Unimportant Clerks

Examines the ambivalent, often critical relationship of the New York School poets to bureaucratic culture and the conditions of work.

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.

Jason Lagapa is a Lecturer within the Synthesis Program in the Seventh College at the University of California, San Diego. He is the author of Negative Theology and Utopian Thought in Contemporary American Poetry: Determined Negations.

Jason Lagapa is a Lecturer within the Synthesis Program in the Seventh College at the University of California, San Diego. He is the author of Negative Theology and Utopian Thought in Contemporary American Poetry: Determined Negations.

"Compelling, generative, and original, Unimportant Clerks takes a relatively well-known set of poets and shines a light into a fascinating aspect of their work and approach. Jason Lagapa writes with elan, and his deep knowledge of the period will make the volume a useful resource for literary historians and critics interested in mid-twentieth-century US culture." — Douglas Field, author of Walking in the Dark: James Baldwin, My Father, and Me

"While many studies lean on biographical and geographic connections among the New York School poets, Lagapa shows how they make sense as a coherent group, drawing out a strong ethos tying their work together." — Scarlett Higgins, author of Collage and Literature: The Persistence of Vision