Interview with Daniel Kane about the Second-Generation New York School at The Argotist Online
http://www.argotistonline.co.uk/Kane%20interview.htm
Excerpt:
JS: In All Poets Welcome: The Lower East Side Poetry Scene in the 1960’s, you mention Bernadette Mayer as having something of an influence in encouraging a more theoretical approach to poetic writing in her poetry workshops at the Poetry Project, which made possible the advent of Language Poetry. Who do you think were other influential figures in the Second-Generation New York School?
DK: Ted Berrigan certainly was read quite avidly by subsequent avant-gardes, particularly his book The Sonnets. The way that book used the sonnet to foreground the artificiality of form while making that gesture hilarious and moving was, I think, really important to a lot of younger writers who had grown tired of purportedly demotic “free verse” poetry. Anne Waldman I think was pretty crucial in extending the bardic, ecstatic aspects of the Beats into more complicated and avowedly feminist directions—see her fantastic poems ‘Makeup on Empty Space’ and ‘Skin, Meat, Bones’ for example, to get a sense of how Waldman riffed in part off of Ginsberg’s incantatory style while introducing the reader to places, tones, affects and situations Ginsberg himself would never be capable of even imagining. Joe Ceravolo, while not as well known as he should be, showed in his terrific Fits of Dawn how one could be simultaneously radically disjunctive and cuddly. Lewis Warsh has quietly and heroically provided readers with a new way of thinking about the nature and function of autobiographical literature that I suspect has influenced writers like Lyn Hejinian. (I sometimes teach Warsh’s Part of My History alongside Hejinian’s My Life, for example). There are others, of course, but these are the ones that come immediately to mind alongside Saint Bernadette.
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