Conversations with New York School Poets

Conversations with New York School Poets is the first multi-generational oral history of the New York School of poets. It comprises 25 interviews with living (and recently passed) American poets poets, carried out over a three-year period, in which the question of what (and who) constitutes the New York School is provocatively explored in the context of excitingly talkative and wide-ranging conversations. The book features conversations with poets of global renown including Eileen Myles, Anne Waldman, Alice Notley, Ron Padgett, Clark Coolidge, Patricia Spears Jones, Bernadette Mayer, and John Yau, each speaking in captivating ways about where and how the New York School lives, and about the environments and communities from which their poetry emerged, particularly The Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church, tracing the stories of their journeys through New York, through poetry, and through friendships with one another. Each interview is rigorous, intimate, and well-informed, and is framed around a set of similar questions, whilst also making room for tangential conversations. It contains plenty of gossip but plenty of what Padgett calls the ‘nuts and bolts’ of poetic writing too, and it offers readers the opportunity to learn about the poetry of the New York School through the voices of the poets themselves. Extensive in scope and coverage, Conversations with New York School Poets is an invaluable archive of New York City’s, and the wider United States’s, modern and contemporary writing cultures.