That many of the New American Poets were gay (Ashbery, Robin Blaser, James Broughton, Duncan, Edward Field, Ginsberg, O’Hara, Peter Orlovsky, James Schuyler, Spicer, Wieners, Jonathan Williams) is not incidental to their quest to find new ways of saying and, by implication (stronger in some than in others) new ways of moving through the world. But those projects were not necessarily or even often conceived of in political terms.

Whatever the New Americans’ interest in social transformation, and whatever forms that interest took, it doesn’t seem to have extended to gender. Only four of the forty-four poets in The New American Poetry are women, and only two of those, Barbara Guest and Denise Levertov, are even heard of now, though Robert Duncan was quite fond of Helen Adam’s romantic ballads. I’m told that it was only at his insistence that she was included at all. That can be seen as commentary on the book's gender politics. But I also wonder what other women were writing and publishing in that mode at the time. The only one I can think of is Diane di Prima, whose first book was published in 1958. Joanne Kyger's first book wasn't published until 1965, and Anne Waldman's (who was only fifteen in 1960, when the anthology was published) not until 1968. I don't think that Allen deliberately excluded women poets. But the paucity of potential female contributors says much about the sexism of the “progressive” or bohemian countercultures of the Nineteen-Fifties and Nineteen-Sixties, especially the Beats, though Gary Snyder does address gender and sexual equality. (The “conservative” anthology against which The New American Poetry is often counterposed, Donald Hall, Robert Pack, and Louis Simpson’s New Poets of England and America, published in 1957, does a bit better, with seven female contributors out of fifty-one total.)

Well, this is it, the last entry in a movimiento here on Harriet, in which I featured every Wednesday (25 Wednesdays to be exact) books that excited me, intrigued me, renewed my faith in poetry. The honor of the send-off goes to poet Alessandra Lynch, for her second collection of poems selected by James Richardson to be part of the Lena-Miles Wever Todd Poetry Series.

This is the second of three posts devoted to the seminal Donald M. Allen anthology The New American Poetry. This post deals with the question of the "New American Poets"'s political commitments, or lack of same.

Some of the poets gathered by Allen did indeed seek to transform society. Some sought to transform consciousness. Some sought to transform writing as a practice. Most just sought to write poems that felt more genuine to them than the products of the poetic orthodoxies of the 1950s. Robert Creeley, for one example, was almost purely concerned with the lyric notation of the moment-to-moment movements of his mind, emotions, and sensibilities. As he wrote in the preface to For Love: Poems 1950-1960, “Not more, say, to live than what there is, to live. I want the poem as close to this fact as I can bring it; or it me” (cited in M. L. Rosenthal, The New Poets 147). This implies a notion of a life more authentic or at least more awake than the one most people live, but has no necessarily political valence: various religious disciplines of attention have the same goal.

John Ashbery was a Yale Younger Poet (and Frank O’Hara almost was, in the same year), and the revolution which interested him was what Julia Kristeva calls a revolution in poetic language, largely inherited from such forebears as Raymond Roussel and Gertrude Stein, what he calls in the title of his Charles Eliot Norton lectures at Harvard “other traditions” (including Thomas Lovell Beddoes, Laura Riding, John Brooks Wheelwright, and David Schubert). It’s important to note that Ashbery has cited such canonical figures as W.H. Auden and Wallace Stevens as among the poets who most shaped his poetic idiom.

It's taken me a while to post this piece, as I've been beset by chemotherapy side effects of my colon cancer treatment, especially a debilitating bout of chemo fatigue, and a nasty cold on top of this, which just seems unfair. But when has my life ever been fair?

Much of what poet and critic Joshua Corey understatedly calls the “remarkable storm of controversy” occasioned (but not caused) by my attempt to describe a phenomenon, “post-avant garde poetry,” much mentioned but little defined, was aroused by my linking of current “post-avant” poetry with what has been called “the New American Poetries,” after the famous Donald M. Allen anthology The New American Poetry, published by Grove Press in 1960. This observation was purely descriptive, not evaluative. The poets often referred to as “post-avants” have clearly been influenced by the New American Poetries. But there is much disagreement about who has the right to claim the New Americans as their inheritance, as if their work and its legacy were something to be owned. But no one can lay exclusive claim to an artistic heritage or tradition. Such things are available to all, which is one of the many ways in which literature improves on life.

In turn, this debate derives from how one interprets that work and that legacy. The two main claims that have been made are a) that the very diverse poets gathered under the rubric “New American Poetry” were political and/or social revolutionaries and b) that they shared a program of total or near-total negation. I will investigate both these claims.

I hope that this series of posts will prompt debate, but I also hope that the debate will maintain a reasoned and reasonable tone. Shouting matches do nothing but make one hoarse, and personal attacks do nothing but make one mean.

This first post discusses the anthology as a whole and its work in producing the grouping we now call "the New American Poetries" out of a number of poets whose work often had very little in common. The second post will focus on the artistic statements of individual contributors. The first post will address broader issues of the relationship between "progressive" art and "progressive" politics. I won't spoil the ending.

Say what you will about this conference, it’s the one I look forward to every year. And I hope to see you there. I’m on two panels this time around, and I’ll spare you the details. I’d rather promote other happenings, like the annual Con Tinta Pachanga, one of the many off-site events made possible because the Chicano/Latino writers wanted to have a community space of their own during this reunion-at-large of writers. All are welcome.

I attend at least two poetry readings a month in New York City. A few venues I check on periodically like The Bowery Poetry Club and Cornelia Street Café—both are fabulous spaces that lend themselves to the intimacy between a reader and an audience. So when the time came that I decided to curate my own series, I turned to Angelo Verga, poet and best friend of the NYC poetry scene.

These Jeanne Moreau-ish Bourgeois eyeballs (cast upward as, we are told, is proper to champagne sipping) led me to the entrance of the Williams College Museum of Art in a faint drizzle. Autumn has a light touch here: a burgundy fringe on the roadside, gold and blush in haptic patches on the tree crowns, like the burnish on a pear.

Inside, Modernism Concentrate: a Larry Rivers, a Diebenkorn, a deKooning, a Cornell—bang bang bang. Upstairs, a perfect Pisarro. A perfect Piero della Francesca. I wandered through the exhibition on Gerald and Sara Murphy, pausing at video of a Stravinsky ballet that made the hackles on my neck rise as I recalled the quote from Edith Sitwell’s A Poet’s Notebook that I had just been reading that morning in a coffeeshop:

YOU ARE BEAUTIFUL (YAB) is my favorite public art collective based in Chicago.