As with Isms, the designation ‘School’ tends to signify that a retrospective and ultimately academic exercise in mapping an aspect of culture is under way. Just as no artist or poet has (to my knowledge, anyway) leapt forward to proclaim their postmodernism, waiting instead to have it thrust upon them by cultural cartographers, so there comes a familiar moment of ritual disavowal in die narrative of a movement, group or School when its members back away from the implications of tutelage and uniformity. In the case of the New York School of Poets, external circumstances have also played an important role. In a melancholy irony, one turning point in the evolution of the group came with the death of a key member, Frank O'Hara (1926–66), and another came in 1976, when John Ashbery (1927–) won a trio of prestigious literary awards including the Pulitzer Prize for Self–Portrait in a Convex Mirror and so vacated the coterie for die canon. Academically speaking, Ashbery was sprung by Harold Bloom, whose allegedly deconstructionist diough basically Freudian dieory of the ‘anxiety of influence’ was about to reach its own peak of academic influence. Bloom's model for poetry was rooted in the figure of die poet as a battling individualist, locked in conscious or unconscious combat with powerful precursors whose work had to be internalised before it could be superseded. The concept of any group, coterie or movement of poets was therefore troubling to this essentially patrilineal psychodrama of tradition and the individual talent.