Nick Sturm Calls for a Steve Carey Collected

For his blog Crystal Set, scholar and poet Nick Sturm gives some overdue attention to New York School poet Steve Carey, looking thoughtfully through The Lily of St. Mark’s, a mimeo published by Ted Berrigan's "C Press" in 1978. "I’ve coveted a copy of this book for a long time and just recently was able to get one," writes Sturm. More:

...The bold intricacy of [George] Schneeman’s playing card-style cover, even the title itself, which is such a quintessential late-1970s, New York School gesture—a wry and lyric gendered play that incorporates the hyper-localized geography of the Second Generation—make this book an irresistible object. It’s also the penultimate publication of Ted Berrigan’s “C” Press—which he revived in 1978 to publish Carey’s book and, finally, Elio Schneeman’s In February I Think. As [Alice] Notley descirbes [sic], “This title is after the song ‘The Lily of the West’ (sung by Joan Baez, and also and not very well by Dylan) suggesting Steve’s Westernness (he loves whitewall tires and smog and Ed Ruscha photos) and his pallor and esthetic purity) which Ted sometimes chides him for, as in Ted’s line ‘Absolute quality tells absolutely nothing’).” Carey’s recent move to New York City from the West Coast—and the quick dissolution of his marriage, as Notley describes in the above essay—maps over the song’s narrative. The allusion is as witty as it is sentimental, a warm mixture of feeling and intelligence that continues to be one of the little-discussed joys of poets such as Carey, Berrigan, Notley, and other “Second Generation” New York School writers.

A few years ago I wrote a short review of The Selected Poems of Steve Carey, edited by Edmund Berrigan (Subpress, 2009), which I’ve included at the end of this post. Everything there holds true for The Lily of St. Mark’s, but many of the poems in this book that don’t appear in the Selected are worth highlighting for their raucous, idiosyncratic swerves of phrase. This is also a way of saying that I’d like to create a record of the need for more of Carey’s poems to be easily available, and that a Collected Poems of Steve Carey would be a celebrated publication for poets and scholars interested in writers like Carey whose work has not been widely read or written about. Notley’s endorsement should be all we need. Elinor Nauen’s narrative of Carey’s last day alive—originally published in The Poetry Project Newsletter in Oct./Nov. 1989—is a strong portrait of Carey’s humor, devotions, and love. “There’ll be marigolds in my next poem,” he tells Nauen. He’d die of a heart attack the next day.