I made the following statements in reply to a questionnaire sent to me by Terence Diggory, of The Encyclopedia of New York Poets
Places of residence: Though I was born in Seattle, I am not a native of the West Coast. A few weeks after my birth, my family returned to the Midwest—more specifically, to Castle Park, a settlement on the eastern shore of Lake Michigan, where my family spent its summers. When I was very young, we spent the winter in Chagrin Falls, near Cleveland. During grade school and the first year of high school, I lived with my family in Birmingham, to the west of Detroit. We then moved to Ottawa Hills, near Toledo. After eleventh grade, I left for the University of Chicago. My sister, Mary Curtis, finished high school in Switzerland and went on to the Rhode Island School of Design. My parents settled in the south of France.
At Chicago, I ended up in the English Department. After graduation, I spent two years in the Army, then stayed for awhile with relatives in Washington, D. C. In 1967, I drifted to New York, living here and there on the Lower East Side (St. Mark’s Place, East 12th Street, East 5th Street). From that neighborhood, I moved with Phyllis Derfner to a loft on Broadway, just north of Union Square, and, a few years later, to an apartment in a building at East 11th Street and Broadway. From 1984 to 2003, we lived in a loft on Beaver Street, in the Financial District. Since then, we have lived in the Hudson River Valley.
Personal information: Thinking of my family background and how it might bear on my poetry, I recall that T. S. Eliot was among the most reliable of my parents’ pretexts for launching a spat. At the mention of his name, my mother would declare her belief that, however good his early work might be, the later work was hopelessly marred by religious feeling. My father disagreed, routinely and vehemently. I suppose these squabbles gave me my first intimation that poetry puts important thing at stake. More generally, just about everyone I remember from my childhood put great stress on language—not on poetry, for the most part, but on language itself, as a sign of who one is and a means of being who one wants to be.
I met Phyllis Derfner in 1968, when she came to my first reading in New York. Soon we were living together. We got married at some point in the 1970s. I’m not sure exactly when because marriage was incidental and changed nothing. From the start, Phyllis’s sense of language was of the greatest importance to me. Her command of American idiom is amazing, all the more so because English is her fourth language, after Polish, Yiddish, and Hebrew. She is the ideal reader embodied.
New York School connections: I was drawn to New York by my sense that the poets who interested me were there. Kenneth Koch and Ted Berrigan were the first to come into focus, then John Ashbery, Ron Padgett, and Tom Clark. After I moved to the Lower East Side and began to go to readings at the St. Mark’s Poetry Project, everyone became important — everyone, that is, who published in The World and Angel Hair and Adventures in Poetry and was on the scene. Ted Berrigan was inescapable, because of his poetry and because of the way he ran his workshop at the Project, which I attended for several years. From all the New York poets but especially from Ted I got the idea that poetry is not only supremely important but endlessly, indefatigably open.
New York disconnections: Ted said that he got his idea of poetry’s importance and possibilities from Frank O’Hara. Though I admired O’Hara’s writing, his most influential works—the “I-do-this-I do-that” poems, as he called them—were not useful to me. My favorite O’Hara poem, “To the Harbormaster,” is unmistakably his and yet grandly impersonal: one of the great set pieces of the twentieth century and a recapitulation of the entire history of the sonnet.
By the mid-1970s I had come to feel that, if there was a New York School, it was held together by a shared ambition: to invent a voice as personal and resourceful and convincing as O’Hara’s, though of course his contemporaries—John Ashbery, James Schuyler, and Kenneth Koch—had already done that. So had Ted Berrigan. But that was not my ambition. I wanted to write poems in as many voices as I could invent. I began to see the importance of T. S. Eliot. Rather, I realized that, ever since I’d come across it, the masquerade of Eliot’s early works—Prufrock, Gerontian, The Wasteland, and so on—had been shaping my idea of what it is to write poetry. Not that I wanted to adopt anything like Eliot’s personae. Their voices were uncool, unlike those of the New York School. But I was entranced by the artifice of Eliot’s voices.
The postures and personages of Wallace Stevens and W. B. Yeats were important to me, as well, as was the highly wrought rhetoric of sincerity deployed by the Romantics—Keats, especially. I have been interested in Milton, Virgil, Aeschylus, Whitman, William Collins, Elizabeth Bishop, and many others. I am indifferent to very little in the great tradition of Western poetry. Yet I think that my reading of that tradition would have been hopelessly earnest and clunky if I hadn’t came at it by way of the St. Mark’s scene in the late 1960s and early ’70s.
Involvement in other arts: Though it is convenient to say that I am from the Midwest, it is more accurate to say that I grew up in the Great Lakes region, a territory that stretches from Buffalo in the East to Chicago in the West. This is the landscape I take seriously, for no better reason than it’s the one I’m from, and I like the Hudson River Valley because it has a cousinly resemblance to the landscape of my youth—and because the part of it where I live, Columbia County, is fairly close to New York, which remains important to me because of my interest in art.
I had always liked paintings, and when I got to know the poets in New York I was happy to learn that many of them wrote for Artnews. In 1969 I became one of the reviewers at the magazine, and within a few years I was writing for Art International and Artforum. Catalog essays and books followed. I feel that there is an affinity between poets and painters. Both produce non-narrative fictions which, if they are any good, draw attention to their mediums—words or paint—in ways that prompt the reader or viewer to come alive to the process of interpretation. Self-conscious interpretation of works of the imagination becomes, at best, self-interpretation. Poetry and painting have the virtue of encouraging us to be more aware of ourselves and thus, one hopes, more humane.
Themes from my art criticism sometimes migrate to my poetry. For instance, writing about Jackson Pollock, Barnett Newman, and other painters of their generation led me to consider certain peculiarly American ideas about space (infinite), order (contingent), and individuality (untrammeled)—in short, the American sublime, which had always tinged my poetry but, at some point late in the 1980s, began to supply it with explicit topics. About this time I returned to Emerson, Whitman, Poe, and Hawthorne: American writers who grappled with the sublime long before American painters did.
Publications: My poetry appeared first in The World, the magazine of the St. Mark’s Poetry Project. In the late 1960s and early ’70s, I published work in many of the magazines I the St. Mark’s milieu: The World, Adventures in Poetry, Sun, Extensions, Penumbra, and no doubt others. From 1968 to 1970, I published three issues of a mimeographed magazine, each with its own title: Cicada, Seaplane, Reindeer. Kulcher Press published a collection of my poems, Fever Coast, in 1973. In 983, Vehicle Press published my second collection, Give Me Tomorrow, with illustrations by Alex Katz. In 2007, Arrivederci, Modernismo (1974), with an introduction by Vincent Katz and my note on the poem.
My poems have appeared in several anthologies, among them Another World, ed. Anne Waldman, New York: Bobbs, Merrill, 1971; Aerial, ed. Edwin Denby, with images by Yvonne Jacquette, New York: Eyelight Press, 1981; Out of This World, ed. Anne Waldman, New York: Crown, 1991; KGB Bar Book of Poems, ed. David Lehman and Star Black, New York: HarperCollins, 2000; Poetry After 9-11: An Anthology of New York Poets, ed. Dennis Loy Johnson and Valerie Merians, New York: 2002. In 1998, “The Violet Hour: An Essay on Beauty” appeared in Uncontrollable Beauty, ed. Bill Beckley and David Shapiro, New York: Allworth Press.
I have no idea how many essays I have published over the years in Artnews, Art International, Artforum, Arts, Art in America, Art on Paper, Modern Painters, Tate, Connaissance des Arts, Flash Art, Artspace, Art & Auction, Parkett, Sculpture, and other art journals. My books and major essays on art include “Joseph Cornell: Mechanic of the Ineffable,” Joseph Cornell. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1980; John Singer Sargent, New York: Abbeville Press, 1982; Robert Longo. New York: Rizzoli, 1985; The Fate of a Gesture: Jackson Pollock and Postwar American Art, New York: Ferrar, Straus, Giroux, 1996; Francis Bacon, Humlebaek, Denmark: Louisiana Museum for Moderne Kunst, 1998; Out of the Box: The Reinvention of Art, 1965-1975. New York: Allworth Press, 2001; “William Blake: The People’s Bard,” Art in America, September 2001; “Barnett Newman’s Perennial Now,” Art in America, September 2002; “Georgia O’Keeffe and ‘the Great American Thing,’” Georgia O’Keeffe, Kunstshaus Zürich, 2003; and Andy Warhol: Portraits, London: Phaidon Press, 2006; "Marisol: The Crowded Mirror, Marisol 1960-2007, New York: Neuhoff-Edelman Gallery, 2007.
Places of residence: Though I was born in Seattle, I am not a native of the West Coast. A few weeks after my birth, my family returned to the Midwest—more specifically, to Castle Park, a settlement on the eastern shore of Lake Michigan, where my family spent its summers. When I was very young, we spent the winter in Chagrin Falls, near Cleveland. During grade school and the first year of high school, I lived with my family in Birmingham, to the west of Detroit. We then moved to Ottawa Hills, near Toledo. After eleventh grade, I left for the University of Chicago. My sister, Mary Curtis, finished high school in Switzerland and went on to the Rhode Island School of Design. My parents settled in the south of France.
At Chicago, I ended up in the English Department. After graduation, I spent two years in the Army, then stayed for awhile with relatives in Washington, D. C. In 1967, I drifted to New York, living here and there on the Lower East Side (St. Mark’s Place, East 12th Street, East 5th Street). From that neighborhood, I moved with Phyllis Derfner to a loft on Broadway, just north of Union Square, and, a few years later, to an apartment in a building at East 11th Street and Broadway. From 1984 to 2003, we lived in a loft on Beaver Street, in the Financial District. Since then, we have lived in the Hudson River Valley.
Personal information: Thinking of my family background and how it might bear on my poetry, I recall that T. S. Eliot was among the most reliable of my parents’ pretexts for launching a spat. At the mention of his name, my mother would declare her belief that, however good his early work might be, the later work was hopelessly marred by religious feeling. My father disagreed, routinely and vehemently. I suppose these squabbles gave me my first intimation that poetry puts important thing at stake. More generally, just about everyone I remember from my childhood put great stress on language—not on poetry, for the most part, but on language itself, as a sign of who one is and a means of being who one wants to be.
I met Phyllis Derfner in 1968, when she came to my first reading in New York. Soon we were living together. We got married at some point in the 1970s. I’m not sure exactly when because marriage was incidental and changed nothing. From the start, Phyllis’s sense of language was of the greatest importance to me. Her command of American idiom is amazing, all the more so because English is her fourth language, after Polish, Yiddish, and Hebrew. She is the ideal reader embodied.
New York School connections: I was drawn to New York by my sense that the poets who interested me were there. Kenneth Koch and Ted Berrigan were the first to come into focus, then John Ashbery, Ron Padgett, and Tom Clark. After I moved to the Lower East Side and began to go to readings at the St. Mark’s Poetry Project, everyone became important — everyone, that is, who published in The World and Angel Hair and Adventures in Poetry and was on the scene. Ted Berrigan was inescapable, because of his poetry and because of the way he ran his workshop at the Project, which I attended for several years. From all the New York poets but especially from Ted I got the idea that poetry is not only supremely important but endlessly, indefatigably open.
New York disconnections: Ted said that he got his idea of poetry’s importance and possibilities from Frank O’Hara. Though I admired O’Hara’s writing, his most influential works—the “I-do-this-I do-that” poems, as he called them—were not useful to me. My favorite O’Hara poem, “To the Harbormaster,” is unmistakably his and yet grandly impersonal: one of the great set pieces of the twentieth century and a recapitulation of the entire history of the sonnet.
By the mid-1970s I had come to feel that, if there was a New York School, it was held together by a shared ambition: to invent a voice as personal and resourceful and convincing as O’Hara’s, though of course his contemporaries—John Ashbery, James Schuyler, and Kenneth Koch—had already done that. So had Ted Berrigan. But that was not my ambition. I wanted to write poems in as many voices as I could invent. I began to see the importance of T. S. Eliot. Rather, I realized that, ever since I’d come across it, the masquerade of Eliot’s early works—Prufrock, Gerontian, The Wasteland, and so on—had been shaping my idea of what it is to write poetry. Not that I wanted to adopt anything like Eliot’s personae. Their voices were uncool, unlike those of the New York School. But I was entranced by the artifice of Eliot’s voices.
The postures and personages of Wallace Stevens and W. B. Yeats were important to me, as well, as was the highly wrought rhetoric of sincerity deployed by the Romantics—Keats, especially. I have been interested in Milton, Virgil, Aeschylus, Whitman, William Collins, Elizabeth Bishop, and many others. I am indifferent to very little in the great tradition of Western poetry. Yet I think that my reading of that tradition would have been hopelessly earnest and clunky if I hadn’t came at it by way of the St. Mark’s scene in the late 1960s and early ’70s.
Involvement in other arts: Though it is convenient to say that I am from the Midwest, it is more accurate to say that I grew up in the Great Lakes region, a territory that stretches from Buffalo in the East to Chicago in the West. This is the landscape I take seriously, for no better reason than it’s the one I’m from, and I like the Hudson River Valley because it has a cousinly resemblance to the landscape of my youth—and because the part of it where I live, Columbia County, is fairly close to New York, which remains important to me because of my interest in art.
I had always liked paintings, and when I got to know the poets in New York I was happy to learn that many of them wrote for Artnews. In 1969 I became one of the reviewers at the magazine, and within a few years I was writing for Art International and Artforum. Catalog essays and books followed. I feel that there is an affinity between poets and painters. Both produce non-narrative fictions which, if they are any good, draw attention to their mediums—words or paint—in ways that prompt the reader or viewer to come alive to the process of interpretation. Self-conscious interpretation of works of the imagination becomes, at best, self-interpretation. Poetry and painting have the virtue of encouraging us to be more aware of ourselves and thus, one hopes, more humane.
Themes from my art criticism sometimes migrate to my poetry. For instance, writing about Jackson Pollock, Barnett Newman, and other painters of their generation led me to consider certain peculiarly American ideas about space (infinite), order (contingent), and individuality (untrammeled)—in short, the American sublime, which had always tinged my poetry but, at some point late in the 1980s, began to supply it with explicit topics. About this time I returned to Emerson, Whitman, Poe, and Hawthorne: American writers who grappled with the sublime long before American painters did.
Publications: My poetry appeared first in The World, the magazine of the St. Mark’s Poetry Project. In the late 1960s and early ’70s, I published work in many of the magazines I the St. Mark’s milieu: The World, Adventures in Poetry, Sun, Extensions, Penumbra, and no doubt others. From 1968 to 1970, I published three issues of a mimeographed magazine, each with its own title: Cicada, Seaplane, Reindeer. Kulcher Press published a collection of my poems, Fever Coast, in 1973. In 983, Vehicle Press published my second collection, Give Me Tomorrow, with illustrations by Alex Katz. In 2007, Arrivederci, Modernismo (1974), with an introduction by Vincent Katz and my note on the poem.
My poems have appeared in several anthologies, among them Another World, ed. Anne Waldman, New York: Bobbs, Merrill, 1971; Aerial, ed. Edwin Denby, with images by Yvonne Jacquette, New York: Eyelight Press, 1981; Out of This World, ed. Anne Waldman, New York: Crown, 1991; KGB Bar Book of Poems, ed. David Lehman and Star Black, New York: HarperCollins, 2000; Poetry After 9-11: An Anthology of New York Poets, ed. Dennis Loy Johnson and Valerie Merians, New York: 2002. In 1998, “The Violet Hour: An Essay on Beauty” appeared in Uncontrollable Beauty, ed. Bill Beckley and David Shapiro, New York: Allworth Press.
I have no idea how many essays I have published over the years in Artnews, Art International, Artforum, Arts, Art in America, Art on Paper, Modern Painters, Tate, Connaissance des Arts, Flash Art, Artspace, Art & Auction, Parkett, Sculpture, and other art journals. My books and major essays on art include “Joseph Cornell: Mechanic of the Ineffable,” Joseph Cornell. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1980; John Singer Sargent, New York: Abbeville Press, 1982; Robert Longo. New York: Rizzoli, 1985; The Fate of a Gesture: Jackson Pollock and Postwar American Art, New York: Ferrar, Straus, Giroux, 1996; Francis Bacon, Humlebaek, Denmark: Louisiana Museum for Moderne Kunst, 1998; Out of the Box: The Reinvention of Art, 1965-1975. New York: Allworth Press, 2001; “William Blake: The People’s Bard,” Art in America, September 2001; “Barnett Newman’s Perennial Now,” Art in America, September 2002; “Georgia O’Keeffe and ‘the Great American Thing,’” Georgia O’Keeffe, Kunstshaus Zürich, 2003; and Andy Warhol: Portraits, London: Phaidon Press, 2006; "Marisol: The Crowded Mirror, Marisol 1960-2007, New York: Neuhoff-Edelman Gallery, 2007.
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