This chapter explores the shared circumstances, collaborations, and socializing that drew modernist poets and painters together in New York, but also the critical discourse of medium specificity that insisted on the separation of their endeavors. William Carlos Williams established proximity with the Stieglitz Circle painters, admiring (and occasionally acquiring) their work, which he rendered in ekphrastic poems. While Wallace Stevens’ early career was also shaped by encounters with these artists, his poetry maintained a distance from while suggesting parallels with visual art. The chapter moves from Williams’ and Stevens’ contrasting approaches through Clement Greenberg’s assertions of medium-specificity to Frank O’Hara’s at once intimate and ambiguous relationship with midcentury American painting and painters. O’Hara’s collaborations with Grace Hartigan and Larry Rivers suggest close connections but no fixed relationships between writing and painting. The chapter concludes with Glenn Ligon, whose late-twentieth-century paintings catch the messiness of preceding word–image encounters but convey an urgent need for communication that extends beyond the dialogue between writing and painting.

This chapter focuses on the New York School of poetry and traces its origins, its history, and its legacy. It discusses the importance of the avant-garde tradition and visual art, especially Abstract Expressionism, to the poets of the New York School, and examines the most important formal innovations and thematic concerns of the poets at its heart. The chapter focuses on the work of Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, James Schuyler, and Barbara Guest, along with poets of the movement’s second generation, including Ted Berrigan, Alice Notley, and Bernadette Mayer.

Part III deploys the theories and approaches presented in Parts I and II, along with art historical texts, to develop a new interpretational framework for artworks that make rhythm and matter explicit.