FTLGTP: Moving across town

Stop #9: St. Marks on the Bowery

During the late 1960s, the Beats began moving over to the East Village and began to mix with some of the new New York School poets who were spending time on the other side of town. The East Village was also where the poetry scene started mixing with a new music scene and the genre of early Punk was being formed.

One way in particular that the new poets congregating in the East Village differed from their predecessors in the West Village was the focus on performance and theatricality. According to John Mellilo in his essay, “Secret Locations in the Lower East Side: Downtown Poetics 1960-1980” for Lost New York, “meaning became a process that was literally worked out—in the air, in the community, on the actual page, on the body. A swirling interdisciplinarity defined this era in New York as artists rejected any and all stable boundaries” (60).

One of the most important places in the history of early punk and the poetry that influenced it, as well as an important performance space for this new interdisciplinarity that Melillo speaks of, was St. Mark’s Church on the Bowery, at 131 East 10^th Street. The Church started a Poetry Project, which continues today, that brought beats like Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs over from the west side, as well as up and coming poets, musicians, and other pop artists like Andy Warhol.

This is where Patti Smith debuted her mix of poetry and music in 1971 when she opened for Gerard Melanga. The performance was a turning point in the connection between poetry and rock n’ roll. She read and sang her poems while Lenny Kaye played guitar behind her. It was the first incarnation of what would eventually become Patti Smith’s first album, Horses, which was released in 1975.

Philip Shaw, in his book Horses, explains how her music was new and different:

The idea of performing poetry to musical accompaniment is nothing new; it began with the Beats in the 1950s and was carried over, via Ginsberg and Dylan to the counter culture in the mid-1960s. But two things…(were) different. To begin with Smith intends to sing as well as read, and the backing is not free-jazz sax, or languid bongos, but an overdriven crudely thrashed guitar (8).

The Church continues to be a place for experimentation with art, poetry, and music. Several other punk artists performed their poetry here as well including members of the band Television.

Up Next: Two Cigarette Butts

FTLGTP: “Monday Nothing…”

Stop #7: Cedar Tavern

Along the opposite side of the park from MacDougal runs University Place. Along University Place there was one bar in particular that was central for overlap of Beats and Folk artists. It was the Cedar Tavern, originally at 24 University Place. Cedar Tavern was also popular to the visual arts crowd during the time period. Regulars at Cedar Tavern included Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, members of The Fugs, and Bob Dylan.

One of the very first bands to mix folk and punk, The Fugs collaborated and borrowed much from the poets and other artists in the neighborhood including their name, which was borrowed from the pages of Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead. Daniel Kane describes this connection in his essay, “From poetry to punk in the East Village” also for the Cambridge Companion:

Links developed between poets and punk-folkies including the band The Fugs, and—combined with the interest among young musicians in poetry and poetics from Rimbaud and Baudelaire through to Allen Ginsberg, Berrigan, Waldman, and beyond—resulted in remarkable artistic cross fertilization. Ultimately, the move from poetry to punk suggests that the period under consideration provided a fascinating challenge to conventional understanding of what constitutes “high culture,” “low culture,” and the status of the lyric as static, page-bound text (190).

This collaboration is something we see throughout Greenwich Village in both the literary and the musical movements and it seems to be vital to the kinds of artistic creativity that was produced.

(Here’s a glimpse into the music of The Fugs:)

Stop #8: Andy Warhol’s Electric Circus

Andy Warhol was particularly involved in the move to mix different kinds of art during this time period. He became the manager for the Velvet Underground and rented out the Polish National Social Hall, which he turned into the Electric Circus at 23 St. Mark’s Place, and used it as a performance space for the Exploding Plastic Inevitable, which included the Velvet Underground and poet Gerard Melanga.

FTLGTP: Hanging Out in the Park/Recording on Eighth St

Stop #5: Washington Square Park

Walking up MacDougal Street, we enter Washington Square Park, which was and still is a meeting place for young and emerging artists of all sorts. In the 1950s, the Beats read their poetry out loud in the Park. In the 1960s, Folk artists began having weekly “songfests” in the Park on Sundays. Even now, there are bands regularly playing in the Park.

Stop #6: Electric Lady Studios

Up MacDougal to 8^th Street is Jimi Hendrix’s recording studio, Electric Lady Studio, at 52 West 8^th Street, which was built in 1970. It has featured a large and eclectic group of artists since it opened, but most notably to us, it was where Patti Smith recorded Horses in 1975, and where The Clash recorded Combat Rock in 1980, which featured Allen Ginsberg on “Ghetto Defendant.” The collaboration is a perfect example of the connections between literary culture and rock n’ roll.

Up Next: Art and Andy Warhol

FTLGTP: The House of a Poet

Stop #3: 75 1/2 Bedford Street

I mentioned Edna St. Vincent Millay in my last post about Chumley’s and just down the street at 75 ½ Bedford Street is a very small townhouse where Millay lived for several years. It is also one of the smallest townhouses in the city. It is only 9 1/2 feet wide, about half the width of a normal townhouse. It was originally a carriage lane.

Edna St. Vincent Millay was famous even before she got to the Village because of a dispute over a poetry prize, but her poetry was significant during the earlier bohemian movement because she presented a woman who was not sensitive but sexually driven. As Melissa Bradshaw points out in her essay “Performing Greenwich Village bohemianism” for the Cambridge Companion to the Literature of New York, “No one exemplified this spirit of daring New Womanhood, as sexually driven as any man and just as wary of entrapment, like the Village golden girl, Edna St. Vincent Millay” (153).

In many ways, she was a precursor to the more explicit questioning of sexuality and sexual norms that would come from the Village, through the Beat Poets with pieces like “Howl,” by Allen Ginsberg, The New York Dolls and their performances in Drag, and Patti Smith’s poetry and music which questioned gender and pushed its boundaries.

Millay was also able to capture the carefree attitude of the Village in her poem “Recuerdo,” “We were very tired, we were very merry–/We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry” (155). As Bradshaw points out, it argues doing something for fun is worthwhile, a common theme in the Village.

Up Next: Minetta Tavern and MacDougal Street