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A muse in the room, or poets are poor - proceedings of two panels on relationship between poets and painters
Art Journal, Winter, 1993 by Raphael Rubinstein
Notes from two panels at the 92nd Street YM-YWHA, New York, on collaborations between poets and painters.
December 3, 1990. Panel: John Ashbery, Jane Freilicher, Kenneth Koch, and Larry Rivers. Moderator: Ron Padgett.
The auditorium is full. Ron Padgett (a poet who has also collaborated with artists, in particular Joe Brainard) explains that the format is for each participant to present his or her work, with a group discussion to follow. The evening starts with John Ashbery, who reads from Flow Chart, a long poem to be published in the spring. He prefaces his reading by saying that parallels between painting and poetry are "not relations that are really very important for me or my fellow painter." Instead, the relations and collaborations Ashbery has enjoyed with visual artists should be understood as simply "the latest manifestations of our tormented mutual urge."
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During the reading three phrases loom out from the Ashberian fog: "so the initial exuberance departed"; "hm, squirrel ragout again"; "the baby boomers who haven't left me in peace since I was thirty." You can look away from the peom for a while, as you can from a painting, and find it still there when you return. The poem has moved on, of course, but with Ashbery at the wheel, the scenery is perfectly interchangeable, or so it seems.
Jane Freilicher is next. She recalls how she met the others in the "dim dark days of the 1940s" and how they "worked side by side rather than in conjunction or collaboration." She stresses the importance of the Tibor de Nagy Gallery, which published early editions of Ashbery's Turnandot and Some Trees, and notes that in those days "the art world was a much more benign place." Remembers paying $11.35 for her studio in "what they now call Alphabet City." She says that she was influenced by Kenneth Koch in the title of her painting Man Girl Tree Dog and also that Koch suggested she name a series of empty landscapes "The Lost Golf Ball." As she talks, she shows slides of several of her paintings.
Kenneth Koch reads a poem in loose rhyming couplets called "Time Zone," after Apollinaire's "Zone." The autobiographical poem moves fluidly through the 1960s and 1950s, as Koch recalls events such as the multimedia performance Boston with Robert Rauschenberg, Niki de St. Phalle, and Jean Tinguely; he also mentions Nell Blaine and how for the young poet that he was, his "painter friends helped." John Bernard Myers makes an appearance, as does going to the Metropolitan Museum with Larry Rivers and Freilicher. Koch recalls Fairfield Porter and the scene at Cedar Tavern with Norman Bluhm, Ruth Kligman, Alex Katz, Willem de Kooning, and Robert Goodnough.
Rivers comes on next, a cross between Dennis Hopper and a Borscht Belt comedian. Says that he never did any kind of public service but "this [meaning his appearance tonight] might qualify." He thought it was supposed to be about collaboration (which it was), so he brought things from his "well-organized archive," but he now realizes that he could have just showed his own work (meaning as had done Freilicher). Observes how he put a naked boy in one illustration of a Kenneth Koch poem because at the time Koch was made nervous by homosexuality, "not that Kenneth had any doubts about his own sex" (said in a tone implying exactly the opposite) "but I just put it in to embarrass him." Recalls how he once did a portrait of John Ashbery on commission from the State Department in reaction to an earlier portrait by Alex Katz that made Ashbery look "like a lumberjack." Says he wanted to catch Ashbery's "handsome side," since he'd always found his friend "rather attractive, at least then." Points out that his transcription of an Ashbery poem in the background of the portrait was incredibly time-consuming; he had to write out some four thousand individual letters. "I don't think John ever realized what a labor of love this was."
After their individual presentations, the panelists attempt some kind of group discussion. They recall their early artistic yearnings. Ashbery says that as a teenager he wanted to be a painter, inspired chiefly by "pictures of ladies' dresses in magazines." He also admits that he was "excited by the idea of art supplies more than by the idea of art." Freilicher recalls declaiming Oscar Wilde's Salome to her mother behind a closed door at age ten. For his part, Rivers says that his and a cousin's greatest ambition was to be writers for nightclub comedians. (So, I wasn't so far off in thinking of the Borscht Belt.) Koch, on the other hand, wanted to be a comic-book artist, inventing a character named Nosy Nozart. Elucidating a scene from his poem, Koch recalls how, on his visit to the Metropolitan Museum with Freilicher and Rivers, Freilicher suddenly said "Wow!" in front of a painting. In that moment, Koch says, he "understood something about the painting." He adds that the "problem for the poet is that painters are always so busy, they have to sell everything they do." Rivers, speaking of his collaboration with Frank O'Hara, says: "We felt as if we were Matisse and Eluard, in that this would bring us great attention." "It did," adds someone else. For Koch, collaborating with an artist is "like having a muse in the room with you." He also thinks that "it is important to make things that there is only one copy of." Stressing the difference between the privacy of poetry and the public life of painting, he says: "You can't get dressed up and go to a poem." Thinking back to a collaboration with Rivers, he highlights the economic discrepancies by saying, "I don't think Larry ever told me how much it [the painting] really sold for." Freilicher says: "I don't think my work was changed so much as I found affinities in poets."
