The New York School of Poets

David Shapiro is associated with the second generation of the New York School of Poets. "The School" was a loosely defined group of poets whose work was to a large extent inspired by painting and the visual arts. In the introduction to the anthology of the movement that David Shapiro and Ron Padgett co-wrote, you can find the following description of the poetry contained therein (p. xxxv):

We will content ourselves by saying that you might find any kind of poem in this anthology; that is, there never has been any kind of hard and fast notion of how a person ought to write. If he wanted to write a sonnet he could do so without feeling that someone  might look at him sideways, even if his sonnet did have fifteen lines, or fifteen thousand lines. The freedom to work with traditional forms and syntax, and the freedom to work with them freely, to use them as the Muse dictated, or to ignore them altogether, is one of the most cheerful things about these poets; with them, the idea of opposing the tradition of the old to the tradition of the new is positively ludicrous.

The above paragraph implies that the NYS poets had little in common in terms of poetic form and diction. Looking for a common denominator, we might point to the geographical factor: New York as their place of residence and poetic activity. The above statements also bring an accurate characteristic of Shapiro’s own approach to poetry, including to poetry-writing: a non-orthodox literary syncretism or inclusiveness. Reading the poems of the NYS authors, we can see how diverse and differentiated they appear.

Among the first generation NYS poets, we can find John Ashbery, Frank O'Hara, Kenneth Koch, James Schuyler. The second generation (and this ordinal number does not mean they were epigones or imitators - they were simply younger) included Ron Padgett, Ted Berrigan, David Shapiro. The poets were friends with visual artists including Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol, Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning... Some call the interaction that occurred between the painters and the poets "cross-pollination" because they drew inspiration from each other.

It is worth mentioning that in its inclusiveness the NYSoP was an LGBT friendly movement.

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