The question came up concerning the New American Poetry. I’m always referring to it here as though everyone understands the reference. Could I give, perhaps, a reading list that would capture that phenomenal mid-century confluence of poets who changed the writing of the U.S. Here’s a list with which to start. I should note that I often prefer to get the early books themselves rather than the later collected editions (I tend to have both if I can afford it).

 

The Allen Anthology, the New American Poetry, is the obvious place to start. The 44 poets here offered the first clear collective alternative to the School of Quietude since the Objectivists of the 1930s. This book to some degree rescued modernism, showing that the influences of Pound, Williams, Zukofsky et al had not come to some dead end during the Second World War.

 

David Ossman's collection of interviews, The Sullen Art, would be my second book. Like a lot of what follows, you will need to go through a rare book service (e.g. ABEbooks.com) to find this. It’s well worth the effort. Ossman, a member of the comedy troupe, Firesign Theater, talks to Rexroth, Paul Carroll, Blackburn, Rothenberg, Kelly, Robert Bly, John Logan, Gilbert Sorrentino, Creeley, W.S. Merwin, Denise Levertov, LeRoi Jones, Ed Dorn & Ginsberg. This is very much “in the thick of things,” for example trying to figure out if the “Deep Image” poetry associated then with Rothenberg, Kelly, Bly & James Wright is really a literary movement or not (not was the answer).

 

The second issue of Evergreen Review, a "SF Renaissance" issue, which includes Rexroth, Brother Antoninus, Duncan, Ferlinghetti, Henry Miller, McClure, Josephine Miles, Spicer, Michael Rumaker, Jim Broughton, Snyder, Whalen, Kerouac (“This Railroad Earth”, one of his very best pieces), and Ginsberg (“Howl”). With some critical pieces on music (Ralph Gleason) and the visual arts (Dore Ashton), photos by Harry Redl. There were a lot of copies of this & it’s not that hard to find. Possibly the most awesome issue of any magazine ever.

 

The Poetics of the New American Poetry, edited by Don Allen & Warren Tallman (includes pieces by Blake, H.D., Lorca, Mac Low, Stein, Whitman, Williams, Zukofsky & Pound in addition to true NAPs). Published a little later, 1973, I think this was the first book I ever owned that had Poetics in its title. LeRoi Jones has become Baraka by this time. This book was an open acknowledgement of the importance of theory to the NAP, something a number of the younger ones felt quite uncomfortable with.

 

New American Story, edited by Allen & Creeley. Burroughs, Kerouac, Rumaker, Creeley, William Eastlake, Hubert Selby Jr., Ed Dorn, LeRoi Jones, John Rechy, Douglas Woolf. The importance of prose – and of writers like Selby, Rechy & Woolf – can’t be underestimated. Everything from the new narrative to a lot of post-1970 prose poetry can be traced back here.

 

A Controversy of Poets, edited by Robert Kelly & Paris Leary. An attempt to put the NAP (and by then newer poets such as Mac Low) alongside School of Quietude poets like Robert Lowell (the only poet they agreed on, Robert Duncan, refused to participate). It's a great book. Going alphabetically let it start with Ashbery, Blackburn & Blaser, then end with Zukofsky. With only one exception, the names you won’t recognize all come from the School o’ Q.

 

An Anthology of New York Poets, edited by Ron Padgett & David Shapiro. This was the bible of the 2^nd generation NY School, as near as I can tell. It also was the book that put Schuyler first. It put Clark Coolidge second.

 

Like the above, Tom Clark’s All Stars, George Quasha’s Active Anthology and Clayton Eshleman’s Caterpillar Anthology all represent good collections of how this writing evolved through the 1960s. Clark’s is interesting for its joining of the NY School with Beats & some post-Black Mountain poets. It too put Clark Coolidge second, after Michael McClure.

 

Then after that, I'd be into specific texts:

 

• Ginsberg, Howl, Kaddish (then, later, from Fall of America, “Wichita Vortex Sutra” & “Wales Visitation”)
• Wieners, the Hotel Wentley Poems – the first true out of the closet book of poems in America.
• Ferlinghetti, Coney Island of the Mind, immensely popular because it made every high school kid think “I could do that”
• Kerouac, Visions of Cody, On the Road – Cody is the masterpiece.
• McClure, Ghost Tantras; A Dark Book, A Book of Torture
• Creeley, For Love, Words, Pieces. The essays from A Quick Graph.
• Olson, The Mayan Letters, Human Universe (the early essays), the Maximus Poems, the non-Max poems first published in The Distances
• O'Hara, Lunch Poems, Meditations in an Emergency
• Joanne Kyger, The Tapestry and the Web – the one poet who fits into virtually every subgrouping one wishes to make of this period (she is the secret to the NAP jigsaw puzzle)
• Ashbery, the first 3 books (then add Three Poems, but only after reading Creeley’s Pieces)
• Ed Dorn, the pre-Gunslinger work, esp. North Atlantic Turbine
• Duncan, his trio of great books from the 1960s: Opening of the Field, Roots & Branches, Bending the Bow
• Spicer -- the Collected Books (esp. Language & Book of Magazine Verse, but keep in mind that almost nobody read that last one until after his death)
• Levertov's first couple of books, ditto Guest
• Koch's When the Sun Tries to Go On (which points directly to Berrigan’s Sonnets)
• Fielding Dawson, Krazy Kat
• Lew Welch, Ring of Bone
• Jonathan Williams, any of the early books
• Phil Whalen, On Bear’s Head (still the best collection)
• William Burroughs, Naked Lunch
• Gilbert Sorrentino’s Something Said & his early books of poetry (through The Orangerie). Sorrentino was the most prolific & intelligent reviewer of the period.

 

John Wieners' 707 Scott Street is worth reading as a document of the period, esp. its configuration of a Black Mountain poet hanging out at the edge of the Spicer Circle in SF.

 

There really is a dearth of good collective books on the NAP & we desperately need an anthology of the Spicer Circle, since people know Jack, Robin Blaser, George Stanley, Kyger, but not Harold Dull, Ronnie Primack, Steve Jonas or Jim Alexander. I'd definitely read Michael Davidson's Guys Like Us, on the role of masculinity in the poetry of the 1950s.

 

Pulling together this list – I keep thinking of all the books, names I’ve omitted – reminds me that by 1970, the NAP was still active (O’Hara & Spicer were the only ones who had died early, tho Olson & Blackburn were soon to follow), the NY School was already into full-blown 2^nd generation stage by then & langpo had hit the streets with This, edited by Bob Grenier & Barrett Watten. In retrospect, it’s hard to imagine all three as contemporary, but they were in their overlapping ways. All of this while the Objectivists were coming back into print, feminism was starting to arrive & just as Jerry Rothenberg was beginning to role out his anthologies, a major rethinking of the whole history of verse. 1970 was also the year that Harvey Brown brought out his Frontier Press edition of Williams' Spring & All, which made everybody have to rethink everything they knew about the Dr. and his role in modernism. No wonder we were all having trouble keeping it untangled in our imaginations!