THEN I SAID

[The New York Poets: an anthology
John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, Frank O’Hara and James Schuyler, edited by Mark Ford]

There have always been motions to declare the death of some forms of writing in order to facilitate the birth of new ones. The poetry of the New York poets emerging in the 50’s and 60’s didn’t have to do this. It didn’t care. Not in an intentional way, it just didn’t. Instead it was occupied with the world as world, and not as a battleground of rights and wrongs within literary expression.

It said: I have a thought, an emotion, a hunch; I can write about it. It said: I’m inspired by this painting, this piece of music, this traffic-jam; I can write about it. And so changed the way poetry saw the world, the way we saw the world, and the world, it changed too. No small feat for lines of ink on paper.

This anthology traces the major developments of four writers that have come to epitomize a poetry that is “dying to see the truth”. A poetry that makes you laugh out loud and cry your most heartfelt tears within the distance that separates two stanzas. (Also avaliable from Carcanet)

I will start recommending books from now on. First out is an autobiography I read two years back. A book I keep thinking of almost every week since.

The Book is Klaus Mann’s Autobiography ‘The Turning Point’, and describes a life led in the shadows of Thomas Mann, Klaus’ father (the great master of the modern European novel)

As a testament to a half-century of upheaval, this story of hope and love, of intelligence and talent, of exile and tragedy, is as riveting as any, and has been described as one of the best autobiographies of all time.

The book is not too easy to come by, so if you happen to do so - buy it.