New York School Collaborations: The Color of Vowels 2013th Edition

“Starting with the pioneering first editions put out by the Tibor de Nagy Gallery in the early 1950s, New York School poets and artists have been notable for their avant-garde collaboration and aesthetic cross-pollination. Surveying the plays, films, musical scores, poem-paintings, comic poems, and co-written books issued during the New York School heyday, Silverberg’s wide-ranging essay collection exposes the risks, rivalries, and erotics that propelled talented writers and artists to explore exciting heights beyond the reach of lyric subjectivity.” – Timothy Gray, Professor of English, College of Staten Island, CUNY, USA

“This well-conceived collection brings overdue attention to an often-mentioned but under-examined feature of the New York School of poetry: the practice of collaboration, both between poets and across art-forms. Exploring a set of diverse and fresh examples, these wide-ranging, insightful essays approach collaboration from an exciting array of angles: they chart its roots in the historical avant-garde, analyze its challenge to individual genius and examine its strange brew of competition and camaraderie, discuss its role in community-formation, consider its erotic dimensions, and contrast male collaborations with works jointly produced by women. This valuable anthology demonstrates that the New York School collaboration is no mere coterie game or historical footnote: it is a ground-breaking and influential aesthetic phenomenon that forces us to rethink the nature of authorship, creativity, and the dialogue between the arts in twentieth-century American literature and culture.” – Andrew Epstein, Associate Professor of English, Florida State University, USA