Introduction: The New York School of Poets

Abstract

If Whitman were alive today and chose to go bathing in the waters off Manhattan, ‘abrupt questionings’ would not be the only thing to stir inside him. But New York is as infamous on account of the chemicals its denizens ingest, as for those its industry expels into the water. As the emblem of a contemporary condition of toxicity, New York is an infernal primus inter pares; the most concentrated dose so far of what is present in more diluted form elsewhere, be it vagrancy or insider trading, crime or vanguard art. It is the city to which other cities look for a sign, most often a warning, of the episodes to come in their own unfolding narrative. In one sense a triumph over Nature, its skyscrapers and subway system are the new Nature, as fields of concrete and forests of scaffolding dwarf the species that created them, ‘while nature itself, in the form of parks, a snowfall, cats and dogs, is a detail in the stone and steel of his habitat’.¹ To take your hungry, your tired, your poor and stratify them, is the real promise of the Statue of Liberty; but if a race and class-based pecking order divides New York as never before, this city is, in a phrase from John Ashbery’s most famous poem, ‘alive with filiations, shuttlings’. (SPCM 75) The homeless prowl the West Eighties in hopes of better pickings, while in the galleries urban refuse turns into art: self-divided, New York is also uniquely self-reflexive.

I too walk’d the streets of Manhattan island, and bathed in the waters around it,

I too felt the curious abrupt questionings stir within me …

(Walt Whitman, ‘Crossing Brooklyn Ferry’)