{"product_id":"unimportant-clerks","title":"Unimportant Clerks","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eExamines the ambivalent, often critical relationship of the New York School poets to bureaucratic culture and the conditions of work.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eUnimportant Clerks\u003c\/i\u003e identifies a central tension in the writing of the New York School poets: at times their poetry replicates the ideology of bureaucracy while at others—and more persistently—it repudiates related principles of efficiency, routine, and regimentation. Frank O'Hara, John Ashberry, Barbara Guest, James Schuyler, and Eileen Myles each had a clerical or secretarial job at the start of their professional careers. Heirs to Melville's Bartleby and antecedents of our own era of \"quiet quitting,\" they by necessity channeled their creativity into everyday practices of refusing work. Drawing on a range of anti-work traditions, movements, and theories, \u003ci\u003eUnimportant Clerks\u003c\/i\u003e shows how their poetry reflects and contests a midcentury administrative ethos, anticipating contemporary critiques of precarity and the demands of office work.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"State University of New York Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":55554905964888,"sku":"9798855803341","price":106.99,"currency_code":"EUR","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0278\/1295\/4195\/files\/9798855803341_7efac518-b370-436a-8276-ad4329ed24cd.jpg?v=1777987842","url":"https:\/\/agendabookshop.com\/products\/unimportant-clerks","provider":"Agenda Bookshop","version":"1.0","type":"link"}