No one who lived in the East Village during the 1960s can forget the foetid smell in the tenement hallways and the reek of garbage on the street. Parallel with the journey which young poets made down Avenue B to clubs like Slugs was another kind of ordure a world away where the Vietnam War was being fought. A common term used by soldiers engaged in a battle is for "the shit to hit the fan." In the literature of the Vietnam War, shit is used more than any other word to describe the experience of war in general and that war in particular. The word is given even more heightened status in poems like "Burning Shit at An Khe" by the combat poet, Bruce Weigl—arguably the best poet of the Vietnam War. Of course, the Lower East Side, even with its new name (the East Village), had its own versions of shit. Breasts might be the obsessive image in Joel Oppenheimer's poetry, but out on the streets of the East Village, shit was the unifying image, though one could not help but notice breasts, too, as more and more women decided not to wear bras. Human figures were only backdrops to the overpowering smell in the air.

Even Frank O'Hara, who often travelled in the rarefied circles of the New York art world, was not above this kind of stinking imagery. Lunch Poems (1964) mostly concerns itself with the witty, elegant, urbane world of O'Hara's midtown life as a curator at the Museum of Modern Art. Yet here he is, describing his downtown world, if not literally, then in its spirit. He describes it this way:

Wouldn't it be funny

if The Finger had designed us

to shit just once a week?

all week long we'd get fatter

and fatter and then on Sunday morning

while everyone's in church

plooop!

Shit would seem to follow in the path of hunger and poverty, and yet this obvious fact may be misleading. Wealth and food may be the natural adjuncts of shit. In a catalogue I have at hand from the London Consortium, a doctoral program offered jointly by the Institute of Contemporary Arts, the Tate Gallery, Architectural Association, School of Architecture, and Birkbeck College, in which a PhD is awarded from the University of London in Humanities and Cultural Studies, one of the key modules in the first year of study centres on "Shit and Civilization." It is subtitled "Our ambivalent relationship to ordure in the city, culture and the psyche." The first sentence of the course description states: "Our societies are, quite literally, founded on shit." The course description goes on to explain that civilization means city-life, and this kind of life means being confronted with garbage everywhere.

I would suggest that New York was no different than London in this regard, and the Lower East Side (the East Village) was a kind of microcosm of civilization and shit. The immigrants, mostly from eastern Europe and Russia, brought their cultures on their backs. The shit was provided by the city of New York, teeming, edgy, overly energetic, devouring, and in your face. Back at the turn of the century and then up to the time of the Poetry Project, the tenement world of the Lower East Side provided its own aromas and textures, and the streets literally reeked of offal wherever one went. A kind of essence of this world, in fact, is found in Joel Oppenheimer's poem, "Sirventes on a Sad Occurrence." An old Jewish immigrant, coming down her tenement stairs with her daughter, encounters the poet there, and she shits her pants. Oppenheimer writes of her embarrassment:

—as if there weren't already

shit in the world, and you invented

it. what further indignities to

allow besides inventing shit?

The Czech writer Milan Kundera notes in his novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984) that "shit is a more onerous theological problem than is evil." He further observes that Stalin's son Yakov, while a prisoner-of-war, held by the Germans, would constantly make a mess of the latrine when he went there. The British officers who were also prisoners complained of how often Yakov fouled the latrine. Yakov — Kundera suggests that he was almost like the Son of God — complains to his German captors, but "the arrogant Germans refused to talk about shit." Finally, Stalin's son ran full-force into the electrified fence, and killed himself.

Was he, who bore on his shoulders a drama of the highest order (as fallen angel and son of God), to undergo judgment not for something sublime (in the realm of God and the angels) but for shit? Were the very highest of drama and the very lowest so vertiginously close?

Kundera goes on:

If rejection and privilege are one and the same, if there is no difference between the sublime and the paltry, if the Son of God can undergo judgment for shit, then human existence loses its dimensions and becomes unbearably light.

This has everything to do with the ethos of the new East Village, a warren of cold-water flats that had been fabricated and slapped up in the 19^th century as disposable housing, not to be inhabited for long, and suddenly a hundred years later, the old Jews long gone from the premises, their grandchildren were re-peopling these three-room configurations with the bathtub in the kitchen, and often the toilet in the hallway, the smell of shit, ancient and recent, filling the tenement hallways and the streets where garbage lay uncollected, filling people's heads with its smells, even affecting their dreams. At one point in the Kundera novel:

The fact that until recently the word "shit" appeared in print as s- - - has nothing to do with moral considerations. You can't claim that shit is immoral, after all! The objection to shit is a metaphysical one. The daily defecation session is daily proof of the unacceptability of Creation. Either/or: either shit is acceptable (in which case don't lock yourself in the bathroom) or we are created in an unacceptable manner…It follows, then, that the aesthetic ideal of the categorical agreement with being is a world in which shit is denied and everyone acts as though it did not exist. This aesthetic ideal is called kitsch.

Oppenheimer confronts this issue of shit and the Lower East Side head on, i.e., without an ounce of kitsch. Of course, kitsch does not literally mean the denial of shit, although its end result could as easily be understood that way. In her essay on "Camp," Susan Sontag says, in her sixth definition of it, that "it is good to be camp," and goes on to add: "[m]any examples of Camp are things which, from a 'serious' point of view, are either bad art or kitsch." So we have Kundera saying that kitsch is a denial of shit, and Susan Sontag claiming that kitsch is bad art. In fact, Kundera sticks to his guns regarding kitsch; he says that it "is the absolute denial of shit, in both the literal and the figurative senses of the word; kitsch excludes everything from its purview which is essentially unacceptable in human existence." The Oppenheimer poem, the sirventes, is many things, but kitsch it is not. The sirventes is "a form of lyric verse of the Provencal troubadours satirizing political, social, or moral themes." One of his longest, most sustained poems, it is also a rare example of the poet using narrative poetry to characterize figures other than himself and/or a lover.