from 17 Poems! Doug then introduced me to Lynne Dreyer, Pete Inman, Tina Darragh, Diane Ward, Bernard Welt, and the other poets who became my new family. That changed my life in D.C. completely.

DB: Did you find the work of the Dupont Circle poets vastly different from what you had experienced in New York?

PR: I felt like there was an affinity, you know--the people I knew were very attuned to the New York School. There were a lot of different poets who came through Folio, but a lot of New York people read there, too, so there was a real continuity.

At the same time, I think that my knowledge and my sensibility regarding poetry expanded after I arrived in D.C. A lot of this again was through Doug, who introduced us to a whole broader range of writing, like the emerging West Coast and New York Language poets. It was like a meteor shower bombarding me. I guess that’s one of the things I wonder--if I had stayed in New York, would I have even learned about these poets until much later?

DB: Let’s talk for a bit about your own publishing efforts. Did you and Diane Ward start Primary Writing Books together?

PR: We did, but not originally. Diane moved to New York in the early ‘90s, and in the meantime, I had the idea that I wanted to start a publication of my own. I wanted to publish longer works by some people I knew. So I started something called Primary Writing (The title came from Diane), and I published three issues over several years in a Xeroxed, stapled format. The first one was a work by Jane DeLynn, my friend from New York, followed by a second by Tina Darragh and a third by Doug.

Then, Diane moved from New York to California, and we really wanted to stay in touch. I think it was Diane who had the idea that the best way for us to stay connected would be to collaborate on a magazine together. Starting in 1995, we published the new iteration of Primary Writing approximately four times a year for 13 years, until 2008. Edric Mesmer, the editor of Among the Neighbors, a series that documents little magazines and small presses, is publishing a history of Primary Writing in a forthcoming issue.

DB: So, when did you decide to resurrect Primary Writing as a chapbook series again?

PR: In 2011. I just thought there’s a lot of terrific writing in and around D.C. that should be published! In some ways, it’s parallel to a kind of curatorial impulse-- seeing an artist’s work and thinking that’s really good, I’d like others to know about it. I have to confess I am a little embarrassed that the first one I did was my own work, as a trial to see what producing a book would be like. I collaborated with the artist Susan Campbell on this first book, and since then with the designer Bob Allen in Baltimore.

DB: How many publications have you done since Primary Writing Books restarted?

PR: Doug Lang, Cathy Eisenhower, Ken Jacobs, Lynne Dreyer, K. Lorraine Graham, Dan Gutstein, Chris Mason, and Diane Ward, so that’s nine.

DB: Looking back and even forward, do the New York School poets still figure in your own aesthetic, or have you moved on?

PR: I went through a period of thinking, after I learned there was such a thing as a New York School, okay, well, that’s kind of old-fashioned, and I don’t write like that anymore. But I’ve recently, in the last year or two, been going back to it, and finding so much of it wonderful. I’m reading a lot of Ron Padgett, and again, James Schuyler, also Alice Notley, and I’m finding it so, so rich. You know, it makes me feel like I was part of something at a very special time.

I think there’s a newer generation of poets who are maybe doing something different. But here in D.C., people like Rod Smith, Cathy Eisenhower, K. Lorraine Graham, and others whom I now consider my cohort, even though they’re younger, all have a sense of a history that we collectively come out of. I mean, we didn’t just spring out of nowhere!

Frank O’Hara Ode (for Lynne Dreyer)

O

Fluorescent spectroscope for complex biomolecules

O

All the branches of economy that are involved with corrupt income

O

The political history of art

I’m sitting here and the sky is that soft winter gray with a glimmer

of orange

It’s so beautiful

which as you know I have been into that topic lately

it’s a balancing posture

on one leg

with this freezing

weather and that sunlight they have pouring in

it’s not that much more …

I hope you are feeling better…not down

these things are versus instead of

…trying…

and

I just wanted to let you know that you help me feel not alone, and I am

grateful for that

- Phyllis Rosenzweig

_______

Phyllis Rosenzweig was a curator for many years at the Hirshhorn Museum, where she authored several important catalogs, including Larry Rivers and The Fifties: Aspects of Painting in New York, and organized many exhibits of contemporary artists. Her poetry has appeared in magazines, journals, and the chapbooks Seventeen Poems (O Press, 1975), Dogs (Edge Books, 1996), Reasonable Accommodation (Potes and Poets Press, 1997), and Girls (Primary Writing Books, 2011). From 1995 to 2008, she and Diane Ward co-published the poetry journal Primary Writing. She currently edits Primary Writing Books. She lives in Washington, D.C. with her husband, the art historian Alan Wallach.

This time around, we are having a chat with poet Michael Lally, whose most recent book, Say It Again - An Autobiography in Sonnets, chronicles the first 30 years of his peripatetic life and literary career across 450 sonnets. Lally, who’s also a jazz pianist, former actor, and political activist, has said of his work, “My goal has been to talk to the kid I was when I was 14, 15, 16—before I had any education, before I had read anything that sophisticated but still knew certain things in my heart.”

[An earlier version of this interview appeared on the Best American Poetry blog.]

DB: When I was re-reading parts of Say It Again this morning, that line from Wordsworth popped into my head—”the spontaneous overflowing of powerful feeling recollected in tranquility…”

ML: I think that could be said to be true for a lot of it, but certainly a good portion was not in tranquility! (Laughter)

DB: You’ve said that you encountered works by the New York poetry set fairly early on in your career.

ML: I was writing poetry and reading it from a pretty early age. So I noticed the New York scene probably through the anthologies, like Donald Allen’s New American Poetry in 1960. But at that point, I was mostly impacted by the so-called Beats. In 1964, when Frank O’Hara’s Lunch Poems came out, I was in the middle of a four-year hitch in the Air Force, hanging out at a friend’s place outside of Spokane, Washington, where I was stationed. He had a copy of Lunch Poems, so I picked it up and read it.

First of all, I was totally taken by the tone, the voice, the surprising honesty of attitudes and perspectives, while at the same time being put off by what I at that time took as the elitism of French expressions and French books and et cetera. So, I had this attraction resistance.

Later, around 1966, when I went to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop on the GI Bill, a poet friend, Ray DiPalma, gave me a book of John Ashbery‘s. I think it was probably The Tennis Court Oath. I remember reading it and being impressed with the technique, the technical craftsmanship, but being again put off by, in this case, what I took as a kind of coldness, lack of emotional connection, which is what I was interested in at the time and usually still am. So my initial response to these poets I was aware of was, you know, being attracted to some things and put off by others.

DB: Did you find your attitudes shifting over time?

ML: Sure. Around 1970, I was teaching a class in a Catholic women’s college in D.C. on O’Hara, explaining the technical brilliance of his poems, “The Day Lady Died” and “A Step Away from Them.” Suddenly, I got tears in my eyes. I was experiencing this visceral connection to O’Hara, who was by then dead! I was totally overwhelmed and taken by surprise by this emotional response to his poems and to his presence in my heart, as opposed to just my brain. From then on, throughout the 70s in particular, and really even still, some if not a lot of my poetry has been really a dialogue with Frank, or an attempt to get his attention!

With Ashbery, I heard him read one night in 1973 at a poetry event at the Smithsonian in Washington. There were six poets reading over three evenings. I was on the bill with Lucille Clifton on another night. Although I had grown to like John’s poetry more, I still had this attitude about his work.

During his reading, he performed “Farm Implements and Rutabagas In a Landscape.” And I suddenly got Ashbery, I got Ashbery! I was a jazz musician and I realized, oh, don’t listen to the words for their emotional content and linear connection. Listen to the words like a jazz solo! Like an improvisation where the words are just the notes. And I was like, bam, this motherfucker’s jamming! I was right in it. And then I just started cracking up, not only laughing at the humor and getting the humor, but also being surprised that Ashbery was humorous.

DB: In the early 70s in DC, you played a central role in the development of what’s now called the Mass Transit school of poetry, involving the likes of Terence Winch, Bernard Welt, Phyllis Rosenzweig, Lynne Dreyer, Tina Darragh, P. Inman, Lee Lally, Tim Dlugos, Beth Joselow, Ed Cox, and others. Then, in 1975, you picked up and moved to New York City. Why?

ML: I just liked the idea of a fresh start. And, on top of that, I had met and become intimate with the artist and writer Joe Brainard. I also had numerous friends in New York already, and was traveling up there quite often. Some of these were first-generation New York poets John Ashbery, Jimmy Schuyler, and Edwin Denby, as well as second-generation poets like Ted Greenwald, Jim Brodey, Charles North, Paul Violi, Tony Towle, Bob Hershon, and John Godfrey. Also, I was getting flak from certain people in DC. I had been very close to the Black Arts Movement, and was close friends with some of the poets in it. But others didn’t like my poetry after I was impacted by O’Hara’s work. And when I came out as gay for a while, I got a lot of flak for that, too. So, there were a lot of reasons to just take a bow and relocate. Even though part of me had a hard time leaving the close friends I had in DC, the New York City scene seemed very welcoming at the time.

DB: Were you able to just jump into the scene there?

ML: Well, it was complicated. I had great relationships with several first-generation New York poets already, which created problems with some second-generation poets. A lot of them had studied with Kenneth Koch and, you know, adored John. And here I was, this outsider, arriving in New York and being included in the first-generation circle.

But most were incredibly welcoming and loving, like Maureen Owen, a wonderful person, Lewis Warsh, and Bernadette Mayer. And eventually, I had dear friends in the third generation, too, poets like Greg Masters, Eileen Myles, Steve Levine, Elinor Nauen, Simon Pettet, Annabel Lee, and Maggie Dubris.

And of course, from our time together in Iowa, Ted Berrigan and I were as close as hell. I visited him and Alice Notley probably once a week, it seems like.

DB: So, what do you think the impact of these poets has been over time?

ML: Certainly, among the poets we’ve been talking about, their impact is widespread. I don’t know where they fit, but for instance, poets Elaine Equi and Jerome Sala, originally from Chicago, are distinct from each other, and they’re distinct from the New York School, but they’re also impacted by it. I don’t think you can have one without the other. So, yeah, I would say I can see New York School fingerprints everywhere.

I do think there was a mythology around the Beats that has made their tradition seem more impactful. And it certainly was and is. But if you want to be truly authentic about it all, the Beats and the New York School melded into each other and are very much connected. So basically, their collective impact covers almost all of modern poetry since the late 20th century.

That’s best expressed in what O’Hara’s work did for me. It gave me permission to be more truly myself. Because, you know, I’m a contradiction. I mean, I’ve always contradicted myself. For example, I’ve written poems about being gay, and I’ve written poems about not being gay.

DB: You know what? You’ve just reminded me of that wonderful line in Whitman’s “Song of Myself:”

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

ML: Amen.

VALENTINE

for Karen A.

It was a gorgeous day to wander around Georgetown.

I didn’t. I got up early, “wrote” a “book,”

listened to some “classical” music like Liszt and Couperin,

Buchanan and Dylan, read about a marriage that

by not being a real marriage at all turned out to be

a beautiful true marriage—what has “true”

got to do with “real” anyway—like today,

what has today got to do with me and you

besides the way it makes me feel full

the way you can do, brings the good things

people say the country offers right here to the city

for a countryphobe like me, so I leave my music and words

and catch the street. Everyone’s out today!

Claudia! Ed! Terry! Henry! Ralph! I wish I was

as bright as the day, so after a while of being dazzled

I go home and take a shower with all the windows open

and I shave and jump around to the good sounds—

I remember to take the huge heart shaped box of candy,

I bought it for the kids, out of the bag and put it

somewhere where it won’t melt. I drink some milk

and eat some cheese, think about all the people

I should write a poem to for “Valentine’s Day,”

for “Washington’s Birthday,” for this wonderful weather

the world gives us despite our arrogance and

belligerence toward it, but I notice the time and

there is no time! Got to run, so I do,

in some new shoes that hurt my toes, but the rest of

my clothes feel fine, and I know I am, on the street again

paying homage to the sun with my grin. I feel like

Ted Berrigan walking with my head held high, jaunty

like Hollywood English types, and a little mischievous too,

thinking about how I can do something fun and funny for you

like the sun is doing for me as I strut. There’s

my car! I haven’t seen it in almost 24 hours

so I throw it a kiss because I’m not a good owner

but I love it and that seems to keep something going.

I get in ready to cruise these canals to your veranda

or something Eddie Arnold and ’30s Hollywood like that,

only the corner of my eye catches the bank clock and

surprise! (Spencer Tracy in A Man’s Castle with

Loretta Young I think, swimming nude!) It’s 4:15 PM!

I can’t believe it! I go into Discount Books to look

for Terry to check. He’s not there but someone

I don’t know says “Hi Mike!” so I say “Hi. Do you know

what time it is?” and he looks at his watch and says

“Well, the government says it’s four twenty but

it’s really three twenty . . .” and some more words.

I don’t hear them thinking about you and ”true” and

“real” and wondering what he meant the “real” time

and what was “mine” . . . You should be there because

it’s almost 5:30 in my life, but in the bank’s and

the guy who knows my name it’s only 4:30 and somewhere

out in abstract city it’s “really” only 3:30. Maybe

that’s why it’s so warm. I back up, back home, back

to back Dylan charms me to the typewriter where

I write to you to kill the time and to say

“Wontchu be my valentine?”

[Written, under peak Frank O’Hara influence, to lifelong dearest friend Karen Allen (poet and novice actor I had fallen in love with in 1973) on Valentine’s Day 1974 in Washington DC, where you could then park overnight in our Dupont Circle neighborhood without fear of getting a ticket...]

©1974 Michael Lally

Michael Lally

Born Orange NJ, 1942, youngest of seven in Irish-American clan of cops, politicians, musicians, and a Franciscan friar; began reading poetry in bars and coffee houses in 1959; enlisted in the USAF (1962-66); ran for sheriff of Johnson County, Iowa, on The Peace & Freedom Party ticket in 1968 while at the U. of Iowa on the G.I. Bill. 31 books since 1970 include Another Way To Play: Poems 1960-2017 (Seven Stories Press 2018) and Say It Again: An Autobiography In Sonnets (Beltway Editions 2024); awards include National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellowships in 1974 and 1981 (the latter denounced in Congress by Republicans citing the poem “My Life” as “pornography” in first attempt to defund the NEA); 1997 PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award for “Excellence in Literature” for Cant Be Wrong (Coffee House Press 1997); 2000 American Book Award for It’s Not Nostalgia: Poetry & Prose (Back Sparrow Press 1999). Day jobs have included jazz pianist, book critic (Washington Post, Village Voice et. al.), TV and movie actor (NYPD Blue, Deadwood, White Fang, et. al. as Michael David Lally), screenwriter and script doctor (Drugstore Cowboy, Pump Up the Volume, et. al.). Writes the blog Lally’s Alley.

This time, we are chatting with poet Elinor Nauen, who landed in New York City in November 1976 on the advice of another poet, Joel Oppenheimer. They had met through a chance encounter in Maine, where Nauen was then living. “Joel told me I should move to New York and be a poet. So, I did! There wasn’t any thought. There wasn’t any planning. I had a hundred dollars and a car. What else did I need?” Almost 50 years later, she still lives in the same East Village apartment she found soon after her arrival.

[An earlier version of this interview appeared on the Best American Poetry blog.]

DB: Can you talk about those first few months in New York City?

EN: The first thing that happened a week after I arrived was that I attended a reading at the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church. The occasion of the reading was to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the death of Frank O’Hara. And the only reason I went was because the one name I recognized on the poster was Allen Ginsberg. Soon after, I started signing up for poetry workshops at the Project. My first one was led by the poet Jim Brodey, who would play Debussy or Chopin, then we’d write poems and read poems. It was there I met my lifelong friend and fellow poet Maggie Dubris.

DB: How did your own sense of poetry, and your own poems, evolve from there?

EN: In an essay I wrote for a 2012 conference at the National Poetry Foundation, University of Maine, on “Poetry and Poetics of the 1980s,” I said this:

“We weren’t—or felt we weren’t—under scrutiny. So here was a freedom that fueled a lot of poetry. We weren’t distracted by career possibilities. We didn’t imagine a career in poetry—even those with great ambitions didn’t see how that might work out. There was definitely the feeling that you had to choose between poetry and a ‘straight’ life.”

A good example of that was in 1977, when Maggie, her roommate Rachel, and I began calling ourselves the Consumptive Poets League. We decided to do a group reading, so I put an announcement in the Village Voice and added, “KOFF Magazine will be available,” which I made up on the spot. When I told Maggie and Rachel that we had to do a magazine, they were like, oh, okay, we’ll do a magazine!

I often tell young poets to start a reading series and invite somebody you want to read with and who you want to hear your work. Then do a magazine and publish the people you like, along with your own work, so they get to know you. Very quickly, that’s exactly what we did.

DB: It sounds like what you learned right away was not so much an aesthetic as an attitude!

EN: In a way, yes, not an aesthetic but: anything goes, everything goes. If I had any aesthetics about poetry, it was that I really liked having a posse, having a party. And to feel like this is fun and exciting and worthwhile. If you start out with an assumption about how a poem is going to work, you’re doomed to fail. You can start out with that assumption, but you have to pretty much leave open the very plausible chance that it’s going to write itself quite differently. Whoever writes a poem and gets to the end and goes, yep, that’s exactly the last line I was expecting, they’re just reciting Tennyson or something.

DB: You have mentioned that the poetry scene then was tilted, with more men than women poets at the time. Was that an issue?

EN: Not really. At that time, nobody particularly cared if they went to college and had a career. So, the women of my generation found this really sweet spot of doing whatever we wanted, and nobody was paying much attention to us. It had that drawback of, you know, if you wanted a career, but it also gave us the freedom, as O’Hara wrote, to go on your nerve, and on your whim! As women poets, we could resist, hang out with friends, and take chances.

DB: What about influence? I’m sensing that everyone was influencing everyone else.

EN: I feel like there’s 50 answers to that question, because each one was important. Everyone and everything served as an influence. We all were collaborating, listening to, and competing with each other. In the early 80s, the atmosphere of poetry in our scene was at least as important as any particular poem—that we were all poets, doing poetry all the time. If we had a theory, it was that everyone was a poet, or could be and should be, and that art was produced by the many, not the individual. It’s the “immature poets imitate; mature poets steal” kind of thing. Once you make it yours, it becomes yours.

I feel like I’ve collaborated with people who don’t even know who I am. By writing 600 stanzas of ottava rima in my book, So Late into the Night, I’ve collaborated with Byron. Maybe that’s what influence is, whether you use the word or not. It is figuring out how to continue.

Hooray for Poetry

Poetry is a great big party

​for all your friends.

As you know them all by name

​you put them in the poem.

Hi Maggie Hi Rachel Hey Greg Hi Ei Hi.

The New York poets should play musical

​lives with the rest of the world.

​​Then everyone would have a penpal.

Poetry is golden oldies

​let’s go to the hop

​​have dinner & take a walk with you

​​​steamy August, with thighs & eyes to match

Poetry is a home movie

​of your mouth & fingers & heart

Poetry is talking till 4 a.m.

​hanging up having accomplished a great deal

going to the movies

​sitting in the front row

​​turning round to see who you know that’s there

hanging out at the bar

​talking about everyone

​​who isn’t there or who is & balling

​​​all the rest

running into people on the street

​telling them to tell someone else to call you

wearing a terrific reedy shirt from 14th street.

Poetry is a great big party.

​I think we should invite as many people

​​as know my name.​​​​​

[1981]

Elinor Nauen’s books include The Alphabet’s Dilemma, Now That I Know Where I’m Going, Snowbound (a dos-à- dos book with Stephen Willis), My Marriage A to Z, So Late into the Night, CARS & Other Poems, American Guys and, as editor, Ladies, Start Your Engines: Women writers on cars & the road and Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend: Women writers on baseball. Her work has appeared in New American Writing, FICTION, Exquisite Corpse, The World, KOFF, Elysian Fields Quarterly, Aethlon, Up Late: American Poetry Since 1970, National Endowment for the Humanities Magazine, American Book Review, and other magazines and anthologies. She edits Julebord with Maureen Owen and for 12 years co-hosted, with Martha King, the reading series Prose Pros. Elinor hails from Sioux Falls, South Dakota, and for many years has lived in New York’s East Village with her husband, the novelist Johnny Stanton, and their cat Lefty, who recently advised her in a dream that when they are out in public she should refer to him as Mr. Money.

This ongoing series of conversations with poets from NYC and elsewhere will reveal how their work was shaped, even subtly, by the amazing writing community that flourished in Lower Manhattan from the 1950s through the 1990s.

I’ll be speaking with some of the most superb poets alive today, especially those who don’t turn up on college lit class reading lists. Together, we will explore what these poets recall about their own influences and experiences—and their views on how the NY sensibility has inspired contemporary poetics.

This series began some months ago on the Best American Poetry blog, through the kind invitation and support of the poet David Lehman. Sadly, the BAP blog shut down on September 30. Now, we continue here.

For now, NY Poets :: IOU is free and open to all, publishing a new interview roughly every month. Whether you write poetry or just love the stuff, please join us and spread the good word!