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Tony Towle’s Memoir 1960–63 (Cambridge, MA: Faux Press, 2001) is a slice of autobiography discussing a time many are increasingly curious about. Begun in May 2000 and finished the day before 9/11, it describes the beginning of Towle’s career as a poet in New York City in his early twenties in the early ’60s, and is filled with an array of characters and places that influenced his work. In these few years he meets New York School
figures such as John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara, Frank Lima, Barbara Guest,
David Shapiro, Ted Berrigan, Kenneth Koch, James Schuyler, Leroi Jones, Ron
Padgett and many other poets and artists. We are given insight into
Towle’s formative years, his discovery of Eliot’s
The Waste Land
and Other Poems, and his revelation of
what was being done and could be done, on first reading Don Allen’s
anthology New American Poetry,
1945–1960.
The mix of anxiety and humor here is seductive,
and the whirring difficulties of keeping afloat emotionally, romantically and
financially lead the author to many quite hilarious episodes, not least of which
is a thwarted trip to Mexico where he ends up working as an extra in Stanley
Kramer’s It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad
World. We also find him crying in California, not from emotion, but
pollution, and later, back in Manhattan, drinking bourbon (‘the house
drink’) with Frank O’Hara in the poet’s apartment whilst
discussing and listening to Prokofiev at high volume. O’Hara’s
friendship, generosity and encouragement resonate throughout the book, and he
was instrumental in making Towle think seriously of himself as a poet.
Another moment of quintessential early ’60s New York occurs
when Towle, along with some other participants at the New York City
Writer’s Conference, gets invited by Gerard Malanga to an artist’s
studio in a converted firehouse — according to Malanga the artist ‘was
going to become famous.’ The following year at the Stable Gallery that
artist first exhibited his Brillo Boxes.
The beauty of this memoir is
that what we think of as history becomes, for 90 pages, incredibly alive, and
the book is a tribute to the substantial power of memory. Significantly,
there’s an almost tremoring sense of an epoch about to change forever,
with the assassination of JFK and the looming war in Vietnam. And the transition
from the alcohol-fueled, Abstract Expressionist ’50s to the psychedelic,
Pop ’60s is there with the symbolic closure of the original Cedar Bar and
its irascible but heart-felt scene, and the subsequent opening of Max’s
Kansas City.
With an erudite calmness, however, Towle always points
us back toward the task of writing poetry, and as such the book is an intimate
portrait of a young poet finding his singular tone in New York City. Late in
1963, Towle started experimenting with a 'pop collage' style, a theme that
seemed to be in the air at the time, both with poets such as Ted Berrigan and
Ron Padgett, and artists such as Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, and James
Rosenquist, among others, although these painters did not become well-known
until the next year, at which time the term ‘Pop Art’ came in. A
non-gentrified East Village is evoked as a kind of experimental open space,
where parties and apartments, transformed by the occupants’ involvement
with art, become settings for expectation and surprise.
Towle’s most recent publication is a limited edition entitled
Nine Immaterial Nocturnes (New York:
Barretta Books, 2003). As suggested by the title, these poems transport the
reader to a dream-like zone — slippages of consciousness and time-travel are
embroidered with a cartoon-lightness and paranoiac sub-texts. The New York
School street vernacular, a conversational language that was lived, and its
coupling of high and low, is here extended toward a highly personalized domain
of structural overlays. When reading these often bizarrely funny works one
sometimes has the feeling of ideas deliriously circumnavigating themselves in
order to arrive at their own particular hearts of darkness. These poems are like
channeling devices for an earth about to talk, a ventriloquist’s baroque
of cities under stress, embarrassment, love, or a degraded fanciness reinvested,
popping up anywhere like Martin Kippenberger’s
METRO-Net illusional subway entrances.
Equally so, they promise us a journey somewhere bedazzling, a
schizo-train of thought, overloaded and turned inside-out, high-flung
hallucinations that they are, ghosting the Capital now that the century has
ended.
Hudson and Worth
As the car alarms
disconcertingly
respond to each other’s pitch
I look down the
former Anthony Street,
a former Anthony myself, where the moon
is full
on the ears of Leon the donkey
and the hibiscus tree remains
untamed
but picturesque and leaning a little forward
as if to peek
between the curtains to the asphalt below
where a diagram of the 1943
Battle of Kursk has been laid out
in myriad notations of red and
orange.
Notice the arrows near the parking lot. They
are
Rossokovsky’s T-34’s, which will pierce the German salient.
At
sunrise, faculty from the military college
will utilize jackhammers to
simulate the clamor of battle
and trace the route of the attack. We
ruminate in our bunkers
until the lesson is complete.
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