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  3. Home

  5. Sound, Shape, and Space: Received and Invented Forms

  7. Telling Secrets: The Lyric “I,” Epistolaries, and Confessions

  9. The Poem in Telephone Lines and Other Thoughts on Tone, Talk, and Voice in Poetry

  11. Writing Out of Surrealism

  13. Duende, Deep Image, and The Poetics of Spells

  17. The Poetics of Liberation

  19. Writing the Body

  21. The Racial Imaginary

  24. Writing in the Field

  26. Docupoetics and Other Forms of Lyric Research



The Poem in Telephone Lines: The Poem in Telephone Lines and Other Thoughts on Tone, Talk, and Voice in Poetry

For Further Reading

  • You can read excerpts from Frank O’Hara’s “The Personism Manifesto,” which we mentioned and quoted from in this chapter.
  • You can read Cathy Park Hong’s “Delusions of Whiteness in the Avant Garde,” which we reference in the chapter.
    You can read Daniel Borzutsky’s response to this essay “Delusions of Progress."
  •  For an overview of the history, aesthetics, and politics of The New York School, we highly recommend Maggie Nelson’s book, Women, The New York School, and Other True Abstractions. Alas there’s no link for this one, you’ll need to order a book from the library or your bookstore the old fashioned way. We promise it’s worth it!
  • In this essay David Graham coins the term “ultra-talk” which many poets have gone on to use to describe a particular mode in contemporary poetry that is heavily influenced by the New York School style.

The New York School Poets

We alluded to a few of the major figures in The New York School in this chapter and we also quoted a few lines from their works. But if you haven’t encountered them in literature classes on American Literature or Modernist poetry, we recommend checking becoming familiar with more of their poems and their ways of using voice in poetry. 

We also suggest checking out Frank O’Hara’s poem “Katy,” the last line of which helped inspire Roger Reeves’s poem “Someday I’ll Love Roger Reeves," both of which influenced Ocean Vuong’s poem “Someday I’ll Love Ocean Vuong."

Playing with Talk, Voice, and Tone

To continue reading poets writing in the tradition opened by The New York School poets, we recommend:

Telling a Full Story of Voice and Language

For many poets the use of English as their medium is fraught. It may be both the language of their colonial oppressors and their mother tongue. It may be a language that was forced on them in schools or that they were criticized for using in ways that did not match the dialect of the power elite. It may be that the capitalist and power dynamics that shape the publishing industry make English the best language for reaching their readers, even as they lose something essential in translation. Here are some poets who lean into these questions and challenges as an essential component of their approach to voice, language, and craft:

You may recognize the names on this list from a similar list in the supplementary materials to “The Racial Imaginary.” When you are exploring poetic lineages, paths often criss-cross along the way. 

Writing in Conversation with Artists

A major characteristic of the New York School was the way their poetry was composed out of collaborative conversations, performances, and experiments with visual artists. Many writers working today are inspired by that tradition, even if their own writings are quite different in form and theme from the characteristic style of the New York School poets. Here are just a few poets who practice ekphrasis, poems written in response to other works of art: 

Persona Poems

In this chapter we asked you to consider how the “I” in a poem might be a construction or character that is distinct from the person and personality of the writer. In persona poems the poet creates an elaborate mask that they don in a theatrical way, to ensure the reader is alert to the distance between the speaker and the poet. Often poets choose figures from myth, fairy tales, or popular culture to serve as the personas.

Consider starting your investigation in persona poems by reading this article on the form at the Academy of American Poets website.