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.

Epstein’s chapter challenges the tendency to overlook the significance of Wallace Stevens—and his characteristic idiom, poetics, and philosophical concerns—to the postwar avant-garde movement known as the New York School of poets. This neglect of Stevens as an important precursor causes problems in both directions: it unnecessarily limits our sense of New York School poetry, which can too easily be reduced to a chatty, pop-culture-infused poetry of urban daily life, while simultaneously reinforcing the distorted image of Stevens as a stuffy, backward-looking aesthete, devoted solely to abstraction and imagination. Epstein suggests that, for all their differences, Stevens and the New York School poets share a great deal: an obsession with painting and a passion for all things French; a delight in wordplay and the sensuous surfaces of language; an anti-foundational skepticism toward fixity in self, language, or idea; and, perhaps most of all, an embrace of the imagination and deep attraction to the surreal combined with a devotion to the ordinary and everyday.

This chapter explores avant-garde literary communities at mid-century, and explains the relationship between the Beats, Black Mountain College, the San Francisco Renaissance, and the New York School.

This chapter examines the development of the New York School of Poetry. This particular “school” or movement has, since its inception, had to do with people meeting, rubbing off on, knowing, collaborating with, being inspired by, and most of all–talking–to other people, many of whom happened to be artists and poets. By this definition, it follows that the school began at the moment in which John Ashbery met Kenneth Koch, or Frank O’Hara, in 1946 and 1949 respectively, depending on whose influence on whom you take to be more generative. The New York School, has been shaped sometimes subtly and sometimes undeniably–by many other deeply involved figures at various points in its evolution, while also consistently consisting of a poetry that explores and creates poetic forms which are distinct in their slipperiness and reflexivity; as they register, among other things, the urban built environment from which they have been written.