Honors English Traverses the Park to the Guggenheim

By Dr. Marzoni
 

To introduce a unit on the New York School of poetry, juniors in my Honors American Literature class visited the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum to see Alex Katz: Gathering, the first major retrospective of the 95-year-old New York painter since 1986. Students honed in on Katz’s portraits of his friends, including poets Frank O’Hara, Edwin Denby, Joe Brainard, Amiri Baraka, Anne Waldman, John Ashbery, Dick Gallup, Ron Padgett, and Allen Ginsberg, who they will be researching in the weeks to come, and considered the ways that the paintings themselves function as visual poems: stripping away the noise of reality to emphasize the beauty in information that lingers on the surface.