John Ashbery reading “Litany” at St. Mark’s Church makes an appearance in this Opinion piece from Perfil (translations compliments of Google translate) , which largely comments on Daniel Kane’s Do You Have a Band?: Poetry and Punk Rock in New York City.
COLUMNISTS OPINIONYESTERDAY 2.23.2022
Books, punk, years
My team sites were Coney Island, in the mornings, and the East Village, after sunset. Only remnants of punk remained.
If I were young I would put together a punk rock band and name it "Social distance", "Narrow contact" or "Third dose" (on the other hand, if it were an eighties-nineties electro pop band, I would put it "The Antigens"). But none of that has been given to me, earned as I am over the years, an irredeemable herniated disc and other calamities that are irrelevant to relate here. At least with the guide of the PERFIL Christmas bonus I went skiing in Aspen for a few days, a matter of relaxing a little. And on the plane back, as a comfort, I read Do You Have a Band in one fell swoop? Poetry and Punk Rock in New York City, by Daniel Kane (Columbia University Press, New York, 2017). The first thing to thank Kane is that in a book on rock and poetry there is not a single quote to Derrida, Benjamin, Deleuze or others like that. A strange confusion of our time lies in the fact that trivial rock critics pass through great thinkers, whose deepest reflections consist of saying that capitalism is bad and that we live in a society of control (What a novelty!). Kane's is an impeccable chronicle of the East Village scene of the late 70s and early 80s, a scene in which New York punk developed. I was there for the first time in 1984, for about 6 months, at that age when you are no longer totally a teenager or completely adult. My team sites were Coney Island, in the mornings, and the East Village, after sunset. Only remains remained of punk, and there was then talk of "After Punk" (curious how the terms change: then it began to be said "Post-Punk" and "After" was no longer used). He did nothing but wander around, with no more (or less). So I knew the heyday of St. Mark›s Bookshop, which I had opened a few years earlier, where I bought books without knowing who the authors were or what they were talking about. In the 90s it had already become an unbearable bookstore that basically sold books from Cultural Studies, to close recently, devastated by Amazon. Do Yo Have... has a beautiful chapter on St. Mark's Place that describes that area and those years well. But the best chapter is called "Eileen Myles and the International Fuck Frank O'Hara Movement", which tells the story of the movement around Koff magazine, a direct intervention against what is known as the New York School, with poets like O'Hara, who was obviously seen as too intellectual and unvitalist (what else is the best rock, but anti-intellectual and vitalist?). However, an accident in St. Mark's Church generates the need to raise funds for fear that the church will be demolished, and then a poetry festival is held to which, of course, O'Hara does not attend, but Ashbery, the other great poet of that group, does. Ashbery reads there "Litany", a poem based on two simultaneous monologues, in which he writes: "Throughout the city / its scenario, anything / could be happening." And indeed they still happened in New York in those years, before it became a huge open-air shopping mall. By the way, in The Consciousness of the Eye, Richard Sennett analyzes the urban implications of Ashbery's other poems, and the relationship between poetry and New York urbanism, in a remarkable way. Books always remain, intellectual and vital.