New York School - The Poets

The Poets

Concerning the New York School poets, critics argued that their work was a reaction to the Confessionalist movement in Contemporary Poetry. Their poetic subject matter was often light, violent, or observational, while their writing style was often described as cosmopolitan and world-traveled. The poets often wrote in an immediate and spontaneous manner reminiscent of stream of consciousness writing, often using vivid imagery. They drew on inspiration from Surrealism and the contemporary avant-garde art movements, in particular the action painting of their friends in the New York City art world circle like Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning.

Poets most often associated with the New York School are John Ashbery, Frank O'Hara, Kenneth Koch, James Schuyler, Barbara Guest, Ted Berrigan, Bernadette Mayer, Alice Notley, Kenward Elmslie, Ron Padgett, Lewis Warsh, and Joseph Ceravolo.

O'Hara was at the center of the group before his death in 1966. Because of his numerous friendships and post as a curator at the Museum of Modern Art, he provided connections between the poets and painters like Jane Freilicher, Fairfield Porter and Larry Rivers (also his lover). There were many joint works and collaborations: Rivers inspired a play by Koch, Koch and Ashbery together wrote the poem "A Postcard to Popeye", Ashbery and Schuyler wrote the novel A Nest of Ninnies, and Schuyler collaborated on an ode with O'Hara, whose portrait was painted by Rivers.

Koch, O'Hara, Schuyler and Ashbery were quite different as poets, but they admired each other and had much in common personally:

• Except for Schuyler, all overlapped at Harvard University,
• Except for Koch, all were homosexual,
• Except for Ashbery, all did military service,
• Except for Koch, all reviewed art,
• Except for Ashbery, who soon moved to Paris, all lived in New York during their formative years as poets.

All four were inspired by French Surrealists like Raymond Roussel, Pierre Reverdy and Guillaume Apollinaire. David Lehman, in his book on the New York poets, wrote, "They favored wit, humor and the advanced irony of the blague (that is, the insolent prank or jest) in ways more suggestive of Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg than of the New York School abstract expressionist painters after whom they were named."