Reframing the New York School: Public Access Poetry and the Screening of Poetic Coterie

Abstract

In a snapshot taken in 1971, the New York School poets Ted Berrigan and John Ashbery pose on the sidewalk in front of the St. Regis Hotel; Berrigan—who stands slightly closer to the camera—raises his palm toward the lens, playfully blotting out half of Ashbery’s face. As the critic Reva Wolf has noted, the staginess of the shot and the poets’ amused expressions, implies a deliberate visual reference to Berrigan’s textual appropriations of Ashbery’s work: