Porter Fox Recounts Early Lessons With Larry Fagin

The New Yorker's Porter Fox recalls his first encounter with the poet Larry Fagin, who died in May of this year. At the time, Fox was an M.F.A. candidate at the New School, and Fagin, an energetic workshop instructor who sailed into class before announcing to the assembled students, “None of us will ever be famous.” Fox writes, “I believed him. I was not a poet. I was an M.F.A. candidate at the time, with a collection of mediocre fiction. Most of the two hundred students I’d met in the program wanted nothing more than to be famous.” From there: 

Fagin had avoided the spotlight for most of his life, and few of us had heard of him. To the class, he was a teacher—funny, ornery, energetic, brilliant, cutting, and exceptionally generous, with an encyclopedic knowledge of the arts.

Fagin transmitted lessons he’d learned from Jack Spicer, Ginsberg, and others, mixed with his own: use ego as a “cutting tool”; create simple ideas in complex relationships; use ellipses; beware of airplane poems and writing about dreams; beauty gets in the way; keep the reader off balance; kill modifiers and metaphors (unless they’re really good); strive for “strangeness.” He told us to write every day, but only a little bit; to “be more in the world”; to look up when we walk down the street; to avoid distraction; to never talk about real estate. Most professors I’d had until then left class the moment the bell rang, offered perfunctory critiques of my work, were unfamiliar with their own reading assignments, and generally regarded the act of teaching as an annoyance. To Fagin, students were his life.

Three weeks into the course, Fagin asked if I wanted to take private lessons with him. The following week I entered what had become a cottage industry in his apartment, on East Twelfth Street. Since 1968, he had taught hundreds of writers at a circular oak table in his living room. Fagin sat on the left; students took their place on his right. He line-edited my short stories with a Blackwing No. 2 pencil and didn’t stop until he reached the end—often after the end of the session, and well beyond my own attention span. He was a savant-like editor. He had published work by John Ashbery, Burroughs, Ginsberg, Bernadette Mayer, Frank O’Hara, James Schuyler, and Anne Waldman in several zines and his small press, Adventures in Poetry.

Read on at the New Yorker.