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In my first-year writing course at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta where I teach as a Marion L. Brittain Postdoctoral Fellow, my students are reading books by Second Generation New York School poets to critique and creatively reimagine concepts of youth, coming-of-age narratives, and the overlap between do-it-yourself and avant-garde aesthetics. We already read Joe Brainard\u2019s I Remember<\/em> and Ted Berrigan\u2019s The Sonnets<\/em>, two versions of youth, memory, and selfhood constructed by male poets of the New York School, and were beginning to read Alice Notley\u2019s Mysteries of Small Houses<\/em> (1998) to extend this intertextual conversation about youth through the perspective of a female poet. While re-reading Mysteries<\/em>, a book of autobiographical poems that tracks Notley\u2019s \u201cI\u201d through the prismatic complexities of life and writing, I returned to her poem \u201cWaveland (Back in Chicago)\u201d in which Notley, challenged by the responsibilities and strictures of living inside concepts like motherhood and femininity in the mid-\u201970s, describes her process of collage-making, a practice Notley continues to be devoted to.<\/p>\n Frozen collection of world\u2014this is \u201cart\u201d I don\u2019t<\/p>\n write much poetry;<\/p>\n I\u2019m thinking with my hands\u2014a ploy against fear\u2014<\/p>\n I have a pile of garbage on the floor<\/p><\/blockquote>\n <\/p>\n The poem then catalogs a series of collages with titles like \u201cWATERMASTER\u201d and \u201cDEFIES YOU THE RHYTHMIC FRAME,\u201d and also describes a collage composed of \u201ca photo of a stripper I\u2019ve named \/ Barney surrounded by cutout words she \/ dances to poetry.\u201d Reading these lines, I remembered that I had actually just seen this collage in Notley\u2019s papers at the University of Connecticut. Among a couple dozen collages by Notley, there was Barney herself, headless, cape trailing behind her, walking across a fragment of moon. After discussing this poem in class, I was able to show my students Of course, none of this would have been possible without my recent visit to the archives at the University of Connecticut. Thanks to the generosity of a Rose and Sigmund Strochlitz Travel Grant, I spent a week in the papers of poets and artists like Notley, Ted Berrigan, Bill Berkson, and Ed Sanders, among others, reading voluminous correspondence with Joe Brainard, Anne Waldman, Bernadette Mayer, Lewis Warsh, Ron Padgett, and a litany of other Second Generation New York School writers. Well-known for its Charles Olson Research Collection, the Thomas J. Dodd Research Center is also home to a wealth of materials associated with the New York School and is a necessary destination for any scholar of 20th century American poetry. And though a week of nonstop work in the archive allowed me to read and assess a lot of material, the sheer amount of New York School material stored at UConn, much of which has only barely begun to be utilized by scholars, meant that I was inevitably rushing through stacks of papers, quickly unfolding and refolding letters, swiftly scanning folder titles, and scratching my own nearly incomprehensible notes in a frenzied, focused attempt to see and catalog as much as possible before having to return to Atlanta. Like Notley\u2019s description of collage-making in Mysteries<\/em>, the archive is a place where I\u2019m also \u201cthinking with my hands\u201d as I arrange, photograph, and order material in \u201ca ploy against [the] fear\u201d of overlooking or not knowing the full extent of what\u2019s present in the archive. Every piece of material, like in Notley\u2019s collage, is necessary and meaningful. This is how \u201ca pile of garbage\u201d becomes both art and scholarship. Starting with what you touch, a life and intelligence are animated.<\/p>\n Notley wasn\u2019t the only poet whose visual artwork is held at the University of Connecticut. Take this incredible poster-size collage \u201cBlues Bombard\u201d (1965) by Ron Padgett with the poet\u2019s thick, elegant cursive painted over sliced fragments of sheet music that frame a photo booth portrait of Padgett, face half-obscured, cool, and mysterious. It\u2019s rare to find visual artwork by Padgett that isn\u2019t a collaboration with friends like Brainard or George Schneeman, and this piece is particularly astounding both for its size and the quick, pleasing, and humorous visual narrative that follows from the newspaper clipping-title, down across the rhyming and chiding main text \u201dmore than likely this stinks greatly,\u201d the arrows and question marks that logically and quizzically suggest a set of correspondences, the appearance of the artist mid-gesture, and the small, humorous, non sequitur conclusion \u201ca hole in one. THE END.\u201d It\u2019s a lovely piece, and entirely Padgett in its cartoonish wit and simplicity.<\/p>\n I\u2019m looking forward to returning to the archives at the University of Connecticut to spend more time thinking through the material traces of the poets I love and study, and to continue to utilize these important and still-growing collections to illustrate the ongoing importance and value both of the New York School\u2019s second generation gems and the pedagogical, personal, and scholarly correspondence that archives allow us to develop. \u201cI must be making my own universe \/ out of discards,\u201d Notley writes in \u201cWaveland (Back in Chicago),\u201d and there\u2019s a sense of that same construction of a world in the loose, wayward ephemera of the archive. What\u2019s most fulfilling is how the process of looking and reading in the archive is always one of presence, and often magically, of being in contact with your sources.<\/p>\n -Nick Sturm<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Currently a postdoctoral fellow in the School of Literature, Media and Communication at Georgia Institute of Technology, Dr. Nick Sturm is an Atlanta-based poet and scholar. His poems, collaborations, and essays have appeared in\u00a0The Brooklyn Rail,\u00a0PEN,\u00a0Black Warrior Review,\u00a0The Best … Continue reading ![\"\"](\"https:\/\/blogs.lib.uconn.edu\/archives\/files\/2019\/01\/NotleyCollageSmall-768x1024.jpg\")
<\/a>the collage to talk about how seeing an example of Notley\u2019s visual art helped us think about her critiques of femininity, motherhood, and aesthetics. Students were surprised that I had such an example to show them\u2014what had seemed like a passing reference in a poem suddenly become material. They immediately started to describe the effects of juxtaposing the collage\u2019s title \u201c2 Nursery Rhymes\u201d with the presence of a nearly-nude woman. They asked what it might mean for Notley to be a \u201cbrilliant mother\u201d in association with the mythological feminine connotations of the moon. And they noted how the epistolary gesture that opens the collage\u2019s text, \u201chi Carlos Dear Henry,\u201d resonated with Berrigan\u2019s The Sonnets<\/em>, which is riddled with salutations like \u201cDear Marge,\u201d \u201cDear Chris,\u201d and \u201cDear Ron.\u201d Seeing Notley\u2019s collage projected in front of them, pairing the material evidence of the poem\u2019s description with a conversation about how the visual medium supplemented their reading of the text, students said they felt a different connection to the poem, to Notley\u2019s work, and to our entire discussion that day.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/blogs.lib.uconn.edu\/archives\/files\/2019\/01\/PadgettBluesBombardSmall-1024x768.jpg\")
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<\/a>I was also interested to work in Ed Sanders\u2019s papers at UConn, which includes a wealth of material from the Peace Eye Bookstore, the infamous \u201csecret location on the lower east side\u201d where Sanders\u2019s mimeograph magazine Fuck You: A Magazine of the Arts<\/em> was published from 1962-65 until the store was raided by the NYPD on obscenity charges. Incredibly enough, the collection includes both a handwritten note from 1964 instructing Sanders to call an FBI agent and Sanders\u2019s January 1965 mugshot following his arrest. After Sanders defeated the charges against him, Peace Eye temporarily reopened in 1967 with a Fuck You<\/em>-style gala event auctioning off \u201cliterary relics & ejeculata from the culture of the Lower East Side.\u201d The collection includes the handwritten notecards Sanders used to identify the various items for sale in the auction, like an \u201ciron used by rising young poets to iron the buns of W.H. Auden during the years 1952-1966,\u201d \u201cAllen Ginsberg\u2019s Cold Cream Jars,\u201d and a letter\u2014likely in protest\u2014from Marianne Moore to Sanders in response to receiving a copy of Fuck You<\/em> in the mail. Some of the material actually confiscated by the NYPD in the raid of the bookstore is in the collection as well, with the police evidence identification slips still attached, like a copy of a Joe Brainard drawing described by police as \u201cBlue colored Headless Superman drawing with private parts exposed.\u201d<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/blogs.lib.uconn.edu\/archives\/files\/2019\/01\/OHaraToBerriganSmall-1024x768.jpg\")
<\/a>Among collages and obscenity charges, the New York School material at UConn also runs parallel to and benefits from the archive\u2019s already well-known collections of Frank O\u2019Hara and Charles Olson papers. The resonance of these collections is embodied in two postcards; one from Frank O\u2019Hara to Ted Berrigan and another from Berrigan to Charles Olson. Much can be made of the micro-lineage threads of the New American poetry and New York School that run through these three poets. Not only are Olson and O\u2019Hara canonical energies within Berrigan\u2019s The Sonnets<\/em>, but Berrigan\u2019s self-described \u201crookie of the year\u201d arrival in American poetry occurred at the 1965 Berkeley Poetry Conference, over which Olson\u2019s presence loomed large. Additionally, O\u2019Hara\u2019s work had been a guide for Berrigan on how to live as a young poet. What\u2019s great about the 1962 postcard from O\u2019Hara to Berrigan is that it offers a reversal on the standard hierarchical narratives of literary tradition. Here, it\u2019s O\u2019Hara praising Berrigan\u2019s poems as he invites him out for a drink and \u201cto meet K. [Kenneth] Koch,\u201d who would also be a New York School hero to Berrigan. Evidenced by the tape arranged on the edges of the card to harden and preserve it, Berrigan clearly treasured this correspondence from O\u2019Hara, which due to the use of Berrigan\u2019s full name, seems to have been their very first formal exchange. One images Berrigan, then 27 years old and having just moved to New York City the year before, formally expressing his admiration for O\u2019Hara\u2019s poems in his initial note. This postcard shows Berrigan\u2019s first-hand devotion to his aesthetic sources. On the other hand, the August 16, 1966 postcard from Berrigan to Olson reveals an already well-established and easy going correspondence with the author of The Maximus Poems<\/em> and \u201cProjective Verse,\u201d as Berrigan, referencing the postcard\u2019s text on the other side, writes, \u201cDear Charles, We\u2019re about to beat upwind. A loon is crying tonight. Maine is full of sky,\u201d and signs off, \u201cBe seeing you, Ted + Sandy.\u201d Likely having stopped in to see Olson in Gloucester, Massachusetts on the drive up to Maine with his first wife, Sandy, Berrigan is playfully following up with the elder poet only about three weeks after the death of O\u2019Hara. ![\"\"](\"https:\/\/blogs.lib.uconn.edu\/archives\/files\/2019\/01\/BerriganToOlsonSmall-1024x768.jpg\")
<\/a>Though Olson himself would die in 1970, and it\u2019s unclear if further correspondence between the two poets exists, Berrigan\u2019s \u201cfull of sky\u201d note to Olson again shows his sense of intimacy with the poets whose work he respected and learned from. The archive, as it often does, is showing us how lineage, tradition, and aesthetic exchange are never abstract.<\/p>\n