The collective portrait here is of a startlingly visceral New York, where physical squalor contributes to a pervasive sense of strangeness, captured in Laurie Anderson's "Words in Reverse": "I went to the movies and I saw a dog 30 feet high. One series reads "LASt Nt ON A BLACK ROAD I tOLD tHEM MY COUSINS WOULD CAtCH FIREFLIES SMASH tHEM & SMEAR tHEIR LIGHt ON OUR FACES." But the effect is partly lost in transcription. Each letter is separated from the others as if imprisoned, evoking both the density and the loneliness of the city, and challenging the reader to make "sense" of the lapidary inscriptions. Poems of delicate lyricism trapped in crossword grids. There are surprises, too - like Holly Anderson, who writes haiku-like prose. Much of the strongest work here is from the best-known writers, including Acker, Bogosian, Spalding Gray, Mary Gaitskill, Tama Janowitz, Dennis Cooper and David Wojnarowicz, who stand out amid some of the less interesting attitudinal posturing. It gathers poems, excerpts and short stories as well as handmade magazine covers, pamphlets and posters that capture the collaborative, on-the-fly spirit of the period. More than one writer took Rimbaud as an intellectual model, inspired by his fluid sexual identity and his pursuit of a total "derangement of the senses." The fiction writers explored new narrative techniques, applying avant-garde pressures to the conventions of storytelling in the hopes of creating a new sense of connection between reader and author. As Stosuy aptly puts it, the term "refers variously to an agglomeration of noncommercial literary and not-so-literary prose, poetry, guerrilla journalism and undefined hybrids that emerged in the mid-1970s" and were published in "homegrown periodicals, newsprint weeklies, Xeroxed zines, semigloss monthlies and small presses in New York City more or less below 14th Street."įormally, Downtown literature was characterized by a do-it-yourself ethos thematically, by a distaste for commercialism ("terror is released in Lower Manhattan / and the terrorists neither carry guns / nor subvert the state / but simply buy it off with. It was, however, far grittier and less optimistic.Īnd it was less a single group of writers than a sprawling collection of sub-scenes. The writing that took shape emerged out of the colliding energies of the Beats and second-wave New York School poets like Ted Berrigan and Anne Waldman. The Downtown literature represented in this anthology is intimately bound up with that Manhattan - infused with the energy and violence of a city where blackouts and social protests were routine, the East Village was still filled with tenements, and the subway was covered with graffiti. What does "Downtown" really mean? It's easy to forget now, but in the 1970s there were twice as many murders and robberies in New York City as today. "Though much of it is out of print and difficult to locate, Downtown writing has never been more relevant," Stosuy claims. Taken together, according to Brandon Stosuy, the editor of "Up Is Up, But So Is Down: New York's Downtown Literary Scene, 1974-1992," this activity represents the birth of an underground literary movement that was just as vibrant as the musical revolution taking place. Mark's Church, the monologuist Eric Bogosian was giving his first solo performance. Around the time Patti Smith was recording her debut album, "Horses," the cultural provocateur Kathy Acker was mailing acquaintances mimeographed stories that juxtaposed violence and vulnerability under the name "the Black Tarantula." The writer and performer Constance DeJong was creating multimedia works with Philip Glass. But a lively literary movement was taking place, though it has received considerably less attention. When people talk about the explosion of art in New York in the 1970s and '80s, they usually mean the Ramones and Television and punk rock, or Jean-Michel Basquiat and the downtown arts scene.
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