I’ve been curious about this book for a long while. When one of my friends (who I haven’t seen in so long, why is that?) read to me from Frank O’Hara’s Meditations in an Emergency, O’Hara’s sensibility and voice charmed me. My friend recommended the present volume to me, as a good introduction to O’Hara and the other so-called New York Poets, that is John Ashberry, James Shuyler, Kenneth Koch.

This anthology boasts that it gathers “the best work by the four extraordinary poets”. Given that I had not read all of their work, and that I wouldn’t really know how to judge its merits as works of art besides in a way that is purely subjective, I won’t be doing any such assessment. Instead, I thought I’d write a few of my thoughts on the four poets’ that I’d noticed along the way.

In the book, O’Hara comes first. I feel like I want to call him, ‘Frank’, given how personal his poems feel. Maybe it’s because he’d been the first I’d been introduced to? He tells us in one of the poems that he is ‘the simplest of men’ because all he wants is ‘boundless love’. A simple desire given its singularity. But the most complex one in its actualizability. What should we do with him? Perhaps he gives us an answer elsewhere, where he writes that he ‘straightened his shoulders and eyelids’. As though calling us to follow him, and look to finding simplicity. Love being the most important goal one may set for oneself.

Following the course of the book, I’ll look at John Ashberry next. Where Frank O’Hara seems to invite his readers into his life, Ashberry wants his readers to listen to him. His politics come through his poems. My favourite example was Definition of Blue where he writes (quite rightly in my eyes, for all that’s worth) that “the rise of capitalism parallels the advance of romanticism”. The individual is king, and Ashberry feels we need to instead look to our commonalities. Stylistically I felt his poems had epic qualities. I could imagine John Ashberry speaking to a gathering, after dark, captivating his audience.

Kenneth Koch’s work feels like it engages the most with other poets: Apollinaire, Federico Garcia Lorca, and naturally, the other New York Poets. His work, I felt gave me insight into the interaction between the four of them, even though as far as I remember right now, he doesn’t mention any of the others in his poems. His poetry also struck me as most radically, of the four, as playing with linguistics. Therefore, his work seemed most ‘new’ to me.

Finally, I have come to James Schuyler. His poems were perhaps most influenced by his mental state (as though any work of art could ever be anything but abstraction from the author’s mental state). The short biography of the poet, provided by the editor of the Anthology, Mark Ford, tells us that Schuyler suffered from many mental breakdowns, and many of his poems were written as a response to his failing mental health. What struck me most in them was his attention to detail, focusing on the minutiae of his surroundings or himself.

As I’d written these few paragraphs I’d realized a bias I’d introduced into my own thinking about this collection. By writing about the four poets here in order they are given in the book, it is tempting to think that they influenced one another in that order. I feel it is important to remember though, that they influenced each other to an immeasurable degree, and their work needs to be considered paradoxically both side by side and separately.

Martin Heidegger wrote that the artist is like a gateway and is in some way irrelevant to the artwork. I feel we should keep this in mind with these poems. And perhaps, to best take them in, consider them, as though they were without an author.

If you want to get this wonderful collection, you can pick it up from Amazon

or Book Depository.