NY School – Poetry

These notes, incomplete and needing attention as they are, began in the Fall semester of 2026 during a NY Poets seminar class taught by Dr. Ben Lee at the University of Tennessee.

Notes on the New York school of poetry.

• It was inspired by the New York City painters.
• Interested in the movement of poetry
• The poetry becomes a map of the poetry itself.
• New York School poetry is neither geographical nor elemental. It’s not really in either or but kind of both it doesn’t always fit. The grounding in the idea isn’t perfect.

Questions for thought:

• When culture becomes political?
• What does it mean to be political?
• Can writing be political?
• Or is it personal on some level so that the reader may be political in a way that the writing is not?
• Situating the New York City poets in time.
• Modernism is 1860 postmodernism mid 20^th century

New York City poet ideas

• Historical movements.
• Form.
• Collaboration, not just with other poets, but also with other creative like painters, musicians, and filmmakers.
• There is silliness irony play there’s abstract and satire different kinds of play.
• The immediacy of the urban environment.
• The generations move through in language and gender.
• The want of community and collaboration while feeling constrained
• The push/pull of community/individualism.
• Probably speaks to our internal desire to segment and categorize.
• Consumer culture is attacked to hetero-normative expectations.
• Patriotism is also linked to these ideas of standard identity.
• How do/does artwork to balance cultural identity with individualism?
• Different approaches by critics on how authorial intention comes into play.
  • This can apply in perfectly. They may say that they are doing X, but the reader feels like they are actually doing why
  • Although many poems may in fact be autobiographical (confessional poets) the conversation is still to talk about the speaker to separate the poetic eye from the poet themselves. This could be further complicated by the shifting of perspective or destabilizing the speaker in the poem

Second generation of New York poets.

• Era of disco and the incoming of pop.
• Chatty obstruction.
• Myles has a free verse vernacular.
• The feminist politics become more obvious in the second generation.
• There’s a longer form of process pieces.
• Work on a call to attention (see Andrew Epstein).
• How does vulnerability add or subtract or affect energy in a poem?

• Form for the writer in relationship to form for the reader.
• How can the energy of the revision move into the energy of the reader?
• How does this move with Charles Olson and his idea of the syllables?
• The embodied poetic

Feelings landscapes in cityscapes – these are things that O’Hara is discussing the young Avantgarde the French influence and he studied music.

What do we mean by dream logic?

What do we mean by a vernacular poet?

What are we talking about when we say I do this I do that

Jane Frecker

Grace Hartigan.

What do we mean by occasional poem?

I still don’t understand what is important in a poem.

Like when is vocality important and when is it just not and when can we overlook our own whatever’s and unknowing?

If there was no knowledge of baseball, how does personal poem change or any of the illusions to the other ideas?

How do we interpret camp?

My own thoughts

• Public community versus private or more accurately smaller community.
• Public encounter public and I am not sure how I feel about this idea of using the term counter. The correlation of the idea remains rhetorically suspect.
• What are the different ways we can understand politics politic political
  • Have we streamline this idea into a monochromatic definition?
• The physiology of the poem is interesting to think about. The physicality of the typewriter that is now lost.
• What do I want from poetry?
• The idea of radical Joy
• Delight as resistance