In thought, a fine human brow is like the East when troubled with the morning

Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories, and criticism. The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs? - Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature

I met Peter Gizzi today. He recommended I read George Oppen which I will definitely be doing. He also recommended I read Abraham Lincoln. Yes, Abraham Lincoln. Mr. Gizzi recited verse from memory and dazzled us with his knowledge of 19th Century Americanism in relation to the Moderns and subsequently its relationship to people like John Ashbery and Frank O'Hara.

I see the poets of the New York School as pioneers (duh) in their ability to eclipse experience with their imaginations; a sort of funneling of realistic experience through the guise of a twisted imagination. No longer was experience the focus. Imagination was emphasized for some of the early moderns (see Dickinson and Williams), but for some reason it was not until the likes of John Ashbery, Frank O'Hara and Kenneth Koch that we (at least for me) were able to see a transformation of imagination rooted in experience but turned in a way that wasn't everyday but was still somehow familiar. I know a lot of people cite O'Hara as the "do this do that" poet where everyday experience was emphasized, but there is something so much more to it than that.

A reproduction of nature is not and should not be the focus of art. Abstract expressionism acts as a god in the fact that it is creation in the most fundamental sense of the word. Using materials around you to produce something that is not currently present. Nothing Pollock or de Kooning created existed before the paint was applied to it. The wheelbarrow was there for Williams just as a taxi was there for O'Hara. Williams got people to recognize and appreciate what they were not recognizing and appreciating, whereas O'Hara got people to be excited about the things they were recognizing all the time. This is O'Hara's imagination at work. Yes, Frank O'Hara is a god in the same sense that Pollock and de Kooning were.

Peter Gizzi talked about poetry constantly looking back at the vacuum of history. One's experience is what a writer draws from for their subjects, whether physically experienced, overheard, read, etc. Where will my imagination take the experiences I've had and/or possess? That is my ultimate curiosity for my life and my writing. What will I do that no one has done? Will I? Can I?

It is appealing to me that writing is a continual present and future action while the physical act of reading is one of the past--words are going past you as you are reading this for instance, but as I am typing this words are appearing and currently are and will be after this word and this word and this one too. Gertrude Stein stated that "For a long time everybody refuses and then almost without a pause almost everyone accepts. In the history of the refused in the arts and literature the rapidity of the change is always startling." What is avant garde? What can I make that will reject anything without immediately being accepted for that rejection? What can I do that is new? David Lehman states, "If we are all postmodernists, we are none of us avant-garde, for postmodernism is the institutionalization of the avant-garde." Can one create something new without being "avant garde?" I guess so?

But for the same reason political poetry is suspect, wouldn't anything rooted in tradition be so as well? Art based on and pursued because of the ideas and beliefs and agendas of others is half art to me. Most political poetry is attempting to further the agenda of someone else, and is, therefore, not inherently original to that author. Does that apply to anything outside of the avant garde? What is the avant garde. Fuck. !

I should have asked Peter Gizzi.