Reva Wolf, Andy Warhol, Poetry and Gossip in the 1960s. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1997; xv+210 pp.; ISBN: 0226904911 (hbk); 0226904938 (pbk); LC call no.: NX512.W37W66

The poetic and the machinic are faux foes. Thus, Andy Warhol, partisan of a particular indolent industry, is widely assumed to be beyond the poetic pale. Reva Wolf's engaging volume, culled from the napkin iliads and eavesdropped odysseys of New York in the sixties, attempts to counter this received, deceived idea by marshalling evidence in favor of Warhol's familiarity and facility with poetry, allegiance to machines notwithstanding.

Wolf's thesis, which claims a counter-critical force as its impetus, is not prepossessing in and itself. The thesis is thus: Warhol dabbled in poetry, and what's more, he knew poets and participated in the New York poetics milieu. I can only respond to this à la Warhol: said thesis elicits a jaded Gee, or a weary Wow. In the current critical milieu, re-evaluation, revisitation and revision are credited as revelation. Proofreading is granted the force of prophecy. But let us dispatch with the dissing, for such metaquibblings compound rather than arrest the spread of the "everybody's wrong but me" school of semithinking. Wolf's book surpasses its thesis in the how of its proving, uncloses its modest case through truly interesting evidence. Her selection of gossip as the mediating term between poetry and the machine is deft and downright delectable. If you wish to establish a chair in Gossip Studies at your university, stock this book in your stacks promptly (and then tell someone to tell someone that I'm simply dying to teach there). Perhaps it is best that she leaves the work of her work to the characters she catalogues: in the absence of the fictive license to create character, the next best choice is culling clever ones and letting them duke it out through the quotations that pepper her commentary. Every time O'Hara, Malanga, Warhol, et al stab each other in their paperbacks, it makes for a damn good story, and I credit Wolf for her taste in the telling. Moreover, gossip is a great locus for the poetic and the machinic to meet and greet. If Warhol made anything clear through the machinations of Factory living, it was precisely that gossip was a productive machine. Gossip's byproducts, fame and celebrity, merely so much gossip writ large, were Warhol's stock and trade. And at their zenith of snark, when the Oscar Wilde effect takes hold, truly great gossips achieve the poignant and pointed power of poetry.

How does the gossip of poets relate to the poetics of gossip? It turns out, throughout the course of Wolf's whosaiddit (this isn't a whodunnit - nobody who was anybody in this circle did anything), the presumed gap between Warhol and the poetics of his day was precisely one poet in length, and at length. Frank O'Hara, a premier versocrat of their shared age, who maintained that art criticism was the art of rumor and gossip, detested Warhol. Wolf meticulously inventories the testimonies of this animosity, a hate that kept Warhol on the fringe of poetic activity of the time. And it seems (for gossip is both seem and heard) that the lowdown on this showdown of show-offs shows another pair of faux foes. Wolf writes, "One of the peculiarities of O'Hara's negative view of Warhol's work is that it existed despite the numerous similarities between the content of his poetry and of Warhol's pop paintings" (19). Peculiar? Hardly. In the topsy-turvy topography of the tattletale and the talk of the town, it is precisely shared territory that spurs spite and births barbs. Wolf's work in mapping the shared territory between Warhol and O'Hara, and thus between the machinic and poetic, is handy for those who find Andy dandy. Her handling of largely evanescent evidence is clever, and the evidence itself, the backbites of inwits, is compulsively compelling: You simply won't believe what so and so said about such and such...

Laura Penny
The University of Western Ontario/
SUNY Buffalo