35 ACADEMIC ENGAGEMENT: FACULTY PERSPECTIVE ACADEMIC ENGAGEMENT FACULTY PERSPECTIVE: MICHAEL THURSTON IN THE LATE 1950s, THE POET FRANK O’HARA was working at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and writing for Artnews. His experience of paintings by Jackson Pollock, Willem De Kooning, Robert Motherwell, Joan Mitchell, Helen Frankenthaler and Larry Rivers, among others, influenced the poetry he wrote during these years. O’Hara’s “Second Avenue” adapts the collage methods so important for Motherwell and De Kooning, for example, and such “lunch poems” as “A Step Away from Them” attempt to capture in phrases the kind of emotion and action in the world that Pollock’s drip paintings or Frankenthaler’s soaking methods recorded. O’Hara’s campy insouciance and gay sexuality would have been in his poetry in any case, but the specific forms they take—their inflection through references to popular culture and an irreverent attitude toward Amer- ican history and art—are clearly influenced by Rivers, with whom O’Hara frequently collaborated on both visual and verbal (and visual/verbal) works. So, thinking about a team-taught course on the art and poetry of New York in the 1950s, my colleague Victor Katz and I wanted, as much as possible, to have students look at the art and poetry together. We ordered books with good reproductions. It is one thing, though, to look at a photo- graph of, say, Joan Mitchell’s Keep the Aspidistra Flying, however high its resolution and however fine its printing, and quite another to stand in front of the painting. How fortunate, for Victor and me, and for our students (from both Smith and Holyoke Community College), that we did not have to content ourselves with photographs. Instead, we all stood in the SCMA Teaching Gallery and stared at the Mitchell painting while we discussed prose about Mitchell by O’Hara and fellow poets James Schuyler and Barbara Guest. And, when the time came to move from Mitchell to Grace Hartigan and to discuss both the mutual appreciation between Hartigan and O’Hara and their collaboration on a series of poem-paintings, we had only to take a few steps and stand in front of Hartigan’s enormous and wonderful Bride and Owl. A discussion of collage, including not only the way bits of referential represen- tation can be recontextualized but also the traces of something like violence in the cutting and tearing that produced those bits in the first place? Walk over here to check out quite different collages by Esteban Vicente and Robert Motherwell. I could go on. Our class met frequently at SCMA, sometimes in the Teaching Gallery, sometimes in the Mellon Classroom, sometimes in the Cunning- ham Center and sometimes in the downstairs galleries, students carrying notebooks and copies of poems while we stood in front of this Gottlieb or that De Kooning, this Frankenthaler or that Rivers, able to see all that you can never see in a photograph of a painting or collage. Part of what excites O’Hara about Mitchell is the variation of texture on the surface of her paintings. In person, you can see how areas of Keep the Aspidis- tra Flying are heavily impastoed, paint working almost sculpturally, while other areas are smoother, the interac- tion of colors more fluid. Part of the power O’Hara finds in Hartigan and Rivers is the scale of their paintings. In