New York School Collaborations

Ben Hickman, University of Kent, UK Terence Diggory, Skidmore College, USA Susan Rosenbaum, University of Georgia, USA Ellen Levy, Pratt Institute, USA Kimberly Lamm, Duke University, USA Jenni Quilter, New York University, USA Monika Gehlawat, University of Southern Mississippi, USA Ryan Dohoney, University of Kansas, USA Flore Chevaillier, Central State University, USA Erica Kaufman, The Graduate Center, CUNY, USA

"Starting with the pioneering first editions put out by the Tibor de Nagy Gallery in the early 1950s, New York School poets and artists have been notable for their avant-garde collaboration and aesthetic cross-pollination. Surveying the plays, films, musical scores, poem-paintings, comic poems, and co-written books issued during the New York School heyday, Silverberg's wide-ranging essay collection exposes the risks, rivalries, and erotics that propelled talented writers and artists to explore exciting heights beyond the reach of lyric subjectivity." - Timothy Gray, Professor of English, College of Staten Island, CUNY, USA "This well-conceived collection brings overdue attention to an often-mentioned but under-examined feature of the New York School of poetry: the practice of collaboration, both between poets and across art-forms. Exploring a set of diverse and fresh examples, these wide-ranging, insightful essays approach collaboration from an exciting array of angles: they chart its roots in the historical avant-garde, analyze its challenge to individual genius and examine its strange brew of competition and camaraderie, discuss its role in community-formation, consider its erotic dimensions, and contrast male collaborations with works jointly produced by women. This valuable anthology demonstrates that the New York School collaboration is no mere coterie game or historical footnote: it is a ground-breaking and influential aesthetic phenomenon that forces us to rethink the nature of authorship, creativity, and the dialogue between the arts in twentieth-century American literature and culture." - Andrew Epstein, Associate Professor of English, Florida State University, USA

• Introduction: New York School Collaborations and The Coronation Murder Mystery; Mark Silverberg 1. 'Our program is the absence of any program': the New York School Reading the Past; Ben Hickman 2. Ballet, Basketball and the Erotics of New York School Collaboration; Terence Diggory 3. 'Permeation, ventilation, occlusion': Reading John Ashbery and Joe Brainard's The Vermont Notebook in the Tradition of Surrealist Collaboration; Susan Rosenbaum 4. Slippery Subjects: Thoughts on the Occasion of Ashbery and Koch's 'Death Paints a Picture'; Ellen Levy 5. Fair Realism: The Aesthetics of Restraint in Barbara Guest's Collaborations; Kimberly Lamm 6. Life Without Malice: The Minor Arts of Collaboration; Jenni Quilter 7. 'An Opposite Force's Breath': Medium-boundedness, Lyric Poetry and Painting in Frank O'Hara'; Monika Gehlawat 8. Mourning Coterie: Morton Feldman and Frank O'Hara's Posthumous Collaborations; Ryan Dohoney 9. 'Everything Turns into Writing': Rhizomes and Poetry Re-Processings in Ted Berrigan's Sonnets; Flore Chevaillier 10. Giant Creatures Sculpted Here: Collectivity, Gender, and Performance in the Collaborations of Eileen Myles; Erica Kaufman