The New York school was a postwar avant-garde poetry tradition of gleeful abstraction and confusion. Poets like John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara, James Schuyler, Kenneth Koch, and their disciples were influenced by painting, cartoons, French symbolists, nonsense, and each other in creating poems of garbled meandering and cosmopolitan insider wisecracks.
For those who expect traditional pleasures from their poetry—rhyme, rhythm, catharsis, narrative, figurative language, personal revelation, words following one another in some sort of meaningful sequence—the New York school can be frustrating. For those willing to bob along with the shifting riptides of fanny and frump, though, the school feels like a spattering of liberatory giggles. Poetry, the New York school insists, doesn’t have to be good for you, or even good, in any recognizable sense. As John Ashbery remarked, “The twaddle dispensary’s reopened.”
I’m going to be writing a series of appreciations of New York school poems—and a good place to start is with a poem from Barbara Guest’s 1962 debut volume, The Location of Things. The poem is called “Parachutes, My Love, Could Carry Us Higher,” and it both demonstrates and describes the New York school approach to meaning, or lack thereof.
Parachutes, My Love, Could Carry Us Higher
I just said I didn’t know
And now you are holding me
In your arms,
How kind.
Parachutes, my love, could carry us higher.
Yet around the net I am floating
Pink and pale blue fish are caught in it,
They are beautiful,
But they are not good for eating.
Parachutes, my love, could carry us higher
Than this mid-air in which we tremble,
Having exercised our arms in swimming,
Now the suspension, you say,
Is exquisite. I do not know.
There is coral below the surface,
There is sand, and berries
Like pomegranates grow.
This wide net, I am treading water
Near it, bubbles are rising and salt
Drying on my lashes, yet I am no nearer
Air than water. I am closer to you
Than land and I am in a stranger ocean
Than I wished.
As with many a New York school poem, “Parachute” has no clear setting, speaker, or topic. It starts out in media res, with the middle in question one of ignorance and/or cognitive confusion; “I just said I didn’t know.”
From that opaque starting point, Guest spins out an ongoing elaboration of confusion. Someone’s holding her, prompting a low-key exclamation (“How kind”) that could be a sincere expression of affection, an ironic dismissal, or both, or neither. The title phrase enters (“Parachutes, my love, could carry us higher”) but it doesn’t lose any of its mystery. Parachutes could carry them higher than what? Who’s she talking to, and where are they anyway?
The poem does sort of answer; the parachute that isn’t drops her into a kind of abstract sea. The poem floats vaguely like the water it describes, with short declarative sentences and phrases lapping around sense and nonsense like ripples or waves pushing her consciousness here and there, from non sequitur to non sequitur. “Yet around the net I am floating/Pink and pale blue fish are caught in it,/They are beautiful,/But they are not good for eating.” What is the net? What are the fish? How do we know they are not good for eating? Is this a metaphor, and if so for what?
Critic Peter Gizzi, in the introduction to Guest’s collected poems, argues that the meaning of the poem is precisely its suspension of meaning. Or as he puts it: “Suspension is the chief conceit of the poem: the suspension of disbelief, the suspension of a locatable time and place, the suspension of a shared amorous attachment, and the suspense of not-knowing—not knowing how to proceed and not-knowing as a human condition.”
When Guest says parachutes could carry them higher “Than this mid-air in which we tremble,” she’s referring perhaps to an uncertain, unsatisfying romantic relationship, and perhaps to a generalized human inability to know. But she’s also referring to the poem itself, in which readers float around with her, in the special bubble of not-knowing and not-meaning which is language in general, and a poem in particular.
New York school writers often create poems about the process of poetry, or about their own involvement in language. They treat poetry as a medium of abstraction or pop art, using words as evocative daubs or referential jokes which create their own canvas, rather than pointing to resolution or information.
In that context, Guest’s glittering underworld seascape (“There is coral below the surface, There is sand, and berries/Like pomegranates grow”) is a painterly, otherworldly decadent still life (recalling the Pre-Raphaelite or impressionists).
But the poem does try to get somewhere or to express an actual emotional or personal situation that’s not just a collection of lovely details. Language—more than painting, more than music—wants to make meaning, to lift up in a parachute for some destination, or propel itself to some denouement (“Having exercised our arms in swimming.”) The poem gives you few clues. But it’s difficult not to try put those clues together. You want to dive through the bubbles and catch some flashing fish of narrative—to read the poem’s ambivalence about meaning as an ambivalence about a particular relationship. Is it the poem that won’t commit, or is it the lover the poem is about?
There isn’t an answer, in part because any one answer would involve the commitment that the poem is refusing. “Parachute” ends with an ambivalently adamant statement of ambivalence; “I am no nearer/Air than water. I am closer to you/Than land and I am in a stranger ocean/Than I wished.” Guest paddles back and forth, asserting that she’s in-between even the state of in-betweenness, in the middle of air and water, but not in the middle of land and “you.” The “stranger ocean” could be the relationship, or it could be the poem itself, which is strange in part because it (like the relationship?) isn’t about the relationship. Guest splashes around in uncertainty, and part of the uncertainty is about whether this is uncertainty. She’s so adrift she can’t even say for sure if she’s adrift.
Again, if you’re looking for something solider to hold onto in your poetry, this is an off-putting reading experience. Guest offers you a parachute only to withdraw it, and throws you a net only to catch nothing in it.
If you’re willing to go with the drift, though, the pleasure is in the sense of almost arriving, of almost holding on, of almost getting perspective, and in the little blinks of sunlight and fishes and gems that wriggle by before you can fully focus. The ocean or the relationship or the poem is beautiful because you’re not sure whether you’re in an ocean or a relationship or a poem. The magic is in disorienting you so completely that every direction is a discovery. You might forget that a parachute is supposed to set you down, not lift you up into a stranger sky.