EAF index | PROJECTS index | EXHIBITION PROGRAM 1999 |previous screen "Ain't It Great To Be Great!" - the New York / Tulsa School Ken Bolton Tusla. It's not much in the news. So when I heard we were showing Larry Clark's photographs of a Tulsa sub-culture of the early 60s I remarked to EAF Director, Chris Chapman, that a number of poets and artists had come from Tulsa just prior to that time. As it happens the groups barely overlap, and the poets mostly heard of Clark for the first time when his work began to gain art world attention in the 70s, just a few years after they had begun to make names for themselves in New York. (Drugs - mostly pills bought from truckers - had only just begun to be used - in Dick Gallup's case, typically, so as to be able to read and write all night. They feature more heavily in the LArry Clark photos. Gallup, though, thinks "the poems do express the sort of political and social interest/alienation that presaged the rise of the later drug culture.") This particular Tulsa group (poets Ted Berrigan, Ron Padgett and Dick Gallup, artist/writer Joe Brainard) - sometimes jokingly known as the Tulsa School - make up a core group within the second generation of the famous New York School of poets, a name generated by Ron Padgett and David Shapiro's An Anthology of New York Poets. Brainard, Padgett and Gallup were students and friends together at their (local) Tulsa University. At the same time, Ted Berrigan slightly older, was stationed in Tulsa with the Army and enrolled at Tulsa. Immediately upon graduation (earlier in some cases) the group moved from small town Tulsa (escaped was more the term) to big city New York. (Dick Gallup says, "I remember when [Clark's] 'Tulsa' book came out in 1971, my reaction was that I hoped Larry Clark had the good sense to get his butt out of Oklahoma post haste. Oklahoma being Oklahoma, he would certainly end up in prison.") 'New York School' as a literary movement can only be loosely defined. Compared to other streams in what was then the New American Poetry (see Donald Allen's anthology of that name) this New York crowd were determinedly less earnest - less Protestantly minimalist than the Black Mountain projectivists, less apocalyptically sloganeering than the Beats - more interested in artifice and formal experimentation, more in tune with continental European avant-garde traditions (Apollinaire, Dada and Surrealism). Mixed with this were the influence and precedents of the then current American art (Pop, Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism, Johns and Rauschenberg) which the poets transposed into a particularly bracing, cheerfully insouciant American blend. The second generation of New York School poets, Padgett in particular, were particularly responsible for this Ôdomestication' of the French tone. (Ron Padgett has been an important translator of Apollinaire, Blaise Cendrars, Marcel Duchamp, and others.) Aside from the Tulsa group, this second generation includes Tony Towle, Peter Schjeldahl, Anne Waldman, Michael Brownstein, Bernadette Mayer, David Shapiro, Edwin Denby, Kenward Elmslie. The first generation, to whom the newcomers gravitated, were Frank O'Hara, Kenneth Koch, John Ashbery and James Schuyler. The work reproduced here is drawn from Padgett's, Berrigan's and Gallup's earliest books and would mostly have been composed in their first years in New York. Those first books very often had covers by Joe Brainard who became quite a well known artist in the 70s. As a writer Brainard's main work is I Remember, a book which proceeds to become autobiography and memoir-of-the-times via accumulated detail, every sentence beginning with the title phrase, "I remember". His journal writings predate and prefigure the 'slacker' figure of the late 80s. Brainard did many flyers for his friends' poetry readings and collaborated with them often in the creation of new work. He died of AIDS in 1994. Ted Berrigan, who died still earlier (in 1983), was probably the first of the Tulsa influx to become influential - tho Padgett and Gallup and the others were hot on his heels. Two longer works of Berrigan's were published to terrific effect: "Bean Spasms" and "Tambourine Life". Even more of a bombshell was "The Sonnets", a series of about one hundred sonnets which recycle a pool of phrases and lines (in combination with new material) to make poems that are fabulously funny, abstract, moving, and often formally beautiful, always interesting. They work best cumulatively but a few are included here and might give some idea. To me these poems seem an interesting parallel to visual art practices of collage, random procedures, delight in the juxtaposition of high and low (echoes of Rimbaud, TV, The Tempest, and scrounging for the rent on a belly full of pills, for example), abstraction, collaboration. They make a blithe assault on 'good taste' and other rules of artistic comportment. For all of which they have never been forgiven. TULSA IN NEW YORK is available from Dark Horsey, The Experimental Art Foundation Bookshop EAF index | PROJECTS index | EXHIBITION PROGRAM 1999 | previous screen