About this site

Welcome to “Locus Solus: The New York School of Poets.”  This site — which I launched in 2013 and which has been called “every New York School fan’s favorite blog” by the Poetry Foundation, “a superb resource” by the Best American Poetry, and “a must-go-to resource” by the Allen Ginsberg Project, and “the ‘go to’ first stop for all things New York School of poets & artists” by the Flow Chart Foundation — is intended to be a place where scholars, critics, poets, students, and anyone else interested in the poets and artists of the New York School can find information and commentary about new books, articles, interviews, and anything else related to the New York School.  It also focuses on the writers, artists, musicians, and other figures who influenced the New York School, as well as on the movement’s profound legacy for later writing, art, and culture more broadly.  (To find out more about the figures and topics I regularly cover on this blog, see the “Categories” listed in the drop-down tab on the right side of the screen, where you can also find the archives for all previous posts, and/or check out this summary I posted to mark the site’s fifth anniversary).

The site’s name, “Locus Solus,” is borrowed from the title of the 1914 novel by the eccentric French writer Raymond Roussel, who was such a formative influence on the poets of the New York School that they used the name Locus Solus for the title of the literary journal they collectively edited and published in the early 1960s (the cover of the first issue can be seen above).

In 2023, to mark the occasion of the 10th anniversary of this blog, the Flow Chart Foundation (the wonderful organization devoted to the legacy of John Ashbery) and the critic Mandana Chaffa generously invited me to have a conversation about the blog, its mission and history, and the New York School more broadly, which was held virtually on Wednesday, June 15, 2023.  You can watch the event here:

I’m a scholar of modern and contemporary poetry who has spent many years reading, teaching, and writing about the New York School of poets.  I have published extensively on Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, James Schuyler, Kenneth Koch, Bernadatte Mayer, and other poets of the New York School and their influence (especially on later movements, like Language poetry).  I’m the author of Beautiful Enemies: Friendship and Postwar American Poetry, which focuses on O’Hara, Ashbery, and Amiri Baraka, Attention Equals Life: The Pursuit of the Everyday in Contemporary Poetry and Culture (which borrows its title from O’Hara, and features chapters on Schuyler and Bernadette Mayer), the recently published book, The Cambridge Introduction to American Poetry Since 1945 (which has an extensive chapter on the movement), and many articles on New York School poetry and poetics.

I am currently editing a book entitled Frank O’Hara In Context (Cambridge University Press), which will consist of about 40 essays by leading scholars of O’Hara and American poetry, both well-established and emerging.  The book aims to offer an unprecedented, comprehensive understanding of O’Hara’s work, life, and influence by locating him within a wide array of contexts and critical frames.

This site came about because I’ve long felt the need for a place on the web that would be specifically devoted to collecting and aggregating information, scholarship, news, resources, and reflection on the New York School of poets, broadly defined.  I’m not interested in reductively defining the “New York School” as a movement or narrowly limiting what gets posted here.  I prefer to see the New York School as a very loose constellation of poets, artists, composers, etc., that spans several generations, and that has tentacles in many different spheres of culture and in different time periods.

My goal is to post links to and commentary on new essays, books, reviews, interviews, poems and volumes of poetry, performances, academic conferences, and any other signs of the New York School’s continuing existence as one of the most vital and influential artistic and literary movements of the past century.

If you’d like to alert me to anything that I may be interested in posting about, please contact me at aepstein@fsu.edu.  Thanks for visiting!