course, because there was already a body of received opinion on the Gregory
elegy, beginning with Frank Kermode’s remarks in Romantic Image. The goal
was—and is—to participate in a discourse that, as Michel Foucault and, more
recently, Pierre Bourdieu have taught us, is nothing if not rule-bound.
For a decade or so, then, my goal was to make it in the world of Modern
Language Quarterly and ELH, American Literature and PMLA. When my es-
say “Spatial Form in Yeats’s Poetry” appeared in the last of these (it was my
¤rst and last article in PMLA), I was overjoyed to receive a note of praise
from the great Yeats and Joyce biographer-critic Richard Ellmann. “Thank
you,” he wrote me in a magisterial handwritten note, which I have preserved
for posterity, “for writing your article.” I felt that I had indeed found my
professional niche!
But then in 1975 I was asked, on the basis of a review essay on Frank
O’Hara’s Art Chronicles that I had written for The New Republic, to write a
book on O’Hara for George Braziller, a small but elite New York publishing
house that specialized in art books. The book that resulted marked a shift
in af¤liation. Not that I ever quite pleased the publisher, who wanted more
anecdotes and fewer footnotes, more biography and good gossip and less
assessment of O’Hara’s debt to French Surrealism. But in the course of writ-
ing Frank O’Hara: Poet among Painters (1977), I met the deceased poet’s sis-
ter, Maureen O’Hara Smith, and his editor, Donald Allen, as well as many
of O’Hara’s poet and painter friends, including John Ashbery, David Sha-
piro, Grace Hartigan, Larry Rivers, and Norman Bluhm. Some of these be-
came close friends, and through them I became af¤liated with the poetry/
art world of New York, although in a minor way. And I must confess that
this world seemed (at least at ¤rst) much more enjoyable and stimulating
than academe. Here people really loved poetry, although they couldn’t always
say why they loved a particular poem; more important: my new poet/artist
friends really cared—they thought poetry and painting made a difference: it
was their life, not just a way to get tenure. Best of all, they were not subject
(or so I thought!) to the institutional constraints that made life in the English
department seem so con¤ning. No curriculum planning or PhD oral com-
mittees, no tenure meetings or job candidate lunches in the faculty club!
My af¤liation with this world expanded when I wrote my next book, The
Poetics of Indeterminacy: Rimbaud to Cage (1981). I couldn’t, of course, have
conversations with Rimbaud or Ezra Pound or Gertrude Stein, but I came to
know Ashbery much better and met his younger friends, John Yau and David
Shapiro, Ann Lauterbach and Marjorie Welish. And I developed a strong
friendship with David Antin—the subject, along with John Cage, of the ¤nal
chapter of my book. David, who teaches at the University of California–San
260 Chapter 14