Burt Kimmelman
Introduction
George Quasha’s presence in the life and work of a great many poets, artists, musicians and filmmakers is most remarkable. And so nearly a dozen critical appreciations of his achievements in the arts have been assembled here. Written by luminaries in their own right, they are meant to broaden awareness of Quasha’s unique contributions in a number of fields of endeavor. George and Susan Quasha (a marvelous artist herself) have been mainstays in a community located close enough to New York City to be an instrumental force in the city’s artistic and intellectual goings on, yet far enough north of the city to have developed a collective character and outlook that may owe something to the bucolic experience possible there. The Quashas put down roots, specifically in Barrytown, New York, having already become a part of the avant garde that was taking shape during the 1960s and ‘70s in the city and its environs.
George Quasha was born in White Plains, New York in 1942, and from age three to seventeen he lived in Miami, Florida. Already a musician, he was reading Nietzsche, Thoreau and Eliot at fourteen, and won the Florida State debate championship at fifteen. Connected to his debate activities, while starting college at the University of Miami the following year, he won a scholarship to the then new and unprecedented International School of America. This award took him and sixteen other high school graduates around the world. They lived with local families in thirteen countries over nine months, accompanied by five university faculty including Edgar Snow and artist Emerson Burkhart. Their curriculum included audiences with the likes of Eleanor Roosevelt, I.F. Stone, Jawaharlal Nehru, Rajendra Prasad, and Willie Brandt.
Following that school year, Quasha spent the summer in Paris learning French. He subsequently attended Ohio State (studying poetry with Milton Kessler, German with Sigurd Burckhardt, and philosophy with Morris Weitz), then enrolling in Mexico City College (where he concentrated in Spanish, anthropology, and geology) before going on to the Sorbonne (in order to study French language and literature). At twenty-one, he finished college as an English major at NYU.
Living in the East Village, while attending NYU across town, Quasha frequented the legendary readings at Café Le Métro, and struck up friendships with Jerome Rothenberg, Paul Blackburn, Jackson Mac Low, Diane di Prima, David Antin, Ed Sanders, Carol Bergé, Diane Wakoski, Harold Dicker, Allen Ginsberg, and others working at the forefront of experimental poetry. He began graduate school at NYU (where he was befriended by Anais Nin), studying at length with M. L. Rosenthal (in whose poetry theory seminars he began reading Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan and others, thanks to a presentation in the course by David Antin).
Quasha became a teaching assistant and the editor of what was then the new Washington Square Review, while taking up Anglo-Saxon, Middle English, the Metaphysical poets, and Blake (the latter under David Erdman—later to be his mentor, colleague and editor—as well as Conner Cruise O’Brien and George Steiner). With his M.A. degree, he became a full-time instructor at SUNY Stony Brook where he taught courses in experimental poetry, Pound, and Blake, in the meantime working toward a Ph.D.
He lived abroad during summers, mostly in Paris and London, and began to make recordings of poets and writers who were in Europe, including members of the Tel Quel group, Marie Jolas (widow of Eugene Jolas and translator of Bachelard’s Poetics of Space), and David Jones; he spent most of a day in intense conversation with Beckett in his home. Inspired by Blackburn’s heroic tape-recording project in those days, he began recording poets in audio and video, and has continued to do so ever since. Indeed, over the past fourteen years he has filmed more than a thousand poets, artists and musicians in eleven countries for his monumental video art work, art is/poetry is/music is (Speaking Portraits). (This effort was supported in part by a Guggenheim Fellowship he won in 2006.)
During Quasha’s Stony Brook years he took the opportunity to develop friendships with poets and artists who made appearances at the university and would often stay on for a week or more, people such as Duncan, Creeley, Gary Snyder, Denise Levertov, Nicanor Parra, John Cage, and Nam June Paik. In 1968 Quasha founded Stony Brook Magazine, collaborating on it with Roger Guedalla and Eliot Weinberger who was an undergraduate there; the magazine also benefited from a raft of contributing editors, among them Duncan, Rothenberg, Antin, Rosenthal, Hugh Kenner, Charles Simic, Kofi Awooner, Nicanor Parra, Wai-Lim Yip, Michael Hamburger, Lawrence Alloway, and Jorge Carrera-Andrade. A widely popular poetry festival at Stony Brook brought contact with the likes of Zbigniew Herbert, Eugene Guillevic, Czeslaw Milosz, Francis Ponge, and Eduardo de Olivera; the festival was directed by friends and colleagues Jim Harrison and Louis Simpson. Concurrent with the run of Stony Brook Quasha co-edited, with Ronald Gross, the extensive collection Open Poetry: Four Anthologies of Expanded Poems (Simon & Schuster 1973), with help from Emmitt Williams, John Robert Colombo, and Walter Lowenfels.
The anthology played a role in cultivating the concept of metapoetry, which would figure in Quasha’s later writings. His evolution as a thinker and especially as a poet would be augmented in the coming years when he met and often worked with a great many of the most vital artists and musicians of the time, as well as with still other writers and poets who played roles in his development, like Charles Olson (since first encountering him with William Burroughs in London), Louis and Celia Zukofsky, Edward Dahlberg, James Laughlin, W. H. Auden, Ezra Pound, Kenneth Burke, George Oppen, Clayton Eshleman, Dennis Tedlock, and Gerrit Lansing.
Beginning in 1970, when George first met Susan Quasha (who had been studying with Olson in Storrs, Connecticut), his life and work would come to flourish outside of established institutions, as he was leaving his academic career behind. Living in a Dodge van, the Quashas made an epic trip around America; their odyssey included both a stay with Snyder and studying meditation in Northern California. They then took up residence in Greenwich Village. In 1972, Rothenberg and George together read deeply into the archives of American poetry to rediscover it multiculturally, and without gender bias; their collaboration resulted in the now foundational volume America a Prophecy: A New Reading of American Poetry from Pre-Columbian Times to the Present (Random House, 1973). Throughout the 1970s, moreover, Quasha was developing the first of his long works, Somapoetics (Sumac, 1973), which embodied what he later would call the axial principle. With Susan Quasha, the following year, he edited the Active Anthology (Sumac, 1974), which represented the work of sixty-seven poets whom they had been in dialogue with during the previous few years.
Also in the early seventies, of special significance, George formed what would turn out to be close and enduring friendships that would define his collaborative years to come—especially with Charles Stein, Franz Kamin, and Robert Kelly. Stein, Rick Fields, and George became the first poets to teach at Naropa Institute (later Naropa University), where he and Susan continued their spiritual study with Choegyam Trungpa Rinpoche (whose poetry they had published) as well as with Herbert Guenther and Gregory Bateson. He began then, too, a lifelong practice of T’ai Chi under Cheng Man-Ch’ing, which would have a profound effect on his interests in axiality, bodywork, and what he might refer to as an interactive art principle, and thus which would lead to his first axial drawings.
In 1975, thanks to Kelly, the Quashas moved upstate for a one-semester job teaching at Bard College, and settled into their home in Barrytown. George received a NEA Fellowship in poetry, and he and Susan founded Open Studio, Ltd. in 1977, as well as the Arnolfini Art Center in Rhinebeck, which included a print shop and design facility for writers, artists and small presses; it also served, at that time, as a base of operations for Station Hill Press (Station Hill has now published hundreds of books). By the mid seventies Quasha and Stein were fully developing their collaborative performance; begun earlier while working with Mac Low and Kamin, and subsequently with artist Gary Hill, it continues today in “axial music” (which has also involved David Arner, John Beaulieu and others). Years of collaboration with Hill led to a major collection of essays by Quasha and Stein in which they explore the principle of axiality/liminality/configuration, titled An Art of Limina: Gary Hill’s Works and Writings (Polígrafa, 2009).
Today, the Quashas are a vital force in a wide range of artistic and spiritual fields. I have wanted to acknowledge how instrumental Susan has been in all of this while emphasizing, in my brief history here, not only George’s brilliance and breadth but also, simply, the magnitude of his life as a whole. He has made a huge difference in the lives of many. In their originality and reach his sculpture, drawing, and video art—his poetry and poetics that are the focus of the essays accompanying my comments in this issue of Talisman—have made a great contribution to our canon. This contribution has been a part of a life the Quashas have led together for decades, profoundly affecting many people, a few of whom have found themselves able to reciprocate herein.
George Quasha’s presence in the life and work of a great many poets, artists, musicians and filmmakers is most remarkable. And so nearly a dozen critical appreciations of his achievements in the arts have been assembled here. Written by luminaries in their own right, they are meant to broaden awareness of Quasha’s unique contributions in a number of fields of endeavor. George and Susan Quasha (a marvelous artist herself) have been mainstays in a community located close enough to New York City to be an instrumental force in the city’s artistic and intellectual goings on, yet far enough north of the city to have developed a collective character and outlook that may owe something to the bucolic experience possible there. The Quashas put down roots, specifically in Barrytown, New York, having already become a part of the avant garde that was taking shape during the 1960s and ‘70s in the city and its environs.
George Quasha was born in White Plains, New York in 1942, and from age three to seventeen he lived in Miami, Florida. Already a musician, he was reading Nietzsche, Thoreau and Eliot at fourteen, and won the Florida State debate championship at fifteen. Connected to his debate activities, while starting college at the University of Miami the following year, he won a scholarship to the then new and unprecedented International School of America. This award took him and sixteen other high school graduates around the world. They lived with local families in thirteen countries over nine months, accompanied by five university faculty including Edgar Snow and artist Emerson Burkhart. Their curriculum included audiences with the likes of Eleanor Roosevelt, I.F. Stone, Jawaharlal Nehru, Rajendra Prasad, and Willie Brandt.
Following that school year, Quasha spent the summer in Paris learning French. He subsequently attended Ohio State (studying poetry with Milton Kessler, German with Sigurd Burckhardt, and philosophy with Morris Weitz), then enrolling in Mexico City College (where he concentrated in Spanish, anthropology, and geology) before going on to the Sorbonne (in order to study French language and literature). At twenty-one, he finished college as an English major at NYU.
Living in the East Village, while attending NYU across town, Quasha frequented the legendary readings at Café Le Métro, and struck up friendships with Jerome Rothenberg, Paul Blackburn, Jackson Mac Low, Diane di Prima, David Antin, Ed Sanders, Carol Bergé, Diane Wakoski, Harold Dicker, Allen Ginsberg, and others working at the forefront of experimental poetry. He began graduate school at NYU (where he was befriended by Anais Nin), studying at length with M. L. Rosenthal (in whose poetry theory seminars he began reading Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan and others, thanks to a presentation in the course by David Antin).
Quasha became a teaching assistant and the editor of what was then the new Washington Square Review, while taking up Anglo-Saxon, Middle English, the Metaphysical poets, and Blake (the latter under David Erdman—later to be his mentor, colleague and editor—as well as Conner Cruise O’Brien and George Steiner). With his M.A. degree, he became a full-time instructor at SUNY Stony Brook where he taught courses in experimental poetry, Pound, and Blake, in the meantime working toward a Ph.D.
He lived abroad during summers, mostly in Paris and London, and began to make recordings of poets and writers who were in Europe, including members of the Tel Quel group, Marie Jolas (widow of Eugene Jolas and translator of Bachelard’s Poetics of Space), and David Jones; he spent most of a day in intense conversation with Beckett in his home. Inspired by Blackburn’s heroic tape-recording project in those days, he began recording poets in audio and video, and has continued to do so ever since. Indeed, over the past fourteen years he has filmed more than a thousand poets, artists and musicians in eleven countries for his monumental video art work, art is/poetry is/music is (Speaking Portraits). (This effort was supported in part by a Guggenheim Fellowship he won in 2006.)
During Quasha’s Stony Brook years he took the opportunity to develop friendships with poets and artists who made appearances at the university and would often stay on for a week or more, people such as Duncan, Creeley, Gary Snyder, Denise Levertov, Nicanor Parra, John Cage, and Nam June Paik. In 1968 Quasha founded Stony Brook Magazine, collaborating on it with Roger Guedalla and Eliot Weinberger who was an undergraduate there; the magazine also benefited from a raft of contributing editors, among them Duncan, Rothenberg, Antin, Rosenthal, Hugh Kenner, Charles Simic, Kofi Awooner, Nicanor Parra, Wai-Lim Yip, Michael Hamburger, Lawrence Alloway, and Jorge Carrera-Andrade. A widely popular poetry festival at Stony Brook brought contact with the likes of Zbigniew Herbert, Eugene Guillevic, Czeslaw Milosz, Francis Ponge, and Eduardo de Olivera; the festival was directed by friends and colleagues Jim Harrison and Louis Simpson. Concurrent with the run of Stony Brook Quasha co-edited, with Ronald Gross, the extensive collection Open Poetry: Four Anthologies of Expanded Poems (Simon & Schuster 1973), with help from Emmitt Williams, John Robert Colombo, and Walter Lowenfels.
The anthology played a role in cultivating the concept of metapoetry, which would figure in Quasha’s later writings. His evolution as a thinker and especially as a poet would be augmented in the coming years when he met and often worked with a great many of the most vital artists and musicians of the time, as well as with still other writers and poets who played roles in his development, like Charles Olson (since first encountering him with William Burroughs in London), Louis and Celia Zukofsky, Edward Dahlberg, James Laughlin, W. H. Auden, Ezra Pound, Kenneth Burke, George Oppen, Clayton Eshleman, Dennis Tedlock, and Gerrit Lansing.
Beginning in 1970, when George first met Susan Quasha (who had been studying with Olson in Storrs, Connecticut), his life and work would come to flourish outside of established institutions, as he was leaving his academic career behind. Living in a Dodge van, the Quashas made an epic trip around America; their odyssey included both a stay with Snyder and studying meditation in Northern California. They then took up residence in Greenwich Village. In 1972, Rothenberg and George together read deeply into the archives of American poetry to rediscover it multiculturally, and without gender bias; their collaboration resulted in the now foundational volume America a Prophecy: A New Reading of American Poetry from Pre-Columbian Times to the Present (Random House, 1973). Throughout the 1970s, moreover, Quasha was developing the first of his long works, Somapoetics (Sumac, 1973), which embodied what he later would call the axial principle. With Susan Quasha, the following year, he edited the Active Anthology (Sumac, 1974), which represented the work of sixty-seven poets whom they had been in dialogue with during the previous few years.
Also in the early seventies, of special significance, George formed what would turn out to be close and enduring friendships that would define his collaborative years to come—especially with Charles Stein, Franz Kamin, and Robert Kelly. Stein, Rick Fields, and George became the first poets to teach at Naropa Institute (later Naropa University), where he and Susan continued their spiritual study with Choegyam Trungpa Rinpoche (whose poetry they had published) as well as with Herbert Guenther and Gregory Bateson. He began then, too, a lifelong practice of T’ai Chi under Cheng Man-Ch’ing, which would have a profound effect on his interests in axiality, bodywork, and what he might refer to as an interactive art principle, and thus which would lead to his first axial drawings.
In 1975, thanks to Kelly, the Quashas moved upstate for a one-semester job teaching at Bard College, and settled into their home in Barrytown. George received a NEA Fellowship in poetry, and he and Susan founded Open Studio, Ltd. in 1977, as well as the Arnolfini Art Center in Rhinebeck, which included a print shop and design facility for writers, artists and small presses; it also served, at that time, as a base of operations for Station Hill Press (Station Hill has now published hundreds of books). By the mid seventies Quasha and Stein were fully developing their collaborative performance; begun earlier while working with Mac Low and Kamin, and subsequently with artist Gary Hill, it continues today in “axial music” (which has also involved David Arner, John Beaulieu and others). Years of collaboration with Hill led to a major collection of essays by Quasha and Stein in which they explore the principle of axiality/liminality/configuration, titled An Art of Limina: Gary Hill’s Works and Writings (Polígrafa, 2009).
Today, the Quashas are a vital force in a wide range of artistic and spiritual fields. I have wanted to acknowledge how instrumental Susan has been in all of this while emphasizing, in my brief history here, not only George’s brilliance and breadth but also, simply, the magnitude of his life as a whole. He has made a huge difference in the lives of many. In their originality and reach his sculpture, drawing, and video art—his poetry and poetics that are the focus of the essays accompanying my comments in this issue of Talisman—have made a great contribution to our canon. This contribution has been a part of a life the Quashas have led together for decades, profoundly affecting many people, a few of whom have found themselves able to reciprocate herein.