| My study focuses on the relationship of women to the so-called "New York School" of poets in its first and subsequent generations. In painting, the term "New York School" typically refers to the Abstract Expressionists working in New York City at mid-century; in poetry, to the close-knit group of poets who were their friends and artistic peers, a group which includes John Ashbery, James Schuyler, Frank O'Hara, and Kenneth Koch. Recognizing the fact that "the writing of literary history inevitably takes mythic forms," as Michael Davidson has put it, my study asks hard questions about the critical urge to consolidate a "school" (even, or especially, an "avant-garde," as the New York School is commonly deemed), along with questions about if and how experimental writing by women can ever be effortlessly slotted into such structures. Throughout, I combine close readings of poetic texts with an overarching interest in the particular aesthetic issues that have accumulated around the idea of the New York School, and explore the relationship of gender and sexuality to their terms. The first two chapters revisit the New York art world of the 1950s and 60s---the first considers the abstract practices of the painter Joan Mitchell and the only "first-generation" female poet, Barbara Guest; the second discusses the play of gender in the work of Schuyler, Ashbery, and O'Hara in relation to their affinity for detail, contingency, and dailiness. The next three chapters consider the careers of three women poets associated to varying degrees with New York School writing. Bernadette Mayer, Alice Notley, and Eileen Myles. These chapters chart the evolution of each woman's work from the 1970s to the present, with particular attention to how each continues, transforms, and occasionally rejects certain New York School tropes. The dominant theoretical concerns of my study include problems of abstraction and detail in language; the relationship between visual and verbal arts; the nexus of feminist and queer issues; the various roles played by women in narratives of literary and art history; and the ways in which New York City itself shapes the art and poetry created in it. |
