Through a series of interactive, accessible, intersectional public events, including symposia, workshops, and performances, and via our new website, the Network will enable novel interactions between academics, creative practitioners, cultural organizations, and members of the public, as well as facilitating the free exchange of ideas across national borders, disciplinary boundaries, and cultural sectors. In so doing, the Network will support the development of innovative critical and creative projects, the breaking down of barriers between academia and other artforms, and the transfer of scholarly and creative outputs to audiences not usually effectively reached by academic research.

The ‘New York School’ of poetry coalesced in the 1950s, when founding members Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, James Schuyler, Barbara Guest, and Kenneth Koch discovered that they shared several key values, including a desire to avoid high seriousness in their poetry; an interest in blurring the lines between poetry and artforms such as dance, painting, and cinema; a belief in the value of collaboration; and a love for the city that brought them together.

As subsequent generations of New York School poets have followed them, a distinctive critical ethos has been cultivated around the School. In response to their aesthetics and politics, scholars of New York School poetry tend to orient their writing around four main tenets:

1. a belief in the importance of sociability and collaboration to the production of creative work;
2. an attentiveness to the environment out of which poetry emerges;
3. an understanding that socially-situated poetry offers crucial sites of resistance;
4. an advocacy of poetry as a non-hierarchical public activity that has the potential to build communities. 

Using the ethos of the School poets as its model, the Network for New York School Studies will advocate for, support, and emphasize the value of community-based public poetry initiatives by collaborating with grassroots poetry organizations, such as Poets & Critics in Paris and the Poetry Project in New York.

We aim not only to showcase and engage with the best contemporary poets whose work has been shaped by the New York School, but also to promote conversations between communities, cultures, and individuals, to create inspiring experiences, and to emphasize and demonstrate that innovative scholarship and creative practice is not the preserve of elite institutions, but, rather, an ongoing and evolving public process of discussion, exploration, and sharing of ideas, knowledge, and ways of knowing, learning, and understanding the value of culture. 

Principal Investigator:

Dr Rona Cran

Senior Lecturer in Twentieth-Century American Literature

Rona's research centres on the literature and culture of New York City, queer writing, and modern American poetry, with an emphasis on literatures of contingency and quiet resistance. 

Rona's profile

Dr Yasmine Shamma

Associate Professor (University of Reading)

Yasmine's research on the New York School attends to the shapes of the poetry's stanzas and the ways in which the New York School poem becomes a place in and of itself--for registering the greater urban built environment, for navigating the congested inner spaces of New York City, and for living and breathing and through.

Yasmine's profile