To Be True to a City?: The New York School of Poets in and out of New York City
“Peace! to be true to a city” (Frank O’Hara, from “For James Dean”)
In the early 1950s John Bernard Myers, director of New York City’s famed Tibor de Nagy gallery, bestowed the name the “New York School of poets” on poets John Ashbery, Barbara Guest, Kenneth Koch, James Schuyler, and Frank O’Hara. Linking an otherwise disparate group of writers into a category associated with Abstract Expressionist artists, “the New York School” label also invited future readers and critics to think about the form and content of the poets’ writing as informed by the textures of New York City itself. Indeed, recent terms such as “urban poetics” and “urban pastoral” have emerged to further define New York School-affiliated writing. But how “true” was the poetry to the city? This panel will present a series of short papers on the New York School poets, taking special care to identify how New York City was employed as a practically mobile signifier that proved applicable well outside the city’s boundaries. Diarmuid Hester will consider the print culture and interpersonal networks that facilitated the spread of O’Hara, Ashbery, Berrigan et al beyond the limited confines of Lower Manhattan in the 1970s and 1980s to poetry communities in Los Angeles and Washington DC. Rona Cran will discuss how poems by AIDS-era New York School writers form counter-narratives about the disease and its effects/affects, offering a form of alternate documentary of the lives and deaths of individuals and communities in and outside New York City. Rosa Campbell will reflect on women in the culture and infrastructure of little magazines in the New York School, considering the role artistic, administrative, and domestic labor played in the 1970s mimeograph revolution. Daniel Kane will outline how the poetry of the New York School informed punk rock style and sound internationally. Gavin Butt will serve as respondent.