Network for New York School Studies
This website serves as a virtual meeting point for New York School poets, scholars, artists, and enthusiasts from across the world. Here you will find information about upcoming events including poetry readings, performances, workshops, and symposiums, recent publications in New York School studies, news, interviews and audiovisual recordings from the Network, and related projects and events.
Image Credit: Thank you to Lina Zawati for our header image.
This website serves as a virtual meeting point for New York School poets, scholars, artists, and enthusiasts from across the world. Here you will find information about upcoming events including poetry readings, performances, workshops, and symposiums, recent publications in New York School studies, news, interviews and audiovisual recordings from the Network, and related projects and events.
Image Credit: Thank you to Lina Zawati for our header image.
About the NNYSS
Founded in 2018 by Rona Cran and Yasmine Shamma...
In 1976, New York School poet Bernadette Mayer urged her students: ‘change the language, and don’t ever get famous’. Through intervening decades, New York School poetry has both changed the language and got famous, bringing an increasingly diverse public to a state of ‘happy awareness’ (Koch) of the open, democratic, interdisciplinary forms and styles of this multi-generational avant-garde. To date, however, although research on New York School poetry is growing and numerous contemporary poets identify as members of the School, there is no identifiable network through which researchers and creative practitioners can connect and collaborate. This project therefore inaugurates the Network for New York School Studies, formalising for the first time an intellectual and creative global union of academics, poets, and other cultural practitioners including curators, artists, and musicians. 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.
The 'New Work on the New York School' research collective was unofficially inaugurated on July 6th, 2018, with its first one-day symposium cultivating ideas and discussion among scholars and poets associated with the New York School(s), punctuated by an evening reading. In 2020, Rona Cran and Yasmine Shamma were awarded an AHRC Research Networking Grant to create and curate the Network for New York School Studies.
NETWORK FOUNDERS
Rona Cran (they/she)
I'm Associate Professor of Twentieth-Century American Literature at the University of Birmingham, and Director of the University’s Centre for the Study of North America. My research and teaching 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. I'm the author of Collage in Twentieth-Century Art, Literature, and Culture: Joseph Cornell, William Burroughs, Frank O'Hara, and Bob Dylan (Ashgate/Routledge, 2014), and the creator of the interactive website dedicated to Joe Brainard's collage fragments www.makeyourownbrainard.com. I'm currently writing my second book, Everyday Rebellion: Poetry and Resistance in New York, 1950-1995 (Louisiana State University Press, 2024), which explores the relationship between NYC poetry and quiet forms of resistance from the counterculture to the AIDS pandemic. My first poetry collection, I Remember Kim, is out with Verve Poetry Press in 2023. Recent New York School-related writing includes work on the mimeograph revolution, teaching Bernadette Mayer, the ecopoetics of Anne Waldman's Life Notes, Joe Brainard and queer optimism, New York poetry, American women poet-editors and the mimeograph revolution, the scissors of Joe Brainard and John Ashbery, and the radical friendship of Allen Ginsberg and Frank O’Hara.
Yasmine Shamma (they/she)
I'm Associate Professor of Modern and Contemporary Literature at the University of Reading, UK. My 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. My first book Spatial Poetics: Second Generation New York School Poetry (Oxford University Press, 2018) spells out this theory of organic poetic form in New York School poetry more rigorously. My second book, an edited collection, focused on one specific poet, the great Joe Brainard, and encouraged poetry and prose from poets and critics on what could be called Joe Brainard's Art (Edinburgh University Press, 2019). While much of my current research asks similar questions about space and place, but about refugee camps (Making Home Away, forthcoming with Palgrave, 2021, and When We Talk About Home, in progress), my third book, forthcoming with EUP in 2021, will offer a large oral history of the New York School as told to me in interviews by the poets themselves. I remain interested in oral history, space, place, and the breathing shapes of forms, like the poem.
In 1976, New York School poet Bernadette Mayer urged her students: ‘change the language, and don’t ever get famous’. Through intervening decades, New York School poetry has both changed the language and got famous, bringing an increasingly diverse public to a state of ‘happy awareness’ (Koch) of the open, democratic, interdisciplinary forms and styles of this multi-generational avant-garde. To date, however, although research on New York School poetry is growing and numerous contemporary poets identify as members of the School, there is no identifiable network through which researchers and creative practitioners can connect and collaborate. This project therefore inaugurates the Network for New York School Studies, formalising for the first time an intellectual and creative global union of academics, poets, and other cultural practitioners including curators, artists, and musicians. 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.
The 'New Work on the New York School' research collective was unofficially inaugurated on July 6th, 2018, with its first one-day symposium cultivating ideas and discussion among scholars and poets associated with the New York School(s), punctuated by an evening reading. In 2020, Rona Cran and Yasmine Shamma were awarded an AHRC Research Networking Grant to create and curate the Network for New York School Studies.
NETWORK FOUNDERS
Rona Cran (they/she)
I'm Associate Professor of Twentieth-Century American Literature at the University of Birmingham, and Director of the University’s Centre for the Study of North America. My research and teaching 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. I'm the author of Collage in Twentieth-Century Art, Literature, and Culture: Joseph Cornell, William Burroughs, Frank O'Hara, and Bob Dylan (Ashgate/Routledge, 2014), and the creator of the interactive website dedicated to Joe Brainard's collage fragments www.makeyourownbrainard.com. I'm currently writing my second book, Everyday Rebellion: Poetry and Resistance in New York, 1950-1995 (Louisiana State University Press, 2024), which explores the relationship between NYC poetry and quiet forms of resistance from the counterculture to the AIDS pandemic. My first poetry collection, I Remember Kim, is out with Verve Poetry Press in 2023. Recent New York School-related writing includes work on the mimeograph revolution, teaching Bernadette Mayer, the ecopoetics of Anne Waldman's Life Notes, Joe Brainard and queer optimism, New York poetry, American women poet-editors and the mimeograph revolution, the scissors of Joe Brainard and John Ashbery, and the radical friendship of Allen Ginsberg and Frank O’Hara.
Yasmine Shamma (they/she)
I'm Associate Professor of Modern and Contemporary Literature at the University of Reading, UK. My 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. My first book Spatial Poetics: Second Generation New York School Poetry (Oxford University Press, 2018) spells out this theory of organic poetic form in New York School poetry more rigorously. My second book, an edited collection, focused on one specific poet, the great Joe Brainard, and encouraged poetry and prose from poets and critics on what could be called Joe Brainard's Art (Edinburgh University Press, 2019). While much of my current research asks similar questions about space and place, but about refugee camps (Making Home Away, forthcoming with Palgrave, 2021, and When We Talk About Home, in progress), my third book, forthcoming with EUP in 2021, will offer a large oral history of the New York School as told to me in interviews by the poets themselves. I remain interested in oral history, space, place, and the breathing shapes of forms, like the poem.
The Network for New York School Studies thanks its past and current funding organizations, including UKRI's Arts and Humanities Research Council, the University of Birmingham, the US Embassy/British Association for American Studies, and Humanities New York, as well as the organizations we've partnered with for symposiums and readings, including Poets & Critics, Royal Holloway Poetics Research Centre, The Brooklyn Rail, and The Flow Chart Foundation.