Contents

Chapters in this book

1. Frontmatter i
2. Contents vii
3. Acknowledgments ix
4. Introduction. Unimportant Clerks: the New York School Poets and the Culture of Bureaucracy 1
5. Chapter 1 I’ll Concentrate More on My Work: W.H. Auden and Poetry as Serious Play 25
6. Chapter 2 To Ignore the Rules Is Always a Provocation: Frank O’Hara and the End of Bureaucracy 47
7. Chapter 3 Accounts Must Be Reexamined: John Ashbery and the Bureaucratic Mind 67
8. Chapter 4 Barbara Guest’s Office Inventory: Three Desks, a Water Cooler, and a Dictaphone 91
9. Chapter 5 It Won’t Last: Monuments, Counter-Monuments, and James Schuyler’s Trials of Affiliation 117
10. Chapter 6 On Being Companionable: Eileen Myles’s Afterglow and the Administration of Care 143
11. Conclusion. Toward a (New) Bureaucratic Sublime 169
12. Notes 185
13. Works Cited 195
14. Index 203