American
Literature 81.3 (September 2009): 615-617
(Review of Beautiful Enemies and Ivy Schweitzer's
Perfecting Friendship).
Reviewed by Betsy
Klimasmith.
Although Epstein spends some time explaining the complex personal
relationships among the poets, their poetry is at the center
of this study, and Epstein’s readings throughout are clear
and nuanced … evocatively weaving together the poets’
lives, letters, and poetry … Persuasively argued and beautifully
written … a model for how friendship and literature may
usefully illuminate one another.
Parkett
84 (2009)
"Is
Art Criticism Fifty Years Behind Poetry?"
by Charles
Bernstein
(Review of Lytle Shaw's Frank O'Hara: The Poetics of Coterie
that also discusses my book)
Still, no discussion of coterie can completely free itself
from the negative connotations of clique and scene. For best
effect, the first chapters of Shaw’s book should be read
beside Andrew Epstein’s Beautiful Enemies: Friendship
and Postwar American Poetry. Epstein offers exemplary Emersonian
readings of the intricate web connecting individual talent and
collective investment in the poetry and poetics of John Ashbery,
Amiri Baraka, and O’Hara. Averting the Cold War myth of
the individual voice in the wilderness of conformity, Epstein
gives us voices in conversation and conflict, suggesting that
resistance to agreement is at the heart of a pragmatist understanding
of literary community.
* * * * * *
Twentieth
Century Literature 54.2 (Summer 2008): 263-72
"Selected Affinities"
(Review essay that discusses Beautiful Enemies
alongside the new Selected Poems of Frank O'Hara,
edited by Mark Ford).
Reviewed by Terence
Diggory.
* * * * * *
Poetry
(July/August 2008): 396-408.
“The
Soul Grown Refined”
(Review essay about Beautiful Enemies, The Friendship:
Wordsworth and Coleridge, by Adam Sisman, and A Blue
Hand: The Beats in India, by Deborah Baker).
Reviewed by Vivian
Gornick.
* * * * * *
Isola di Rifiuti
(June-July 2008)
On the poet John Latta's blog, there has been a multi-part
discussion between Latta, the poet Tony
Towle, and myself about my attribution of the unpublished
poem "Finding LeRoi a Lawyer" to Frank O'Hara. To
see this discussion, see here,
here,
and here.
* * * * * *
Contemporary
Literature 49.1 (Spring 2008): 151-158.
“‘Between
the Poet and the Person’: Dilemmas of Friendship in Contemporary
Poetry.” (Review of Beautiful Enemies).
Reviewed by Libbie
Rifkin.
... a fascinating reading of the artistically generative conflicts
between self and friendship in O'Hara's life and work... Bracingly
corrective and inspiring ... Sharply faceted readings set in
motion a feeling of kaleidoscopic possibility, of shifting scholarly
configurations yet to be explored...
Although it is not the first recent work to explore the connections
between pragmatism and postwar American poetry, Epstein's book
does so with the combination of intellectual lucidity and psychological
affinity that, one imagines, helps to inspire the relationship
between philosophy and art—and philosophers and artists—to
begin with...
Beautiful Enemies takes an elegant next step [from
previous criticism] … Epstein's approach is at once more
historical and more immanent…
Epstein is uniquely alive to the tensions legible in these
poetic continuations of friendship, and this attentiveness,
along with his assiduous scholarship, yields results that should
change the way the works, their creators, and their milieu are
viewed...
His analysis of the impact on avant-garde poets of discussions
about conformity and "the crisis of the individual"
in publications as varied as Life and Commentary
and in best-selling books such as David Riesman's Lonely
Crowd is smart and persuasive...
The chapter on Emersonian and post-Emersonian pragmatism is
a richly documented and convincing argument for the relevance
of that school of thought beyond modernism and into the postwar
period. In fact, Epstein's illumination of pragmatist antifoundationalism
and its commitment to mobile relations between individual and
community suggests that it could be an abundant resource for
the continued conceptualizing of these issues as they play out
in global networks of cultural production...
Beautiful Enemies gives us a social, historical, and
artistically reverberative context in which to evaluate these
sorts of decisions—and a heightened recognition that they
are never made alone.
* * * * * *
Zen Monster
1.1 (Winter 2008).
“Circle of Friends”
(Review of Beautiful Enemies and Frank O'Hara:
The Poetics of Coterie by Lytle Shaw).
Reviewed by Timothy
Gray.
Two recently released books contribute fresh, theoretically-informed
analyses of O’Hara’s social genius … [Epstein
and Shaw] are experimental poets as well as literary critics.
Their appreciation of the New York School is nuanced and multifaceted
… [they offer] riveting narratives about a dynamic literary
community...
Andrew Epstein’s marvelous book, Beautiful Enemies,
takes the conundrum of literary friendship to a whole new level…
[the argument] is full of ironic twists and intrigue. Literary
scholars have been sniffing around this terrain for years, but
no one has written so thoroughly, or so lucidly, about the contested
nature of friendship in avant-garde circles as Epstein as...
Epstein’s discussion of O’Hara’s ongoing
‘sibling rivalry’ with Ashbery (interestingly, both
poets were fans of the film East of Eden) hints at the friction
many critics have tended to smooth over. Even more fascinating,
from my viewpoint, is Epstein’s chronicle of the O’Hara-Baraka
friendship, for I believe it provides one of the most intimate
looks yet at the racial politics of the New York School. In
Epstein’s insightful and well-written book, the two chapters
on Baraka are worth the price of admission...
Academic books do no usually attract large audiences, but these
two studies deserve wide readership, particularly among folks
who share a love of New York City art and literature, and who
form friendships based on that love.
* * * * * *
Criticism
(Spring 2007, Vol. 47.2)
“Frank O’Hara and
the Turn to Friendship” (review of Beautiful Enemies:
Friendship and Postwar American Poetry and Lytle Shaw’s
Frank O’Hara: The Poetics of Coterie)
Reviewed by Benjamin
Lee
Epstein’s elegant book … offers a subtle and meticulously
researched account of the literary, personal, and philosophical
dynamics of the New York School, and of O’Hara, John Ashbery,
and Amiri Baraka in particular….
It is during his final meditations on the extended poetic and
intertextual dialogue between Ashbery and O’Hara (the
two poets share the final chapter and long stretches of the
conclusion) that Epstein’s book uncovers most poignantly
the thematics and paradoxes of friendship among rivals.
His nuanced and often illuminating accounts of poems and prose
by Ashbery, Baraka, and O’Hara remain deeply invested
in destabilizing the notion of avant-garde as collaboration
and replacing it with a portrait of experimental artists who
are socially situated, and even affiliated with radical communities,
and yet never wholly committed to avant-gardism as a collective
endeavor.
Both Epstein and Shaw offer us the pleasures of their own timeliness
and intelligence. Both exhibit a shrewd sense of the new directions
O’Hara criticism might take in the years to come (an expanded
sense of O’Hara’s dialogue with pragmatism, for
instance, or of his work as an art critic or his Cold War–era
fascination with Russian literature), and both offer compelling
new readings of individual poems. I plan to return in particular
to Shaw’s readings of O’Hara’s “Cornkind”
and “In Memory of My Feelings,” and to Epstein’s
reading of O’Hara’s “Joe’s Jacket’s”
and his quite unforgettable take on Ashbery’s “Street
Musicians.” These books should quickly find their place
in an expanding field of O’Hara criticism, adding depth
and detail to discussions of the New York School’s cultural
force and its deft imagination of a whole range of individual
and collective—indeed, of collaborative— freedoms.
As for O’Hara, whose poems remain so powerfully public
and private, depressed and ambitious, solitary, utopically expansive,
and just plain entertaining, he will no doubt continue enjoying
his moment in the sun.
* * * * * *
New
Yorker (April 7, 2008)
"Fast
Company: The world of Frank O'Hara" (review of Frank
O'Hara's Selected Poems)
Reviewed by Dan
Chiasson.
The best-known poems in Ford’s edition—“The
Day Lady Died,” “Personal Poem,” “Ave
Maria,” “A Step Away from Them,” “Having
a Coke with You”—feel like attempts to make a built-to-last
social world founded upon friendship. (Andrew Epstein’s
excellent study “Beautiful Enemies” makes this point.)
* * * * * *
Rain
Taxi Review of Books (Winter
2007-2008)
Reviewed by Elizabeth
Robinson
Andrew Epstein’s Beautiful Enemies offers
a study of friendship and postwar American poetry by focusing
on three poets, Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, and Amiri
Baraka.... This scholarly book is likely to be read by practicing
poets; it speaks to issues that are familiar and perplexing
to all such practitioners. How does one preserve one’s
distinctiveness and elasticity as a writer while also making
meaningful connections with peers whose own efforts can provide
useful provocation and inspiration? At its best, Beautiful
Enemies delves into the messy world of friendships without
diminishing their complexity, ambivalence, or pleasures ...
his depiction of the Baraka-O’Hara friendship is lively
and revealing. Whether or not Baraka and O’Hara were ever
lovers, their intimacy clearly galvanized strong writing from
both. Epstein’s chapter on Baraka’s break with his
mostly white, middle-class, apolitical (and frequently gay)
writing community is revelatory and often wrenching to read,
evoking as it does the painful self-division that Baraka experienced.
Epstein is sharply critical of Baraka’s later homophobic
and anti-semitic remarks, yet he attends to the ambivalence
of Baraka’s early work with considerable sympathy and
admiration. About Baraka’s play, The Toilet,
he notes that it is “powerful because of its author’s
confusion and ambivalence.”
... The temptation to extrapolate from Epstein’s
study and apply it to contemporary communities of writers is
irresistible—and this is entirely pertinent to the project
of Beautiful Enemies. When Epstein addresses the problem
of “how to avoid appropriation, how to ward off absorption
by groups, institutions, and other forces that might reduce
one’s ability to change, move, or create freely, while
at the same time navigating and feeding off of literary communities
and friendships,” his description is hauntingly trans-historical:
he seems to be talking about you and me.
* * * * *
Beat
Scene 54 (Autumn 2007)
Reviewed by Eric Jacobs.
Andrew Epstein's Beautiful Enemies, a
title lifted from an essay by Ralph Waldo Emerson, is both immensely
readable and enjoyable, despite the weightiness it carries with
it ...
The stereotypical image of the poet is a solitary
figure, creating in a lonely state of isolation -- of course
that is a romantic vision and there is some basis in that stereotype.
Yet Epstein argues that creativity is also sparked by the friction
and inspiration that comes with friendship. Not just poems from
bonding, but poems that spring from antagonism, the competitiveness
that often runs in tandem with friendship ...On initial reading
Beautiful Enemies unfolds almost like a poetic family
tree, as Epstein examines Existentialism, Pragmatism, Emerson,
James, William Carlos Williams, Abstract Expressionism, the
impact of The New American Poetry edited by Don Allen, bebop,
the notion of a "New York School" of poetry, did a
unified group of such poets ever truly exist? The Cold War,
Charles Olson, Black Mountain and so on; I've missed some vital
components out here, the listing is bewilderingly comprehensive
as Epstein tries to establish where this trio of Ashbery, O'Hara,
and Baraka work best -- is it part of a cohesive group or as
lone figures? There are no clean cut answers to the questions
posed by Epstein ...
... The notion of a family tree of poets is a
powerful motif running through the book. Whether or not poets
are best working in that solitary air or fired by the crossfire
of companionship, the collision of friendships, the jury is
out and yet this book is about a vaster plane of ideas around
that core. And a page pondering on the contents is simply doing
it a disservice.
The
Poetry Project Newsletter (April-June
2007) (excerpts)
Reviewed by K. Silem
Mohammad
A new trend in academic criticism – almost a sub-genre
has arisen in the past few years: studies of modernist and postmodernist
poetry with an emphasis on issues of community and innovation
that are of immediate relevance to practicing writers. Juliana
Spahr’s Everybody’s Autonomy, Michael Magee’s
Emancipating Pragmatism, Lytle Shaw’s Frank O’Hara:
The Poetics of Coterie, and similar recent university press
books by younger poet-critics perform a double duty: they contribute
to the literary-historical scholarship around individual artists
and formations, and they serve as sounding boards for ideas
about factors that directly affect contemporary poetics. What
these books generally share is a sense of having been written
out of a motivated interest in the ways that narrative genealogies
built around charismatic individuals and movements shape our
own activities as poets, for good or bad.
Andrew Epstein’s Beautiful Enemies: Friendship and
Postwar American Poetry covers some of the same ground
and treats some of the same central figures as the above-mentioned
volumes. He divides his attention equally between Frank O’Hara,
Amiri Baraka, and John Ashbery – a grouping that is itself
illustrative of Epstein’s desire to “complicate
stable, reductive definitions of phenomena like ‘The New
York School’ and to suggest that literary history must
attend to the messy contours of actual poetic communities and
friendships” (12)
… the reader comes away with an enriched appreciation
for the work of the poets and a heightened understanding of
their particular dynamics. Epstein’s close readings of
individual poems are sharp and trenchant … Most engaging
of all are the sections in which Epstein explores the poets’
intertextual and collaborative processes in depth, especially
when he cites unpublished documents such as a wonderful letter-poem
to Kenneth Koch co-written by Ashbery and O’Hara, which
he reprints in full.
* * * * * *
Choice
(May 2007)
Reviewed by R. T. Prus, Southeastern Oklahoma
State University
Richard Poirier (Poetry and Pragmatism),
Joseph Riddel (Purloined Letters), and Jonathan Levin
(The Poetics of Transition), among others, established
the Emersonian influence in modernist poetry and poststructuralist
thought. Epstein (Florida State Univ.) extends Emersonian pragmatism
to the work of Frank O'Hara, John Ashbery, and the early Amiri
Baraka (before he established his "black arts" positions).
The author grounds his theoretical framework in Jacques Derrida's
Politics of Friendship, which echoes Emerson's essay
"Friendship," to examine how the lives and work of
the three poets make them "beautiful enemies" (the
phrase is from Emerson). Between Emerson and Derrida lies the
philosophical pragmatism of William James and John Dewey, and
Epstein situates these philosophical underpinnings within the
context of post-WW II cultural conformity and homophobia. Epstein
offers superb close readings of individual works as they relate
to the biographical, philosophical, and cultural background
of the three poets. This is an enlightened and enlightening
study of O'Hara, Ashbery, and Baraka in particular and of postmodern
poetries in general. Summing Up: Highly recommended.
Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.
* * * * * *
Publishers Weekly
The premise is simple – John Ashbery and Frank O'Hara
were frenemies, as were O'Hara and LeRoi Jones (now Amiri Baraka)
– but Florida State University assistant professor Epstein
handles it with such care and intelligence, that his study ends
up revealing a great deal about the American midcentury avant-garde.
For those in the know, the above two friendships won't be news,
but never before have they been presented in such painstaking
detail, backed by a wealth of letters and readings of the poets'
verse that are patient in the explication, and in their refusal
to draw easy conclusions about the nature of the relationships
under discussion. Two opening chapters offer an introduction
to the avant-garde as it functioned in American culture, and
to its Emersonian origins, followed by individual chapters considering
each of the three poets (with close references to the other
two, and to many other poets and artists), and a final summation
of the many paradoxes and contradictions encountered therein.
Anyone with an interest in the ways great poetry depends on
complex and extraordinary relationships will find this book
deeply rewarding.
* * * * * *
Amazon review, by poet
and critic Kevin
Killian (5 stars), February 16, 2007
I've got so many opinions about BEAUTIFUL ENEMIES
that I will be misquoting its author for years, arguing about
its contentions, red-faced, drunken, at parties and conferences,
watching with immense satisfaction as its truths eventually
percolate through the strong soil of O'Hara criticism. Andrew
Epstein, himself an accomplished poet, wades into deep waters
with his study of the friendships between O'Hara and Ashbery
and between Baraka and O'Hara. I was enthralled throughout the
entire book and think you might be too. Even the notes are beautifully
written, compact, thorough, yet with Epsteinian touches of wit
and esprit.
A contrarian, even controversialist bent animates
Epstein here, and if you come away from BEAUTIFUL ENEMIES feeling
your head is about to explode, don't say I didn't warn you.
Seems that everything (well, all the obvious things) that we
had ever been taught about the three poets were wrong, even
the most basic of our assumptions. You thought Frank O'Hara
the apostle of friendship and community? Wrong. Through a clever
and conscientious use of letters, diaries, contemporary news
items, interview material, and most of all through recourse
to the poems themselves (including some "new" material
that, for the most part, is wholly surprising and convincing),
Epstein is able to shove O'Hara more towards the Jack Spicer
school of contentious grump whose ideas of friendship included
competition, division, testing, and a free floating anxiety
that manifests itself in unusual verbal tactics. "I hope,"
he writes, "to provide a corrective here to the usual sense
that Frank O'Hara is a poet of `sociability' whose work simply
`celebrates' his friends and his coterie.' It's not just rhetoric,
there's a genuinely original vision of O'Hara here that complicates
the work immeasurably and makes him not so annoying--not that
I ever really found him annoying, but thinking about the old,
"received" version of O'Hara, the sunny Tom Hanks
of poetry who's everybody's favorite pet, just makes my blood
run cold. I like the new guy, and he's sexier to boot!
If you thought Ashbery cold or silent about the
human condition, a la Mark Halliday, surprise, for Epstein reads
Ashbery (particularly in THE DOUBLE DREAM OF SPRING, the book
he wrote after O'Hara's death) as a poet very much concerned
with personal relationships, particularly friendship and its
ups and downs. The material here is thinner on the ground, but
I suppose it's possible, and Epstein has won so much goodwill
from his previous reading I could forgive him nearly anything.
Plus he has unearthed a beautiful, witty, tender, collaborative
poem written in alternate couplets by FO'H and JA that illustrates
perfectly--as though fabricated for the occasion--how friendship
is always a bag mixed to brimming with competition, adoration,
a Wayne Koestenbaum sort of erotics, and a perfect period panache.
(Maybe this balances out another undocumented poem by O'Hara
that Epstein found in Kenneth Koch's papers, "Finding Leroi
a Lawyer," which some may champion but others will find
the singlemost dumbest poem O'Hara ever put to paper.)
If you thought, following all previous Baraka
scholars, that Baraka's "Beat" period was but a inconsequential
and negligible phase of what Epstein calls a "conversion
narrative," then you are missing out on some intensely
great work; Epstein reverses conventional thinking here, or
comes close to it, by plumping for the early work (written before
Malcolm's assassination in February 1965) as far superior to
the later Black Arts poetry and, perhaps, as politically committed.
In each case, Epstein just patiently plays his cards until what
seemed shocking or just startling for its own sake, when one
began reading the chapter, seems by the end of it a perfectly
reasoned, exquisitely marshaled argument. Were O'Hara and Baraka
romantically involved, perhaps sexually involved? Here Epstein
wades right in where angels fear to tread, following the leads
provided in Brad Gooch's criminally underrated biography of
O'Hara, CITY POET. It does seem as though the older, white,
homosexual man, sometimes generous, sometimes threatening, always
alluring, who pops up through much of Baraka's early prose,
poetry and drama must have worn O'Hara's face at least occasionally.
Baraka's supposed to appear at City Lights on Monday, I'll have
to go and ask him what he thinks of BEAUTIFUL ENEMIES and his
new avatar as sort of the Billy Strayhorn of the New American
Poetry.
All in all, a groundbreaking and even better,
a gorgeously written and thought out book. Hooray for Andrew
Epstein! Some caveats, I don't 100% buy this new John Ashbery,
our greatest poet of love and friendship. No way. Well, maybe
a little way. And also I OD'd a bit on how without Emersonian
pragmatism nothing important would ever have been thought, written
or said. And I grimace when I see Epstein replaying Michael
Davidson's effective, yet rhetorical vision of the Spicer circle
as a hellish hotbed of gay homophobia and "exclusion,"
in order for him, Epstein, to say, "but our fellows didn't
go that far." So there was no exclusion in the New York
circles of O'Hara and Ashbery? Uh-hunh, and I'm Tallulah Bankhead.
* * * * * *
Jonathan Mayhew, on Bemsha
Swing (6/13/07, blog posting):
I have been reading Andrew Epstein's Beautiful
Enemies on friendship in postwar American poetry. It's
really very perceptive on O'Hara. I haven't read much of the
book yet but I've already found a few quotes I'm going to appropriate
(I mean quote with proper attribution) in the book I am writing.
It always helps to have some really well-written quotes that
make your point for you. Not your main point, but one that you
need to make along the way. In this case, a very good summary
of O"Hara plurality of selves. It's one of those books
with quotable ideas on every page.
I noticed Kevin Killian has a mightily perceptive
review at Amazon.com of this book, up already. Kevin has single-handedly
converted Amazon into a serious venue for criticism.
Like Kevin, I am less interested in the American
pragmatist and Emersonian angles. Perhaps not being an Americanist
I don't care as much about tracing everything back to Emerson
and Wiliam James. Isn't that the déformation professionelle
of the Americanists? Not that it isn't a valid critical path
to explore. There is a lot of Emerson in Ashbery, and a lot
of Emersonian self-fashioning in O'Hara.
It also looks like it's going to be perceptive
on Baraka/Jones.
* * * * * *
John Latta, on Isola
di Rifiuti (8/13/07-8/21/07, several blog postings). Excerpt:
Beautiful Enemies is “cleanly writ
and musters together a fine compendium of material to bounce
against in considering, oh, how people in self-proclaim’d
hoity-toit groupuscules (and they tender adversaries) behave
today. (That’s not exactly the book’s intent—it
is doing a historical job, considering the ties and rifts in
a number of writing relationships, O’Hara’s with
Ashbery’s, O’Hara’s with Baraka’s, Baraka’s
with the New York School, and, largely, how the individual talent
does commerce with the social realms as they manifest themselves
in writing communities, self-conscious or not).” He focuses
on “the marked ambivalence of the New York School “players”
about working jointly—and he reads and reveals superbly
some of the competitive tension-undertows that roil some of
the collaborations.
[…] The other thing that struck me in reading
Beautiful Enemies: how pervasive the “splatter’d
self”’s become. It’s getting found everywhere,
its lineage traced back and back. Epstein writes a terrific
summary of how the Cold War culture of containment and conformity
led to oppositional strategies: “To counter the tremendous
emphasis placed on stabilizing and containing unruly energies,
participants in the avant-garde devoted themselves to values
diametrically opposed to containment: motion, disorder, flux,
speed, change, and action.” And, too, how, under the repressive
post-war political and cultural forces—what Baraka, in
The System of Dante’s Hell calls “the torture
of being the unseen object, and the constantly observed subject”—the
concept of identity shifts to become a malleable, protean, camp
thing, a no-identity, temporal, performative, slippery. It’s
a persuasive reading.
What concerns me, though, is how that notion of
identity’s become doxology now; a half-century along,
we all lack a reify’d sense of identity, any essence,
we all move to survive. Which makes us both hard to hit, empty
targets, indestructible, and perfectly ineffectual, hydra-head’d,
of no concern to the State, representing nothing, without danger,
ciphers and codes, not worth the cracking. Nuts. A nation of
nuts, acceptable (no need in the ’thousands for containment,
even the outlawry is in containable lock-step with the aping
masses aspiring behind), non-threatening.
