ABSTRACT
A lthough writing alone was not among the categoriesqualifying an artist for legal residence in SoHo proper, a good deal of literature was produced there, much of it obscurely published and barely known, even decades later. The distinctive characteristic of SoHo literature was its close relation, both stylistically and socially, to new ideas in the other arts. More precisely, SoHo writing was concerned, like other SoHo arts, with issues of minimalism and abstraction, of extreme fragmentation; with alternative scale and coherence, of patterning and difficulty; questions of nonart and anti-art, perceptual stretching, and the exploration of media other than one’s initial mastery (which, for writers, would be words for printed pages). Another SoHo ideal has been unique signature-that a work should look or sound like yours and no one else’s-at a time when most aspiring graduates of university writing programs were encouraged to resemble one or another accepted masters. It follows that SoHo writing was not about expressionism or about classicism, not about “poetic feeling” or realistic portrayals.
