There are some basic similarities but huge differences.

ONe huge difference is that the Beats did not think of themselves as existing
in the art world in any common sense of that term--would not have proudly
described themselves as concerned with "the aesthetic." The New York School
of poets were very much and happily involved with the "art world," the world
of museums, of galleries, of "art talk." O'Hara, Koch and Ashbery liked
nothing more than to listen and be part of "art talk" (with all the elitist
connotations) with no notion that there was anything to *DO* with such talk.
O'Hara's poems are sometimes nothing more than reports on that kind of talk.
"What I did" today is often "what I heard people say." Beat poems are
typically what people do and say; New York School poems are often what people
say and don't really need to *do*. Even love for O'Hara and Ashbery (see
"Some Trees") are about human relation as established through communication.

Another huge difference is that Ashbery and O'Hara wrote a LYRIC poetic line.
(Read aloud the end of "Like" and hear how lovely and lyric the lines are.
Ashbery, as we'll learn tonight, is the same way.) The Beats of course IN THE
END must be considered great lyric poets (especially Ginsberg and Kerouac)
but they were avoiding any established sense of the lyric quality of a line.
Ashbery poems are often beautiful in the conventional sense even while you
don't understand (as a matter of content, of meaning) what the hell he's
saying. They are amazing in this regard. 

The New York Poets were (and to some degree are) more attached to the
modernist idea that poetry is always nothing more than surfaces, than words.
The Beats, at least consciously, wanted to "get beyond" the self-conscious
"mere words" quality of modernist poetry, which they found "too aesthetic" or
"too concerned with the aesthetic" and thus limited in terms of actual lived
experience. As you know from "The Instruction Manual," Ashbery could
delightedly MOCK the idea that experience is a guide to living. Words are.

In general the New York Poets derive more obviously as postmodernists from
modernism than the Beats. The Beats' relation to modernism is quite vexed.
They have some relation to Williams but only insofar as Williams was to them
Whitmanian. They love the "visionary romantic" side of modernism (typically
more French than American or British).

--Al
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