New York Poets for a New Century: When Nothing is Too Much Detail 

Looking at the New York Poets and their artist peers to create collage-inspired poetry.

* This course will take place on the video-conferencing platform ZOOM *

Is there more noise now, in the age of social media, than in 1960s’ New York? Looking at key New York poets Frank O’Hara and James Schuyler, alongside their peers and the poets they inspired, we will talk about chatty tone, breaking rules, and play with putting disparate elements from our daily lives into poems. We’ll explore how a range of apparently random observations and images can combine to form a whole, asking how loose that whole can be, and where we can drop killer lines.

Taking inspiration from post-war collage, assemblage, and pop art, we will look at artists such as Robert Rauschenberg, who combined diverse materials, Lee Krasner, who ripped up and rearranged old work, Pauline Boty, one of the first UK artists to embrace pop culture, and arch collector Peter Blake. 

We will write about our days, what comes into our heads and onto our phones, as well as what runs in our blood, and juxtapost images to create striking effects. Working through multiple short exercises, then piecing them together, participants will be encouraged to create lines that can be ordered in multiple ways to explore various structures and narratives. Will will also look at the famous ‘recipe’ for a New York School poem, then cook up one of our own.

1-off Zoom session at 10.30am – 1pm (BST on Saturday 12th September)

Concessions & Accessibility

To apply for a concession rate, please send relevant documentation showing your eligibility for one of our concessions to [email protected]. Conditions of eligibility are detailed here.

What to Expect

This course is part of The September Sessions: 10 Years of the MA in Writing in Poetry, a series of Zoom workshops celebrating 10 Years of our MA in Writing in Poetry programme. Check out the full line up here.

More information about how our Video Courses work can be found on the Video Courses page. If you have any questions or wish to be added to the waiting list of a sold-out course, please email [email protected]. 

Image Credit: Clément Proust

About Steph Morris View Profile

Steph Morris’ poems have been published in his pamphlet Please don’t trample us; we are trying to grow!, in the magazines Rialto, Ambit, Ink Sweat & Tears, Under the Radar, Finished Creatures, The North, Impossible Architype, Magma and Stoat, in the anthologies Joy//Us – Poems of Queer Joy, Poetry Prescription: Becoming, Up//Roar – Poems of Queer Resistance and in several gardens as part of Poetry School’s Mixed Borders project. He won the 2019 Live Canon Borough Prize and was longlisted in the 2021 National Poetry Competition. He also translates poetry from German, including Austrian modernist Ilse Aichinger’s collection Squandered Advice. He makes visual art, mostly collage, and concrete poetry, using stencil and riso, seen in the Parlour Gallery, at Triangle LGBTQ+ cultural centre in Deptford, the Royal Geographical Society, the Poetry Café, and in magazines such as Streetcake, Mercurius and Aswiri. He has led workshops for the National Maritime Museum, Poetry in Aldeburgh, Pen-to-Print and other organisations. Find Steph on Instagram @herr_morris70 at steph-morris.com and elsewhere. 

"The Poetry School courses are a fantastic entry point into more detailed study of specific elements of poetic craft. I don't think there's any other offering that provides the breadth and depth of courses that The Poetry School does, nor an offering that provides such a fantastic array of tutors."

- Spring 2026 Survey Response