INTRODUCTION The term ‘The New York School of Poets’ was first used in 1961, in an article by John Bernard Myers published in the Californian magazine Nomad. Myers was a hugely energetic impresario of the avant-garde: in the 1940s he’d both edited a poetry magazine called Upstate, and been managing editor of the Surrealist View, set up by Charles Henri Ford and Parker Tyler under the aegis of André Breton. In 1950 he co-founded the Tibor de Nagy Gallery in Manhattan. On the advice of the likes of Clement Greenberg and Willem de Kooning, he assembled an impressive stable of painters that included Fairfield Porter, Larry Rivers, Helen Frankenthaler, and Grace Hartigan. Around the same time Myers also launched a four-page poetry broadside, Semi-Colon, and began issuing limited editions of chapbooks that combined the work of a poet and painter. Among the first of these were Frank O’Hara’s A City Winter (1952) illustrated by Larry Rivers, Kenneth Koch’s Poems (1953) with prints by Nell Blaine, and John Ashbery’s Turandot and Other Poems (1953), which included four drawings by Jane Freilicher. ‘The New York School of Painters’ was a label loosely used to denote the work of abstract expressionists such as Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko, Robert Motherwell, and Franz Kline. Part joke, part provocative assertion of New World supremacy over the School of Paris, it proved immensely effective in promoting the innovations of post-war New York artists to both national and international audiences. Myers no doubt reasoned a similar tactic might help raise the profile of these hitherto neglected experimental poets, who were all interested in avant-garde painting – indeed involved, to varying degrees, in the professional art world: Frank O’Hara worked for over a decade at the Museum of Modern Art, where he was eventually made an Associate Curator, and he frequently collaborated with painters such as Mike Goldberg, Joe Brainard and Larry Rivers; Kenneth Koch also participated in numerous art and theatrical collaborations, and in his late autobiographical poem, ‘A Time Zone’, talks with particular frankness about the inspiration he derived from the New York art scene of the 1950s; John Ashbery earned his keep for most of his life as an art critic for, among others, the international edition of ix