Women, the New York School, and Other True Abstractions

Nelson's revision of the New York School makes it not only more diverse but also more resistant of defining tropes. By showing how a motley collection of poets and artists defied the gendered conventions of both the aesthetic status quo and the so-called experimental Nelson restores the avant-garde to its raison d'etre: to lead us past orthodoxy to discovery. Modern PaintersNelson has produced the kind of boundary-busting scholarship perhaps most likely to push the field toward greater clarity concerning its parameters urgent questions and dramatis personae. American LiteratureAfter decades of listening (enthralled of course) to the knitted ribbon-dress observations of John Ashbery Frank OHara and James Schuyler nally the other serious ladies of the necessarily so-called New York SchoolJoan Mitchell Barbara Guest Bernadette Mayer Alice Notley and Eileen Mylesare invited to give their full-throated response. Smart as a whip and fun as an after-hours bar Maggie Nelson gets fresh with heretofore queerly ignored matters poetic aesthetic and feminist. Rearranging the schools classroom seating illuminating details all the while demonstrating how crucial not-caring is to care Nelson remaps the one flow of poetry. Let me be blunt: reading her bravura studys like spying Joan Jett taking Helen Vendler for a joyride. Bruce Hainley This is a terrific and necessary book. . . . Maggie Nelson charts new paths for work on the New York School and on postwar experimental writing and her book will be necessary reading for anyone working in the areait will reach poets and other writers visual artists and scholars interested in the New York School and in avant-garde or experimental work; it will reach readers interested in womens contributions to the arts urban culture and the history of New York City. Susan Rosenbaum University of Georgia author Professing Sincerity: Modern Lyric Poetry Commercial Culture and the Crisis in Reading So many times over the years Ive been asked Whats it like to be a woman in rock music? Its always been sort of a paralyzing questionto answer it is to give the question itself meaning. Maggie Nelson here opens it all up for examination with this incredibly timely and astute book. Kim Gordon of Sonic YouthMaggie Nelson is deft and revelatory in bringing sociological as well as psychological stylistic and political insights to bear on her title terms women and the New York School. She lays bare an obscured history performs imaginative and incisive readings of careers as well as books and poems and foots her way with exciting skill through the overlapping minefields of professional national and sexual politics. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick author A Dialogue on Love