New York School
Quick answer: The New York School brought wit, speed and city life into poetry. Frank O'Hara, John Ashbery and friends, plus ways to catch their energy yourself.
The New York School was a circle of poets in 1950s and 60s Manhattan, Frank O'Hara, John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, James Schuyler and Barbara Guest, who wrote with the wit, speed and casual surrealism of the abstract painters they befriended. Their poems sound like brilliant talk: lunch dates, phone calls, gallery gossip and sudden tenderness, all moving at the pace of a city afternoon.
The name was a gallery man's joke, borrowed from the New York School of painters, and the poets wore it lightly. What they proved matters to every writer since: that charm is a serious literary power, that a poem can be intimate without being solemn, and that the texture of an ordinary day is inexhaustible material.
History and Key Figures
Most of the group met at Harvard before converging on Manhattan, where the art world employed them: O'Hara as a curator at the Museum of Modern Art, Ashbery and Schuyler as art critics. Painters like Willem de Kooning and Jane Freilicher were friends and collaborators, and the poems absorbed painting's permission to be abstract, quick and unfinished-looking.
O'Hara's Lunch Poems (1964) is the movement's pocket monument, written, the legend goes, on his lunch breaks. His mock-manifesto 'Personism' claims a poem should simply be put between two persons instead of two pages. Ashbery drifted toward the meditative and became the most decorated American poet of his era; Koch carried the comic torch into classrooms, teaching children to write with famous success.
The 'I Do This, I Do That' Poem
O'Hara's signature form narrates a stretch of ordinary time in the present tense: walking, buying a paper, thinking of a friend, until the casual surface cracks and feeling shows through. The craft is in the timing of that crack.
An invented miniature: 'I buy two peaches and argue with nobody, / the bus exhales, a stranger laughs like you did, / and suddenly it is your birthday again, everywhere.' Errand, errand, ambush: that is the mechanism.
Catching the Energy in Your Own Work
Write fast and in the present tense; this style dies in the past perfect. Use real names, shops and street corners. Aim the poem at one specific person, per Personism, and let the address stay warm. Then place a single unguarded line where the reader least expects it. Poems like this feel effortless and are not; if you want an external check on whether the ambush lands, entering one in Writory's monthly contest will get it scored on emotion alongside its charm.
What poets can take from this
- Narrate in the present tense and keep the pace of walking; momentum is part of the meaning.
- Use proper nouns freely: streets, songs, friends' first names all warm the poem.
- Write the whole draft in one sitting; this aesthetic rewards a single continuous mood.
- Plant one sincere, unguarded line amid the wit and give it the poem's best position.
- Read O'Hara's Lunch Poems, then write during your own lunch hour for a week.
Try it yourself
Address a poem to one friend, narrating exactly what you did between noon and one o'clock today, in the present tense, with at least five proper nouns. Somewhere in the last third, allow one sentence of pure unprotected feeling, then return to the errands.
Questions
Why is it called the New York School?
The name was borrowed, half in jest, from the New York School of abstract expressionist painters, since the poets worked inside that art world. It marks a friendship circle and a shared tone rather than a formal doctrine.
What is Personism?
Frank O'Hara's 1959 mock-manifesto, which jokes that he could have telephoned the person instead of writing the poem. Beneath the comedy is a real aesthetic: poems as direct, intimate address, free of grand ambitions and rhetoric.
How does the New York School differ from the Beats?
Both broke with academic formality in the 1950s, but the Beats ran on prophecy, spirituality and the open road, while the New York poets ran on urbanity, irony and art-world play. Roughly: Howl is a sermon, Lunch Poems is a phone call.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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