'The New American Poetry' revisited, again.

Publication: Contemporary Literature

Publication Date: 22-JUN-98

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COPYRIGHT 1998 University of Wisconsin Press

In terms of its defining "anti-academic" role in the 1960s anthology wars, its impact on later collections and editors, its importance for later poets, and its central place in most readings or structurings of postwar literary history, Donald Allen's The New American Poetry (1960) is generally considered the single most influential poetry anthology of the post-World War II period. A high percentage of the largely unknown Black Mountain, New York school, San Francisco Renaissance, Beat, and other poets whom Allen introduced to a broader reading public went on to significant writing careers, and a number have become widely read, taught, anthologized, and commented upon. As regards writing practice, The New American Poetry, more than any other anthology, helped promote and canonize ideas of field composition based on Charles Olson's "Projective Verse"; a (re)definition of poetic form as immanent and processual; a poetics of dailiness and of the personal (as distinct from the confessional); and a poetry of humor and play (as distinct from wit). It is the anthology, in short, that marked the early postmodern turn, in Charles Altieri's terms, "from symbolist thought to immanence." And it retains enough staying power as an anthological touchstone for alternative poetries that editors of avant-garde anthologies continue to invoke it as a model over thirty years after its publication.(1)

The New American Poetry's imminent reprinting (with a new afterword) from the University of California Press--that rarest of fates for an earlier poetry anthology--both stands as further testimony to the text's historical importance and makes this an especially fitting moment to examine the process of that text's original construction. The process of editing poetry anthologies is still rarely discussed in concrete detail, even while it is assumed to be a highly contingent one. It is also a social process. Initiated and completed as an individual labor of love (Allen typed the whole manuscript himself), The New American Poetry also reveals a good deal about the possible role of poets, and the networks to which they belong, in compiling an influential anthology. The collection is as much the product of multiple, interacting poetic communities and affiliations, of correspondence among contributors and editor, as it is the work of an individual editor himself. In this sense, The New American Poetry is very much a communal construction or shared enterprise.

The New American Poetry, then, provides a revealing case study of the variables involved in producing what has become a canonical anthology. Such contingencies can be divided into two kinds, those of construction and of reception. The former includes everything that affects the evolving ambitions, contents, and organization of the anthology: the resistance (in this case, Robert Duncan) or input (Charles Olson) of major contributors; the differences and conflicts among groups and individuals represented, particularly relevant to an anthology structured around poetic communities; the back ground of cultural debate out of which the anthology emerges (the embattled relationship between a so-called academic and an alternative poetics); the race and gender politics of the anthology's moment (which, while not thoroughly determining, are still more likely than not to shape the text). The latter includes reviews, popular and critical reception, reception among other poets, and classroom use. While I will pay some attention later in this essay to the context of The New American Poetry's reception by discussing debates over the question of the "academic," I will devote myself mainly to the process of the anthology's construction. My governing question, then, is this: how did The New American Poetry--this venerable institution of alternative poetics--come to take the form that it finally did?

One irony of The New American Poetry's place in recent literary history is that Allen's ambitions for the anthology (like its scale in relation to later, comparable texts) were quite modest, out of all proportion to the text's eventual impact. In a July 18, 1958 letter to Cid Corman, Allen writes of his plans to devote "320 pages [rather than the final 362] to the poetry" of "about 25 poets" (the final total is 44) in a book "to be of interest for a couple of years--then to be replaced by another view."(2) Other correspondence from the period reveals this to be the standard description that Allen circulated to prospective contributors. He apparently had no plans at this time for the "Statements of Poetics" section that became one of the means by which his poets announced their differences from a theory-phobic mainstream.(3) He was also mulling over the volume that eventually became The Poetics of the New American Poetry (1973), and this plan may well underlie the "Statements on Poetics" in The New American Poetry--that section being, then, a kind of stopgap measure or mini-volume in the absence of a full, independent book.

So much for Allen's original ambitions. What about his evolving sense of the anthology's contents and organization? Fairly late in the editorial process, Allen still had a conception of The New American Poetry significantly different from its final form. When he mailed a contract and descriptive form letter to Robin Blaser on September 24, 1958, he was hoping for a spring 1959 publication. The plan is still to devote around 300 pages to the work of "25 to 30 poets," with a brief preface, biographical notes, and APR-style "photos of the poets." As regards organization, "the arrangement of the poems will be alphabetical by name of author, I think." The working title is still, as it had been from the beginning, "Anthology of Modern American Poetry (1948 to 1958-59)."(4) In terms of presentation, then, Allen here has in mind a much more conventional anthology than he finally produced, something paradoxically closer in format to later, more mainstream collections.

Soon after this communication with Blaser, and still thinking the book only a few months away from publication, Allen sent Robert Creeley a tentative list of contents--one that features no women poets except Denise Levertov and that does not mention a number of the San Francisco poets whose work he finally used. His "maybe" category at this point contains both eventual exclusions (Theodore Enslin, William Bronk) and inclusions (Bruce Boyd, Blaser), and he asks for Creeley's help in making the Larry Eigner selections. Creeley's October 8, 1958 reply adds another spice to the potpourri: "What about Jonathan Williams?" One year later, in September 8, 1959 letters to Creeley and Charles Olson, Allen is still vacillating on whether to provide historical context by including post-1945 work from an older, high modernist generation and a middle generation of Louis Zukofsky, Kenneth Rexroth, Paul Goodman, and perhaps Kenneth Patchen.(5) A number of writers whom he includes here in a general "new poets" group end up placed elsewhere in the anthology, while Creeley, in his September 11, 1959 response, proposes dropping Goodman and suggests that "Bronk is marginal, more Stevens than anything" (although seven months earlier he had recommended Bronk).

Also at issue for Allen was the use of longer poems or excerpted sequences, about which he seems to have vacillated considerably. He frequently states in his correspondence that he will not use longer pieces; as late as October 15, 1959, he writes to Duncan that "I've not included Howl, nor other very long poems, and have avoided taking excerpts from long poems, with the exception of 2 of the Maximus letters." In a draft paragraph finally cut from his preface, however, he argues that "one prominent feature of the period is the recreated long poem," with Duncan's The Venice Poem (1948) "the first sustained achievement." Among other longer poems, Olson's "The Kingfishers .... remains one of the starting posts for the course" (a phrasing that actually derives from an October 3, 1959 Olson letter to Allen), and Howl "has already assumed the status of The Waste Land for our age"--claims that eventually show up, in revised form, on the jacket blurb. This lost paragraph reminds one of how many longer poems The New American Poetry does indeed include or excerpt. In it Allen mentions Duncan's "Poem Beginning with a Line from Pindar" and work by Jack Spicer, Gregory Corso, Frank O'Hara, Stuart Perkoff, Gary Snyder, Edward Marshall, and Michael McClure; one could add Allen Ginsberg's "Kaddish" and selections by Jack Kerouac, Kenneth Koch, and Ray Bremser. In the cases of Marshall, Spicer, and Kerouac, the poet's sole representation is from a long poem or excerpted sequence. This use of longer poems or excerpts (running up to eleven pages for Snyder and Mar shall) is both consistent with the anthology's promotion of a poetics of exploratory process and a vivid contrast with the emphasis on the self-contained artifact of Donald Hall, Robert Pack, and Louis Simpson's rival New Poets of England and America, where the only selection that stretches to four of that text's smaller pages is extracts from W. D. Snodgrass's Heart's Needle.

On November 6, 1959, Allen wrote to Olson that he had just delivered the anthology to the printer, but with "a couple of items, chiefly Duncan's statement on poetics still to come." His thinking about the contents seems to have been in process up to the last minute. On October 29, 1959 (one week before delivering the manuscript), Allen told Duncan that "I've had a long visit with Sanders Russell" and "I plan to include him in the collection"; Russell never made the cut, however. Further changes in the contents--changes of poems, though not of names--took place even in the late stage of page proofs. In this stage, Allen dropped poems by Duncan, O'Hara, James Broughton, Richard Duerden, Philip Lamantia, Peter Orlovsky, and Kirby Doyle; he also added a poem written as late as December 12, 1959, O'Hara's "Hotel Transylvanie"; and he apparently changed his choice of Helen Adam's work in response to a December 23, 1959 letter from Duncan pushing her "I Love My Love." He made structural changes such as removing Gilbert Sorrentino from the Black Mountain section of the anthology and inserting Ebbe Borregaard into the San Francisco Renaissance section. He also changed the order of numerous poets' selections to reflect the chronological order of composition, apparently in response to late information from his contributors. Responding to page proofs on December 27, 1959, for instance, Olson wrote: "the only significant change is the dates of composition. Which will shift the order, of the 'Harrison'-'55, to before the Satyrs if you wanted to maintain it."(6)

Perhaps the most influential figure in the final product, Olson was also crucial to the editing of The New American Poetry, and his advice seems to have played a significant role in the conceptualizing and shaping of the anthology. The Olson-Allen correspondence, which contains numerous mentions of Allen's visits to Olson's home in Gloucester, suggests that much of their discussion of the anthology took place in person.(7) After one visit, for instance, Allen writes on June 3,1959 to thank Olson "for that great carrying gift of a plan for the anthology.(8) On August 14, 1959, he is still pondering the problem of organization, the twin issues of how to group his contemporaries and whether to include an earlier generation of writers. A September 9, 1959 letter to Olson reveals his continuing ambivalence about contents and organization. Here he considers an organization that implies a rather different historical argument from that which he finally used: a brief modernist section as a way to "show continuations, and also departures," followed by a section of mid-century "continuers"--a section that he quickly comes to see, however, as "pretty meaningless." (One can only speculate how much an appearance in The New American Poetry might have advanced the serious reception of Louis Zukofsky's work.) He does know, however, the...

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