Unimportant Clerks: The New York School Poets and the Culture of Bureaucracy

Examines the ambivalent, often critical relationship of the New York School poets to bureaucratic culture and the conditions of work.

Unimportant Clerks identifies a central tension in the writing of the New York School poets: at times their poetry replicates the ideology of bureaucracy while at others—and more persistently—it repudiates related principles of efficiency, routine, and regimentation. Frank O'Hara, John Ashberry, Barbara Guest, James Schuyler, and Eileen Myles each had a cleric...