"The New American Poetry" Revisited, Again

Abstract

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. University of Wisconsin Press andThe Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Contemporary Literature. , 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 My thanks to Donald Allen, Michael Davidson, Michael Heller, and Lynn Keller for reading earlier versions of this essay, and to Kevin Killian for sharing information on Jack Spicer and the San Francisco poetry communities.Unpublished correspondence between Donald Allen and poets other than Charles Olson, Allen's reader reports for Grove Press, and a draft of his preface to The New American Poetry are cited with the permission of the authors and of the Mandeville Special Collections Library, University of California at San Diego. Both sides of the Allen-Olson correspondence are cited from the Charles Olson Papers, Archives & Special Collections, Thomas J. Dodd Research Center, University of Connecticut Libraries, and are used with permission. Allen's letter to me is cited with his permission. Contemporary Literature XXXIX, 2 0010-7484/98/0002-0180 $1.50 ? 1998 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System This content downloaded from 128.235.251.160 on Tue, 9 Dec 2014 08:24:54 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions G O L D I N G * 181(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 histo...

A Network Analysis of Postwar American Poetry in the Age of Digital Audio Archives

“…20 Various scholars have contextualized the anthology wars as ensuing from the academy's increasing role in the canonization of postwar poetry. Allen's The New American poetry was a response to "the widespread institutionalization -or academicizing of 'creative writing,'" 21 and it was also a response to New Criticism's "dominant poetic discourse" of "self-contained, coherent, and unified" lyric poem. 22 Because anthologies from the 1950s were incrementally repurposed for college classrooms, 23 Allen, in fact, defined the New American poetry as "a total rejection of all those qualities typical of academic verse."…”