Unimportant Clerks

The New York School Poets and the Culture of Bureaucracy

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.

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