Women, the New York School, and Other True Abstractions

by Maggie Nelson

Maggie Nelson provides the first extended consideration of the roles played by women in and around the New York School of poets, from the 1950s to the present, and offers unprecedented analyses of the work of Barbara Guest, Bernadette Mayer, Alice Notley, Eileen Myles, and abstract painter Joan Mitchell as well as a reconsideration of the work of many male New York School writers and artists from a feminist perspective.

Genres: Poetry, Nonfiction, Art, Essays, Theory, Criticism, Feminism

310 pages, Hardcover

First published December 1, 2007

About the author

Maggie Nelson is the author of nine books of poetry and prose, many of which have become cult classics defying categorization. Her nonfiction titles include the National Book Critics Circle Award winner and New York Times bestseller The Argonauts (Graywolf Press, 2015), The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning (Norton, 2011; a New York Times Notable Book of the Year), Bluets (Wave Books, 2009; named by Bookforum as one of the top 10 best books of the past 20 years), The Red Parts (Free Press, 2007; reissued by Graywolf, 2016), and Women, the New York School, and Other True Abstractions (U of Iowa Press, 2007). Her poetry titles include Something Bright, Then Holes (Soft Skull Press, 2007) and Jane: A Murder (Soft Skull, 2005; finalist for the PEN/ Martha Albrand Art of the Memoir). In 2016 she was awarded a MacArthur “genius” Fellowship. She has also been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in Nonfiction, an NEA in Poetry, an Innovative Literature Fellowship from Creative Capital, and an Arts Writers Fellowship from the Andy Warhol Foundation. She writes frequently on art, including recent catalogue essays on Carolee Schneemann and Matthew Barney. She holds a Ph.D. in English Literature from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, and has taught literature, writing, art, criticism and theory at the New School, Pratt Institute, and Wesleyan University. For 12 years she taught in the School of Critical Studies at CalArts; in fall 2017 she will join the faculty of USC. She currently lives in Los Angeles.

Reviews

[julieta · Rating 5 out of 5]

It took me a while to read this book, but it was totally worth it. I love Maggie Nelson, and this is a wonderful study on women in the New York School. I will be coming back to this book many times more. I am left with a long reading list, and very curious of many poets I did not know about. Loved it and enjoyed it very much. It was like taking a poetry course.

[Clara Martin · Rating 5 out of 5]

if you're interested in poetry, or the new york school, or women, or abstraction, or writing, or maggie nelson, or eileen myles, or music, or anything marginally aligned to the previous list, you should read this book.

[Charlotte Alexander · Rating 3 out of 5]

Reading this felt like reading 10 academic articles trying to put a literary theory onto the New York poets and painters. While it is a needed book and provides a very fresh look at these writers it also felt like proving an argument just to take it away in half a page.

[justin]

in truth i've only read the first part and i'll get to the second part after i brush up on the poets involved there, but i absolutely love frank o hara, gertrude stein, and joan mitchell and adore maggie nelson's writing. so when i discovered a book about frank o hara, stein, and mitchell was written by nelson i went a little nuts. nelson's academic and critical voice is sharp and succinct and sometimes goes on too long for my liking. seeing her invoke barbara guest and sylvia plath, too, comparing their poetics in lieu of the rise of women poets in america during the 20th century was so insightful to read.

[Zoe Tuck]

If you're looking for models for how to do literary criticism (as I am), you could do a a lot worse! Plus, criticism or poetry, Maggie Nelson is a joy to read.

[Claire g]

(finished ish)

[Andrew Guthrie · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is another excellent addition to Nelson's bibliography . . . albeit far more academic (for some people) in terms of citations and all the other academic requirements . . . but my gosh: the sheer breadth of Nelson's reading, in that she (in the index and notes) mentions just about everyone else (poets/writers) that she wasn't able to focus on.

Given the density of the text, I chose not to read it back to front, but read bits of the beginning and then the chapters on Alice Notley and Bernadette Mayer. I appreciated Nelson's take on Frank O'Hara or the other big male names of the New York School (which begins the book), in that their brand of "gayness" (or sensibility) was more open to the influence of women writers, say, as opposed to the Beats who were far more exclusive. This is also to give credit to Nelson, as she never peremptorily dismisses any writer and qualifies whatever contribution they made.

The text, in general, should inspire any contemporary poet, as it lays out the meaning, impetus, and way-of-life of the dedicated poet (in this case, the less than fully acknowledged poet). This includes what I call the extra-economic impetus in that poetry is allowed a significant social space in contrast to its general esoteric reception in the marketplace. Both Notley and Mayer clearly made a decision not just about what and how they wanted to write but about how they wanted to live.

Read this . . . and learn something!

[Chloe Xiang · Rating 4 out of 5]

⭐️4.2/5 I enjoyed this book. The topic felt quite targeted toward me as someone who volunteers at the Poetry Project and loves the poets mentioned in the analysis, including Alice Notley, Eileen Myles, and Bernadette Mayer. I generally love Nelson’s literary analysis. In this book, I could particularly feel her first-hand perspective of an up-and-coming New York poet, as she worked with the mentioned predecessors, which gave the analysis a personal edge. I enjoyed Nelson’s arguments on how these writers deviated from the conventional, male-dominated poets surrounding them and created work that didn’t prioritize status and instead, revolutionized gender theory, domesticity, and more. I didn’t give the book 5 stars because I felt that at times the book would meander a bit where I’d lose the central point and feel less immersed in the text. For this reason, I also felt like when I finished the book, I couldn’t immediately summarize the messages in the book in a way that goes beyond the surface thesis, and felt like the book was more of a conversation with herself than a succinct essay.

[Juliano · Rating 4 out of 5]

Women, the New York School, and Other True Abstractions is a well-researched, persuasive and engaging argument for the place of key women writers and artists in the so-called New York School. Looking at work by such writers as Alice Notley and Eileen Myles, and then juxtaposing it against O’Hara and Schuyler to name but a couple, Nelson is expansive but never at the expense of precision. As she gets deeper into her analyses of the experimental/ avant-garde, and the grey areas between poetry + prose, it’s easy to see her later work (most notably The Argonauts + Bluets) already taking root. Perhaps a little more difficult to get into than her other works (especially to start), this book has introduced me to many artists and writers whose work I’m already trying to track down copies of, and was a wonderful way to complete my Nelson-odyssey.

[Micaela · Rating 4 out of 5]

I did it!! After letting this book stare me down for three years, I finally took it off the shelf and got it done. I attended a conversation with Maggie Nelson and Michelle Tea earlier this year, where Maggie described this book simply about people she found “rad”. It’s an exploration of the topics that she has since covered in greater depth. It’s all here— art, sex, gender, cruelty, politics, and freedom.

[Ana Hein · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.75

the back half is much more compelling than the front; but I did love the back half

[Madeleine]

- PAGE 86-87:
“I know of no better way to describe O’Hara’s poetry than as an structure of observation, criticism, and solidarity,’”
Body as city, body as metaphor
“It’s also worth noting that at the same time that the first generation New York School profs were hanging out in Greenwich Village, an enormous drama was playing out between highway-obsessed urban planners—Robert Moses, mainly—and Village residents...Jane Jacobs...Indeed, if Jacobs and her fellow activists had not prevailed, an enormous freeway would run though the heart of the West Village today.) In her landmark 1961 book on urban planning, The Death and Life of American Cities, Jacobs describes the workings of the city is a ways that could almost serve as an aesthetic manifesto for much New York School Poetry: ‘[The city] is a complex order. It’s essence is intricacy if sidewalk use, bringing a constant succession of eyes. This order is all composed of movements and change, and although it is life, not art, we may fancifully call it the art form of the city and liken it to dance—not to a simple-minded precision dance with everyone kicking up at the same time, twirling in unison and bowing off em masse, but to an intricate ballet in which the individual dancers and ensembles all have distinctive parts which miraculously reinforce each other and compose an orderly whole. The ballet of the good city sidewalk never repeats itself from place to place, and in any one place is always replete with new improvisations (50)’
“Looking back on New York from Paris, Notley remembers the character of her life there as follows: ‘The fact is that to live in New York is to be involved with the outer or communal life of the city in all its detail, to be in the face of everyone else looking at you (but giving you license to be eccentric), particular people doing particular things, amid detail of objects, architecture, weather. Everyone is interested in everything; stoop society (in which we participated wholeheartedly at 101 St. Mark’s) is a structure of observation, criticism, and solidarity. The ephemeral, the insouciant, the occasional—all of that is outside in New York as well as inside. When I first went to New York to finish to Barnard College, I was entranced by this aspect of the city and felt instantly at home. I know no other city like it—it is such a force as itself. It is always bigger than one, which is why one has to say I there. And it is a city of humor, sympathy, and very personalized encounters including aggressive ones. This all seems to me to be part of the School. (Email interview, 4 February 2002)’”
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18 getting out of the city as important as being in the city…anecdote…indicates something of the deep pleasure to be found in the blurring of boundaries between art and nature, pigment and color, human and nonhuman, aesthete and naturalist, and so on—not to mention the profound gratification of evacuation, of getting rid of one’s art, and of watching it join the procession of objects in the world (as Warhol celebrated with his floating silver pillows)
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[Brian · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent! Nelson's huge list of talents includes nimble literary analysis and an obvious love of research. As with all of her work, her true strength lies in the imaginative leaps she makes between her insights, which are consistently unique, clear and poignant. A beautiful and beautifully written study that moves quickly through a hard earned path of questioning.

[Beth · Rating 3 out of 5]

She's such a good writer, but I probably won't read much more of this book--too academicalogical. Skimming the Eileen Myles and Alice Notley chapters though--good juice in there and fine observations throughout, often in the footnotes.