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Enlarge Cover
list price: $18.95
edition:Paperback
category: Literary Criticism
published: Mar 2005
ISBN:9780889224865
publisher:
Talonbooks
Description
Donald M. Allen’s anthology The New American Poetry, published by Grove Press / Evergreen in the U.S.A. and the U.K., burst onto the literary scene in 1960 to become the single most important and influential book of poetry in the English language published in the second half of the 20th century.
Conceived originally as a collection intended to augment the anthologies of the 1950s with the work of American poets whose careers had flourished since the Second World War, it became, through the influence of Charles Olson (Donald Allen was his editor at Grove Press), a radical and revolutionary manifesto that echoed around the world.
Spanning the period from the modernists through the poets of Origin and The Black Mountain Review, the San Francisco Renaissance, the Beat Generation, the New York poets of the Poet’s Theatre, to the first mapping and performance of a new poetry and poetics from the racial, sexual, aboriginal and cultural margins of a formerly Euro-centric and chauvinist poetry, The New American Poetry became as liberating a movement in writing and letters worldwide as abstract expressionism has been in the visual arts, and as jazz has been in music.
Poet to Publisher: Charles Olson’s Correspondence with Donald Allen tells the story of how that happened.
Contributor Notes
Ralph Maud is the author of Charles Olson Reading (1996) and the editor of The Selected Letters of Charles Olson (2000.) He has edited much of Dylan Thomas’s work, including The Notebook Poems 1930–1934 and The Broadcasts, and is co-editor, with Walford Davies, of Dylan Thomas: The Collected Poems, 1934–1953 and Under Milk Wood. Maud is also the editor of The Salish People: Volumes I, II, III & IV by pioneer ethnographer Charles Hill-Tout. In addition, he has done extensive work on the translation collaboration between Henry W. Tate and Franz Boas, including the book, Transmission Difficulties: Franz Boas and Tsimshian Mythology.
Editorial Reviews
“The letters make fascinating reading for their commentary on writers…and literary issues from 1957 to 1969 … ”
—Canadian Literature
“More than forty years after its first publication, Donald Allen’s The New American Poetry, 1945–1960 continues actively in print. Here is Allen’s collected correspondence with the master poet Charles Olson, which so shaped and defined that initiating work. Together, they undertook to change the formal disposition of poetry and so brought forward those then unknowns, who were to ‘make it new’ for American poets in all the years since.”
—Robert Creeley
