rk poets were devoted to the belief that "every moment has its validity" and that, in the process of creation, one should try "to be the work yourself." New York's environment provided a brilliant backdrop for their poetry, alive with odd juxtapositions, shuttling at top speed between high culture and pop culture. The quotidian details of life and the social activities of friends provided the basis for elegant, witty riffs on modern urban life. The New York poets often looked to non-American or non-literary artists_notably the Abstract Expressionist painters, the Surrealists and Dadaists, and the composer John Cage for their inspiration. Frank O'Hara wrote a manifesto, "Person-ism," that mockingly declared "the death of poetry as we know it"; focusing on the essence of poetry as the expression between two people, O'Hara said he could use a telephone instead of writing a poem. O'Hara, a prolific poet as well as an energetic social organizer, curator, and critic, became the group's ringleader; his premature death at the age of forty was widely mourned. Edwin Denby was introduced to the circle in 1952, although he was a generation older and was best known for his dance criticism. LeRoi Jones (who changed his name to Amiri Baraka in the 1970s) wrote ground-breaking works about African American identity, and he also edited a magazine, Yugen, that linked the New York School poets, the Black Mountain poets, and the Beat Generation. Describing himself, John Ashbery observed that he uses words as an abstract painter uses paint, creating in his poems a sense of the conscious mind as it processes the world. This attention to the details and juxtaposition of urban modern life also inflects the poetry of James Schuyler, Barbara Guest, Kenneth Koch, and Kenward Elmslie. Just as the Beat Generation's social constellation was rooted in Columbia University, the New York School's roots are in Harvard, where O'Hara, Ashbery, Elmslie, and Koch spent their ...
