On Sundays, I stayed in my room and listened to the Sunday symphony programs." After service aboard a destroyer in the South Pacific during World War II, he entered Harvard (the illustrator Edward Gorey was his roommate), first majoring in music, but changing to English and deciding to be a writer. His first published work was some poems and stories in the
Harvard Advocate. While living in Cambridge, he met poets John Ashbery, who was on the editorial board of the
Advocate, and V.R. "Bunny" Lang. On occasional visits to New York, he met Kenneth Koch and James Schuyler, as well as the painters who were likewise to be so much a part of his life, notably Larry Rivers, Jane Freilicher, Fairfield Porter, Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell, Michael Goldberg, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, and Jackson Pollock. He was the first of the young New York poets to write regular art criticism, serving as editorial associate for
Art News, contributing reviews and occasional articles from 1953 to 1955. He had a long association with the Museum of Modern Art in New York, beginning as a clerk at the information and sales desk in the front lobby, later becoming an assistant curator at the museum, and in 1965, despite lack of formal training, associate curator.
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