Spatial Poetics

Emphatically coming after the enthusiastic, dexterous, and avant-garde First Generation New York School poets, the Second Generation New York School poets Ted Berrigan, Alice Notley, Ron Padgett, and Joe Brainard engaged with highways and byways of both the poetic line and Manhattan’s grid. These poets lived in and wrote from alternative domestic spaces—untidy, disordered, congested apartments in downtown New York City. This study argues that the forms of their poems are accordingly untraditional, highlighting how New York School stanzas often take on the contours of these spaces, becoming linguistic rooms riddled with the tensions of urban life. Building on recent urban and spatial theory, this book offers a history and close reading of Second Generation New York School Poetry, which reads into the subtle formal elements of this supposedly wild poetry, while also suggesting that the dimensions of lived in urban space inform those elements. This first examination of the formal ramifications of Second Generation New York School poetry aims to situate these later twentieth-century American poetries within larger critical narratives of postmodern American innovation.