New York School (Poetry)

The New York School was a loosely affiliated group of American poets active from the 1950s through the 1960s, centered on New York City and closely tied to the city's contemporary avant-garde painting scene, whose work favored an improvisational, conversational, often ironic style influenced by Surrealism, French poetry and the immediacy of Abstract Expressionist painting. Its core figures, Frank O'Hara, John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch and James Schuyler, wrote poetry notable for its urbane wit, its embrace of everyday urban detail and pop-cultural reference, and its resistance to the formal seriousness and confessional intensity of much contemporary American poetry, with O'Hara's Lunch Poems, written on his breaks from working at the Museum of Modern Art, exemplifying the group's casual, occasion-driven style. Closely linked personally and artistically to painters such as Willem de Kooning and Larry Rivers, the group takes its name by direct analogy with the New York School of Abstract Expressionist painting, and it went on to influence a second generation of New York School poets in the following decades.