Examines the ambivalent, often critical relationship of the New York School poets to bureaucratic culture and the conditions of work.
Unimportant Clerks identifies a central tension in the writing of the New York School poets: at times their poetry replicates the ideology of bureaucracy while at others-and more persistently-it repudiates related principles of efficiency, routine, and regimentation. Frank O'Hara, John Ashberry, Barbara Guest, James Schuyler, and Eileen Myles each had a clerical or secretarial job at the start of their professional careers. Heirs to Melville's Bartleby and antecedents of our own era of "quiet quitting," they by necessity channeled their creativity into everyday practices of refusing work. Drawing on a range of anti-work traditions, movements, and theories, Unimportant Clerks shows how their poetry reflects and contests a midcentury administrative ethos, anticipating contemporary critiques of precarity and the demands of office work.
Rezensionen / Stimmen
"Compelling, generative, and original, Unimportant Clerks takes a relatively well-known set of poets and shines a light into a fascinating aspect of their work and approach. Jason Lagapa writes with elan, and his deep knowledge of the period will make the volume a useful resource for literary historians and critics interested in mid-twentieth-century US culture." - Douglas Field, author of Walking in the Dark: James Baldwin, My Father, and Me
"While many studies lean on biographical and geographic connections among the New York School poets, Lagapa shows how they make sense as a coherent group, drawing out a strong ethos tying their work together." - Scarlett Higgins, author of Collage and Literature: The Persistence of Vision
Sprache
Verlagsort
Zielgruppe
Für höhere Schule und Studium
US School Grade: College Graduate Student and over
Maße
Höhe: 235 mm
Breite: 157 mm
Dicke: 18 mm
Gewicht
ISBN-13
979-8-8558-0334-1 (9798855803341)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Klassifikation
Jason Lagapa is a Lecturer within the Synthesis Program in the Seventh College at the University of California, San Diego. He is the author of Negative Theology and Utopian Thought in Contemporary American Poetry: Determined Negations.
Acknowledgments
Introduction Unimportant Clerks: the New York School Poets and the Culture of Bureaucracy
1. I'll Concentrate More on My Work: W.H. Auden and Poetry as Serious Play
2. To Ignore the Rules Is Always a Provocation: Frank O'Hara and the End of Bureaucracy
3. Accounts Must Be Reexamined: John Ashbery and the Bureaucratic Mind
4. Barbara Guest's Office Inventory: Three Desks, a Water Cooler, and a Dictaphone
5. It Won't Last: Monuments, Counter-Monuments, and James Schuyler's Trials of Affiliation
6. On Being Companionable: Eileen Myles's Afterglow and the Administration of Care
Conclusion Toward a (New) Bureaucratic Sublime
Notes
Works Cited
Index
