Unimportant Clerks: The New York School Poets and the Culture of Bureaucracy

Central to the work of the New York School poets is an operative tension—their writing both reflects and contests a midcentury administrative and bureaucratic ethos. 

As emergent writers in a highly administered era, the New York School poets by necessity cultivated their imaginations into an everyday cultural practice: the refusal of work, its bureaucratic systems, and conditions.