New York Group

The New York Group is an association of Ukrainian émigré poets that formed in the late 1950s and early 1960s in the USA (mostly in New York) among the young generation of the postwar diaspora. Unlike the statist-heroic Prague School, the New Yorkers consciously distanced themselves from direct political and national-patriotic pathos, concentrating on modernist formal experiment, free verse, surrealist imagery, universal existential problems, and the integration of Ukrainian poetry into the world modern context. To the group belonged Bohdan Boychuk, Yuriy Tarnavsky, Emma Andijewska, Vira Vovk, Bohdan Rubchak, Zhenia Vasylkivska, and Patricia Kylyna. The work of the New York Group, produced beyond the reach of Soviet censorship, substantially broadened the aesthetic horizons of Ukrainian poetry and testified to its capacity for free modern self-expression.