The New American Poetry, 1945-1960

by Donald M. Allen (Editor)

With more than 100,000 copies sold, The New American Poetry has become one of the most influential anthologies published in the United States since World War II. As one of the first counter-cultural collections of American verse, this volume fits in Robert Lowell's famous definition of the raw in American poetry. Many of the contributors once derided in the mainstream press of the period are now part of the postmodern Olson, Duncan, Creeley, Guest, Ashbery, Ginsberg, Kerouac, Levertov, O'Hara, Snyder, Schuyler, and others. Donald Allen's The New American Poetry delivered the first taste of these remarkable poets, and the book has since become an invaluable historical and cultural record, now available again for a new generation of readers.

Genres: Poetry, Anthologies, Fiction, The United States Of America, 20th Century, American

479 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1960

Reviews

[Mitch · Rating 5 out of 5]

For me, this is where my reading & writing of poetry began. It's not just the poets represented here (Olson, Blackburn, Creeley, Duncan, Spicer, etc.), but the poems selected, which, frankly, seems to be a lost art. There have been numerous anthologies published since, some with even more impressive lineups, but they lack the selectivity of works that this anthology epitomized. The poems selected for Olson really highlight what was revolutionary in his thought; The Kingfishers, The Lordly & Isolate Satyrs, The Distances. All three great poems, all three truly projective, and all three poems so compelling that I still re-read them to this day. The Duncan selection includes Poem Beginning With A Line by Pindar, which is easily one of his best & brightest. Dorn's The Hide of My Mother presages his most sarcastic works, but with an inner view which his late works avoid. Could have done better with Levertov & Blaser, but a stunning selection of Lamantia poems, leading off with Terror Conduction, which makes the hair stand on end. 12 choruses from Kerouac's fabulous Mexico City Blues, Parts 1 & II of Howl, Sunflower Sutra, Corso's Marraige, all exemplary works from what was to become the beat canon. The NY School could have been more illuminating, but Koch's Thank You rocks, and O'Hara's whole selection is utterly mind-blowing. These are still my favorite O'Hara poems. Ashbery's Instruction Manual is still used in workshops (because it is so perfect), and How Long Will I Be Able To Inhabit the Divine Sepulchre is one of the flarfiest Ashbery poems I know of. Nice Whalen selections, and Snyder's Riprap sort of round out that scene. The John Weiners poems are so intense & burning that I remember not being able to forget them, still. Then closing out with some essays, like Olson's Projective Verse and the like, this book was absolutely crucial for me & many others. I constituted my first reading lists from this book. I don't think I could possibly recommend it enough. Does it have shortcomings? You bet. Very few women, it's missing Ted Berrigan (who wasn't publishing much at the time, but came to be so much a part of this mileu), maybe not enough Barbara Guest, but even so, a masterpiece.

[Jen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Published in 1960, this is considered a classic anthology introducing the poetic movements that began to mature in the 1950s. For me, its value is almost entirely historical, but it admittedly has huge historical value. The copy I have, picked up at a library book sale, is the original with the contents divided into six parts, which I lay out in detail below because it best expresses the scope of the book:

I. Black Mountain poets
Charles Olson
Robert Duncan
Denise Levertov
Paul Blackburn
Robert Creeley
Paul Carroll
Larry Eigner
Edward Dorn
Jonathan Williams
Joel Oppenheimer

II. San Francisco Renaissance
Helen Adam
Brother Antoninus
James Broughton
Madeline Gleason
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Robin Blaser
Jack Spicer
Lew Welch
Richard Duerden
Philip Lamantia
Bruce Boyd
Kirby Doyle
Ebby Borregaard

III. Beats
Jack Kerouac
Allen Ginsberg
Gregory Corso
Peter Orlovsky

IV. The New York School
Barbara Guest
James Schuyler
Edward Field
Kenneth Koch
Frank O'Hara
John Ashberry

V. A group of young poets difficult to classify
Philip Whalen
Gilbert Sorrentino
Stuart Z. Perkoff
Gary Snyder
Edward Marshall
Michael McClure
Ray Bremser
LeRoi Jones
John Weiners
Ron Loewinsohn
David Meltzer

VI. Statements on Poetics
Charles Olson: Projective Verse and Letter to Elaine Feinstein
Robert Duncan: Pages from a notebook
Robert Creeley: To Define and Olson & Others: Some Orts for the Sports
Denise Levertov
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Jack Spicer: Letter to Lorca
Jack Kerouac
Allen Ginsberg: Notes for Howl and Other Poems
James Schuyler: Poet and Painter Overture
Frank O'Hara
Philip Whalen
Gary Snyder
Michael McClure: From a Journal
LeRoi Jones: "How You Sound??"
John Weiners: From a Journal


I can't say I found the poetry in this volume thrilling. I found a couple of poets I might look into further. Most of them I was always familiar with and have never taken a particular liking to, with the exceptions of Levertov and Ferlinghetti. So this book was something of a slog for me, but I did read it all. The selections are generous for some poets: 20 pages for Ginsberg and Duncan, over 30 for Olson and O'Hara. I also found the statements on poetics disappointing.

What I ended up treasuring most in this anthology was the biographical notes in the back. Some of them are the trim statements we've become accustomed to and some are entirely unleashed. Gregory Corso's is two and a half confessional pages. Robert Duncan's is a four page full biography in brief. Peter Orlovsky's contains a good deal of silliness ("I want the moon for fun").

I'm glad to have this anthology on my shelf and would recommend it to anyone with an affection for or curiosity about that period in the history of American poetry.

[Craig Werner · Rating 4 out of 5]

Extremely important anthology that helped establish the contours of 1950s American poetry and point the way to the explosions of the 1960s. I'm reading it along with New Poets of England and America, the aesthetically conservative book that was cast against New American Poetry in an influential "battle of the anthologies." NAP takes its cue from Charles Olson's notion of "projective verse," essentially poetry that focuses on "COMPOSITION BY FIELD, as opposed to inherited line, stanza, over-all form." Asserting that "FORM IS NEVER MORE THAN AN EXTENSION OF CONTENT," Olson calls for poetry that attends to the ever-changing rhythms of perception and life. Most of the poets whose reflections are included in the section on Poetics which follows the poems subscribe to Olson's approach, often tying it to William Carlos Williams.

Many of the fifty-some poets included have faded into the mists of time, but the anthology played a role in establishing Olson, Robert Duncan, Robert Creely, Denis Levertov, Gary Snyder, Leroi Jones (pre-Amiri Baraka and the only Black poet in the anthology), Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, John Ashbery, Michael McClure and Frank O'Hara as parts of the evolving American tradition.

What struck me most strongly is the absence of direct political engagement in the large majority of the poems, which chart alternate spaces in the stultifying public culture of the 1950s. Most of the poets would broaden their net in the decade to come.

[Augustus · Rating 3 out of 5]

Kind of a mixed bag. Some of the poems are an interesting corrective to high modernism, replacing the esoteric with the strikingly colloquial. But a good number of the poems just do that obnoxious thing that the Beats — and then everyone in the Sixties — did where they just say something like "Modern society, crazy and kind of fucked up, man" and then call it a day.

[DeadWeight · Rating 5 out of 5]

Perhaps the most important poetry collection of the 20th century, certainly in American poetry. A veritable who's who of post-war American poetry (granted, primarily of those who happen to be both white and male — to Allen's credit, this collection's purview is too late for the Harlem Renaissance, and it came out right before the explosion of exciting, radical black poetry of the 60s, although they are preempted by Amiri Baraka's (as LeRoi Jones) inclusion), this book nearly single-handedly delineated the landscape of then-contemporary poetry and does more to capture a kind of canon than Harold Bloom could have ever dreamt of.

Can be paired with Al Alvarez's more obscure The New Poetry, which endeavoured to extend the effort to poets of the UK, with much of the same prescience.

[M.W.P.M. · Rating 5 out of 5]

The New American Poetry 1945-1960 is considered a landmark anthology, thanks in no small part to the fact that many of the poets selected herein went on to become among the most influential American poets of the second half of the twentieth century. Among them: Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, Denise Levertov, Paul Blackburn, Robert Creeley, Larry Eigner,Edward Dorn, Joel Oppenheimer, Helen Adam,Madeline Gleason, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Robin Blaser,Jack Spicer, Allen Ginsberg, Barbara Guest, James Schuyler, Kenneth Koch, Frank O'Hara, John Ashbery,Philip Whalen, and Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones).

One must commend editor Donald Allen for his foresight, and forgive him for his lack of diversity (Allen, like Olson, "salutes the cock")...

I. Le Bonheur

dogwood flakes
what is green

the petals
from the apple
blow on the road

mourning doves
mark the sway
of the afternoon, bees
dig the plum blossoms

the morning
stands up straight, the night
is blue from the full of the April moon

iris and lilac, birds
birds, yellow flowers
white flowers, the Diesel
does not let up dragging
the plow

as the whippoorwill,
the night’s tractor, grinds
his song

and no other birds but us
are as busy (O saisons, O chateaux!

Délires!

What soul
is without fault?

Nobody studies
happiness

Every time the cock crows
I salute him

I have no longer any excuse
for envy. My life

has been given its orders: the seasons
seize

the soul and the body, and make mock
of any dispersed effort. The hour of death

is the only trespass

- "Variations Done for Gerald Van De Wiele", Charles Olson, pg. 34-35

*

good wood
that all fiery youth burst fourth from winter,
go to sleep in the poem.
Who will remember thy green flame,
thy dream's amber?

Language obeyd flares tongues in obscure matter.

We trace faces in clouds: they drift apart.
Palaces of air. The sun dying down
sets them on fire.

Descry shadows on the flood from its dazzling mood,
or at its shore read runes upon the sand
from sea-spume.

This is what I wanted for the last poem.
A loosening of conventions and return to open form.

Leonardo saw figures that were stains upon a wall.
Let the apparitions containd in the ground
play as they will.

You have carried a branch of tomorrow into the room.
Its fragrance has awakend me. No . .

It was the sound of a fire on the hearth
Leapd up where you bankd it

. . . sparks of delight. Now I return the though

to the red glow, that might-be-magical blood,
palaces of heat in the fire's mouth,

if you look you will see the salamander -

to the very elements that attend us,
fairies of the fire, the radiant crawling . .

That was a long time ago.
No. They were never really there,

though once I saw - did I stare
into the heart of desire burning
and see a radiant man? like those
fancy cities from fire into fire falling.

We are close enough to childhood, so easily purged
of whatever we thought we were to be.

Flamey threads of firstness go out from your touch,

flickers of unlikely heat
at the edge of our belief bud forth

- "Food for Fire, Food for Thought", Robert Duncan, pg. 57-58

*

I like to find
what's not found
at once, but lies

within something of another nature,
in repose, distinct.
Gull feathers of glass, hidden

in white pulp: the bones of squid
which I pull out and lay
blade by blade on the draining board —

tapered as if for swiftness, to pierce
the heart, but fragile, substance
belying design. Or a fruit, mamey,

cased in rough brown peel, the flesh
rose-amber, and the seed:
the seed a stone of wood, carved and

polished, walnut-colored, formed
like a brazilnut, but large,
large enough to fill
the hungry palm of a hand.

I like the juicy stem of grass that grows
within the coarser leaf folded round,
and the butteryellow glow
in the narrow flute from which the morning-glory
opens blue and cool on a hot morning.

- "Pleasures", Denise Levertov, pg. 67

*

Staggering down the road at midnite
home from the bar, the

mexican Bandit stood facing me, about
to improve his standard of living

Two
fingers handled the moustache, gently,
the other hand fingered the pistol. My asshole

dropped out/
and crawled all the way back to El Paso

- "The Encounter", Paul Blackburn, pg. 76

*

For love—I would
split open your head and put
a candle in
behind the eyes.

Love is dead in us
if we forget
the virtues of an amulet
and quick surprise.

- "The Warning", Robert Creeley, pg. 78

*

The children were frightened by crescendos
cars coming forward in the movies

That is, before they found out love,
that is, Comedy
the cheeks blew
music rises and continues

and the sea does

and there were no accidents today
the bombs showered us in the air

- "A Fete", Larry Eigner, pg. 90

*

The cowboy stands beneath
a brick-orange moon. The top
of his oblong head is blue, the sheath
of his hips
is too.

In the dark brown night
your delicate cowboy stands quite still.
His plain hands are crossed.
His wrists are embossed white.

In the background night is a house,
has a blue chimney top,
Yi Yi, the cowboy's eyes
are blue. The top of the sky
is too.

- "Vaquero", Edward Dorn, pg. 98

*

I wish all the
mandragora grew
wild, screaming.

and in the cattails,
pussywillows, etc.
wind osft as eastern standard time.

wind soft as the
last time you
did it. wind soft
as a soft wind.

I wish we
bathed in essence of
ginseng, for our health.

I wish eastern standard
time, etc. rang the
changes in our hearts.

- "Blue Funk"Joel Oppenheimer, pg. 112

*

There was a man who married a maid. SHe laughed as he led her home.
The living fleece of her long bright hair she combed with a golden comb.
He led her home through his barley fields where the saffron poppies grew.
She combed, and whispered, "I love my love." Her voice like a plaintive coo.
Ha! Ha!
Her voice like a plaintive coo.

He lived alone with his chosen bride, at first their life was sweet.
Sweet was the touch of her playful hair binding his hands and feet.
WHen first she murmured adoring words her words did not appall.
"I love my love with a capitol A. To my love I give my All.
Ah, He!
To my love I give my All."

She circled him with the secret web she wove as her strong hair grew.
Like a golden spider she wove and sang, "My love is tender and true."
She combed her hair with a golden comb and shackled him to a tree.
She shackled him close to the Tree of Life. "My love I'll never set free.
No, No.
My love I'll never set free."
[...]

- "I Love My Love"Helen Adam, pg. 114-

*

Cross at the morning
and at waking,
with a mourning for summer,
she crossed the bridge Now
over the river Gone
toward the place called New
to begin her Once Upon.

Once and Upon
my daddy long legs
walked in a web of work
for my sisters and me,
as Mother spun round
with silver knives and forks
in a shining of pans,
a wash of Mondays
and plans
for our lives ten thousand weeks.

To cross the bridge Now
over the river Gone
toward the place called New
to begin her Once Upon,
in a mourning for summer, she moved
to write her right becoming
and find her true beloved.
[...]

- "Once and Upon", Madeline Gleason, pg. 125-

*

He is one of the prophets come back
He is one of the wiggy prophets come back
He had a beard in the Old Testament
but shaved it off in Paterson
He has a microphone around his neck
at a poetry reading
and he is more than one poet
and he is an old man perpetually writing a poem
about an old man
whose every third through is Death
and who is writing a poem
about an old man
whose every third thought is Death
and who is writing a poem
Like the picture on a Quaker Oats box
that shows a figure holding up a box
upon which is a picture of a figure
holding up a box
and the figure smaller and smaller
and further away each time
a picture of shrinking reality itself
He is one of the prophets come back
to see to hear to file a revised report
on the present state
of the shrinking world
[...]

- "He", Lawrence Ferlinghetti, pg. 134-

*

It is their way to find the surface
when they die.
Fish feed on fish
and drop those beautiful bones
to swim.
I see them stretch the water to their need
as I domesticate the separate air to be my
breath.
These fish die easily.

I find my surface in the way they feed.
Their gathering hunger is a flash like death.
No agony
as if
my mind had eaten death

- "Poem by the Charles River", Robin Blaser, pg. 138

*

Poetry, almost blind like a camera
Is alive in sight only for a second. Click,
Snap goes the eyelid of the eye before movement
Almost as the world happens.
One would not choose to blink and go blind
After the instant. One would not choose
To see the continuous Platonic pattern of birds flying
Long after the stream of birds had dropped or had nested.
Lucky for us that there are visible things like oceans
Which are always around,
Continuous, disciplined adjuncts
To the moment of sight.
Sight
But not so sweet
As we have seen.
When I praise the sun or any bronze god derived from it
Don't think I wouldn't rather praise the very tall blond boy
Who ate all of my potato-chips at the Red Lizard.
It's just that I won't see him when I open my eyes
And I will see the sun.
Things like the sun are always there when the eyes are open
Insistent as breath.
One can only worship
These cold eternals for their support of
What is absolutely temporary.
But not so sweet.
The temporary tempts poetry
Tempts photographs, tempts eyes.
[...]

- "Imaginary Elegies, I"Jack Spicer, pg. 142-

*

What thoughts I have of you tonight Walt Whitman, for I walked down the sidestreets under the trees with a headache self-conscious looking at the full moon.
In my hungry fatigue, and shopping for images, I went into the neon fruit supermarket, dreaming of your enumerations!
What peaches and what penumbras! Whole families shopping at night! Aisles full of husbands! Wives in the avocados, babies in the tomatoes!—and you, Garcia Lorca, what were you doing down by the watermelons?
[...]

- "A Supermarket in California", Allen Ginsberg, pg. 181-182

*

I go separately
The sweet knees of oxen have pressed a path for me
ghosts with ingots have burned their bare hands
it is the dungaree darkness with China stitched
where the westerly winds
and the traveler’s checks
the evensong of salesmen
the glistening paraphernalia of twin suitcases
where no one speaks English.
I go separately
It is the wind, the rubber wind
when we brush our teeth in the way station
a climate to beard. What forks these roads?
Who clammers o’er the twain?
What murmurs and rustles in the distance
in the white branches where the light is whipped
piercing at the crossing as into the dunes we simmer
and toss ourselves awhile the motor pants like a forest
where owls from their bandaged eyes send messages
to the Indian couple. Peaks have you heard?
I go separately
We have reached the arithmetics, are partially quenched
while it growls and hints in the lost trapper’s voice
She is coming toward us like a session of pines
in the wild wooden air where rabbits are frozen,
O mother of lakes and glaciers, save us gamblers
whose wagon is perilously rapt.

- "Santa Fe Trail"Barbara Guest, pg. 217-218

*

A chimney, breathing a little smoke.
The sun, I can't see
making a bit of pink
I can't quite see in the blue.
The pink of five tulips
at five p.m. on the day before March first.
The green of the tulip stems and leaves
like something I can't remember,
finding a jack-in-the-pulpit
a long time ago and far away.
Why it was December then
and the sun was on the sea
by the temples we'd gone to see.
[...]

- "February", James Schuyler, pg. 220-

*

At the Poem Society a black-haired man stands up to say
“You make me sick with all your talk about restraint and mature talent!
Haven’t you ever looked out the window at a painting by Matisse,
Or did you always stay in hotels where there were too many spiders crawling on your visages?
Did you ever glance inside a bottle of sparkling pop,
Or see a citizen split in two by the lightning?
I am afraid you have never smiled at the hibernation
Of bear cubs except that you saw in it some deep relation
To human suffering and wishes, oh what a bunch of crackpots!”
The black-haired man sits down, and the others shoot arrows at him.
[...]

- "Fresh Air, I", Kenneth Koch, pg. 229-

*

Hate is only one of many responses
true, hurt and hate go hand in hand
but why be afraid of hate, it is only there

think of filth, is it really awesome
neither is hate
don't be shy of unkindness, either
it's cleansing and allows you to be direct
like an arrow that feels something

out and out meanness, too, lets love breathe
you don't have to fight off getting in too deep
you can always get out if you're not too scared

an ounce of prevention's
enough to poison the heart

don't think of others
until you have thought of yourself, are true

all of these things, if you feel them
will be graced by a certain reluctance
and turn into gold

if felt by me, will be smilingly defected
by your mysterious concern

- "Poem", Frank O'Hara, pg. 266-267

*

As I sit looking out of a window of the building
I wish I did not have to write the instruction manual on the uses of a new metal.
I look down into the street and see people, each walking with an inner peace,
And envy them—they are so far away from me!
Not one of them has to worry about getting out this manual on schedule.
And, as my way is, I begin to dream, resting my elbows on the desk and leaning out of the window a little,
Of dim Guadalajara! City of rose-colored flowers!
City I wanted most to see, and most did not see, in Mexico!
But I fancy I see, under the press of having to write the instruction manual,
Your public square, city, with its elaborate little bandstand!
The band is playing Scheherazade by Rimsky-Korsakov.
Around stand the flower girls, handing out rose- and lemon-colored flowers,
Each attractive in her rose-and-blue striped dress (Oh! such shades of rose and blue),
And nearby is the little white booth where women in green serve you green and yellow fruit.
The couples are parading; everyone is in a holiday mood.
First, leading the parade, is a dapper fellow
Clothed in deep blue. On his head sits a white hat
And he wears a mustache, which has been trimmed for the occasion.
His dear one, his wife, is young and pretty; her shawl is rose, pink, and white.
Her slippers are patent leather, in the American fashion,
And she carries a fan, for she is modest, and does not want the crowd to see her face too often.
[...]

- "The Instruction Manual", John Ashbery, pg. 172-

*

What I need is lots of money
No
What I need is somebody to love with unparalleled energy and devotion for 24 hours & then goodbye
I can escape too easily from this time & this place
That isn't the reason I'm here

What I need is where am I

Sometimes a bed of nails is really necessary to any man
Or a wall (Olson, in conversation, "That wall, it has to be there!")

Where are my hands.
Where are my lungs.
All the lights are on in here I don't see nothing.

I don't admit that this is personality disintegration
My personality has a half-life of 10∞ years besides

I can put my toe in my mouth
If (CENSORED), then (CENSORED), something like
Plato his vision of the archetypal human being

Or the Gnostic Worm.

People see me; they like that . . .
I try to warn them that it's really me

They don't listen; afterwards they complain
About how I had no right to really be just that:
Invisible & in complete control of everything.

- "Take 1, 4:11:58", Philip Whalen, pg. 294-295

*

(for Kellie Jones, born 16 May 1959)

Lately, I've become accustomed to the way
The ground opens up and envelopes me
Each time I go out to walk the dog.
Or the broad edged silly music the wind
Makes when I run for a bus...

Things have come to that.

And now, each night I count the stars,
And each night I get the same number.
And when they will not come to be counted,
I count the holes they leave.

Nobody sings anymore.

And then last night, I tiptoed up
To my daughter's room

[VT Dorchester · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was hard work.
I understand this collection of free form poetry was (perhaps is to some) a big deal. However, it felt a lot like homework to me.

I picked this book up over a year ago while volunteering as a selection reader for an (American) literary magazine - I figured I should acquaint myself with some of the poets who had come before, in order to allow me to better understand the poetry I was seeing as a reader, and to better understand the other staff members when they referred to past poets.

I figured post-war was a good as any place to start, and this was sitting at a used bookstore looking important (and not inexpensive for a second-hand book.) Unfortunately I never got around to reading this collection until after I freed up some extra time by dropping that volunteer commitment. Still, I have (finally!) read it.

There were long stretches of this collection that were just a slog to read through. One of the significant differences between poetry today and poetry then, I would say, is that today, we tend towards poetry that is one, two pages long, anything more than that is really stretching it, whereas sixty years ago a couple of pages in a poem seems to have been fairly standard. (Of course this probably means something negative about our attention capabilities today, yada yada.) There are also more references to god or other gods then I saw in my time reading poetry for the magazine.

Some of these poets seem to have been, how do I put this... okay, well, genuinely unbalanced. And also a lot of them seemed to do a lot of drugs. I can understand how talking about some of the things they talk about in the poems included in this collection were avant-garde at the time (sex, drugs, gay sex, sex, death, drugs) and they probably did shock quite a few people - but I'm not sure their contextual shock value alone is enough reason to revere these poems into the future (and most of them are no longer particularly shocking.) I'm not all that interested in reading about what people see while on drugs. A lot of these poems were written for people with interests that I do not share.

I feel compelled to point out that the vast majority of poets in this collection are men.

Some of them are playing around a lot with punctuation and form, and that's sort of interesting, for a few seconds, and then in some cases it just adds to the work of moving through the poem. I'm glad that not all of these form-experiments seem to have "made it" into more-or-less mainstream modern free-form poetry practice, although I also don't condemn people for trying things out. Trying things out is good, (although maybe they should have tried out fewer drugs...) but then you pick what works and what does not. The exclamation marks, in particular, became exhausting for me.

There were, also, on a positive note, a few places where I encountered some excellent poetry, or at least some excellent bits of poetry within a longer poem. Bits that satisfied me or intrigued me as a reader.
I (unfortunately) can't say there were more than a few poems in total that made me go "yes, that was fun, that spoke to me."
There really were too few poems in here that spoke to me over the last month for me to consider this anthology a success for me.

I do recognize poetry is, more than many other story-telling, language-writing pieces, often written for fairly specific purposes, to particularly audiences, and that is 100% fine, I don't expect all poems to be speaking to me. I just wish more of these did, there were over 300 pages.

I am, however, glad I eventually got through all of this, I think it was educational for me, and therefore I'm going to give it three stars, even though in terms of my actual enjoyment, I'd give it fewer.

[Jeffrey · Rating 5 out of 5]

If the coming out party for modernism was the great Picasso show at the Museum of Modern Art in 1939, poetry would have to wait for the G.I. Generation to return home, use their G.I. Bill (or not), gather in interested circles of friends, whether in New York, North Carolina at Black Mountain College, or in San Francisco. I use the term G.I. because most of these poets are men and a good portion went to school on G.I. Bill.
Of course, there were poets writing in towns and cities across the country. And there were many great writers whether inside the movement like Cid Corman, or outside like Gwendolyn Brooks, who were not included. The only Black writer is Amiri Baraka. Roethke and Berryman did not abide the guidance provided by Pound and Olson’s Projective Verse and were considered anachronistic. So many others!
Yet if a bookend exists for the Picasso exhibit in poetry, this is it. The now obscure and the still famous writers of these schools offer a rare sense of continuity in these artistic fragmented times. The only writer that I thought was bad—or poorly represented—was Gregory Corso (though his bio, a long, rambling piece of self-presentation was interesting).
It was a great pleasure to re-read work by writers I know well that has stood the test of time. Creeley, Duncan, Ginsberg, McClure, O’Hara, Gary Snyder and Lew Welch Remain favorites. Other lesser-known poets who I’ve read more in passing than in book form, reminded me again how substantial their work is: Blackburn, Blaser, Dorn, Guest, Koch, Schuyler, Spicer and Wieners. Like Pound once did for Whitman, I make a mea culpa to Charles Olson and his Maximus (a poem that seemed obese an overblown). I really enjoyed him this time around.
But the self-same fragmentation I spoke of before begins here with the modern. Perhaps we best say this is the beginning of the end of the modern. The erosion of the demands of form was the creation of diverse possible forms, and soon ethnic, racial, and sexual identity, the spoken word versus the written, the erosion of traditional grammatical practices by the algorithms of the mobile phone are where today’s poetic universe writes. It is a multiverse of literary possibilities, and you can still write a love poem.

[Austin Farrell · Rating 5 out of 5]

I remember when I checking this book out at the library I worked at several times until I found a copy in the storage room for the Friend's Bookstore and bought it for like 50 cents since the man who organized everything called me his best customer. This is an important anthology as it documents several different voices within several different schools that were evolving from Modernist tradition. I skipped most of the Beat material, as I equivocate a lot of their sensibilities with my teenage poetics and hate voices that reflect a post-hippie/druggie/new age subculture at this point in my life (not to say that their work doesn't have any merit, but there are way more interesting poems in this anthology than Mexico City Blues choruses and buddha talk; I was taken aback by Edward Marshall's "Leave The Word Alone", Lew Welsh's "Chicago Poem", and Paul Carroll's "Father", all displaying a more genuine and lyrical capacity than any of the Beat amphetamine sputter). The statements on poetics are just as insightful, including Olson's "Projective Verse" essay (Olson particularly feels like the spearhead of the writers in this book, not just Black Mountain colleagues, though this may not be true for all writers included). As a poet, there were several times during my reading sessions of this book where I had to put the book down after being moved by a poem or hearing the rhythms of what I was reading in my thought patterns and I had to write something, poem or not. I recommend this to any poet and anyone interested in the history of poetry. A lot of poems in here you won't find online and a good way to familiarize yourself with writers that don't get as much recognition as they deserve, especially in an era where Instapoetry is the dominantly recognized mode.

[Theo · Rating 4 out of 5]

Favorite poems: The Third Dimension (Levertov), The Bus Trip (Oppenheimer), Imaginary Elegies I-IV (Spicer), Freely Espousing (Schuyler), Fresh Air (Koch), Hotel Transylvanie (O’Hara), Feasts of Death Feasts of Love (Perkoff), Canticle (McClure), Ode for Soft Voice (McClure), Prayerwheel/2 (Meltzer)
Favorite statements on poetics: Pages from a Notebook (Duncan), Letter to Lorca (Spicer), From a Journal (McClure)

[Jim Manis · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is an anthology of the poetry of my childhood, almost none of which I learned about until ten years after any of it was published. Which speaks to the state of poetry during the 15 years after the war.

[Adnan · Rating 5 out of 5]

list for personal reference::

1. Charles Olson
2. Denise Levertov
3. Larry Eigner
(ok i forgot go back to the written note

[Tom · Rating 5 out of 5]

Well, I had mostly planned to dip into this periodically over a couple months, but I wound up being more into it than I'd expected. Of the poets gathered here, I'd only previously read Ginsberg, O'Hara, and Ashbery, but nearly half of the others I marked as being worth further exploration. That seems like a more than solid ratio.

My growing interest in poetry is reminding me of when I started really digging into music, and how that process was informed by big reference books like the All Music Guide, a lot of hunches, and a general openness that's hard to retain after a certain point. I've been somewhat blindly feeling my way around poetry, being familiar with some names but not really having a clue how things connect. I'm finding that I'm pretty okay with not liking everything, even important poets and poets whose biographies or connections seem in tune with stuff I do like, and there was plenty in The New American Poetry that I didn't care for. But now I have a list of about twenty poets to investigate further, and in the absence of something like an All Poetry Guide, that feels like feels like an awfully good starting point.

[Danny Mason · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read the first part of this in full because it was assigned for uni and then went through the rest and just read what I was interested in. As with any anthology there are highs and lows, but overall it's easy to see why this was so influential. I hadn't read much poetry from the era before so some of it was beyond me, but the sheer amount of great poems and important poets included here is immense. I'm sure it's one I'll keep coming back to and maybe one day I'll even be able to get my head around the Olson poems.

[Andrew · Rating 5 out of 5]

Just flipped through this the other day for the first time in a few years, and I'd forgotten how great it is. It's a great anthology for finding out what was going on in American poetry immediately after the War, and it spans a short enough period (15 years) to be very comprehensive and, with a few exceptions, gives a good amount of print space to poets who otherwise wouldn't have had any in print. A beautiful book, and a must own for poetry lovers.

[Steve]

A little bit of this may go a long way. So far some very good stuff (Olson's Kingfishers is awesome), but also some silly stuff (Olson's The Lordly and Isolate Satyrs). But placed within the context of the times, the silly stuff is also ok. Maybe I'll watch Corman's Bucket of Blood (so bad it's good) this weekend, and then go back and read "Satyrs."

[Paul Secor · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was the book that introduced me to contemporary American poetry - at least the poetry that was outside of academia at that time - in the 1960's. Many of the poets have since passed, but I still read the works of some of them - Sorrentino, Dorn, Blackburn, Creeley, J. Williams - today. For me it's a book that's still alive.

[Kyle Fox · Rating 3 out of 5]

I took a poetry class with this as a supplementary text. I enjoyed most of the poetry therein but found the selections at times a little frustrating for a lack of giving me a 'taste' of the poet featured.

[Rachel · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the best resource I have found for those poets who follow the tradition of William Carlos Williams.

[Laura · Rating 5 out of 5]

so much talk of this collection & it's 'ground broken' in contemp. amer. poe. so to hold my face i can't not read it any longer.

[Thom Dunn · Rating 4 out of 5]

(Mine is the original Grove Press edition of 1960. It does not have the dates of inclusion in the title.)

[Brenda · Rating 3 out of 5]

A mix of well-known and lesser known poets, this collection harbors some rare treasures from its time period.

[Wade Fox · Rating 3 out of 5]

Reread this after many years. I enjoyed some of it, but much of it seemed dated, and a lot of it sounded like the worst Beatnik cliches.

[David Garza · Rating 4 out of 5]

Only read the work by Charles Olson. A good overview of mid-century American poetry.

[Laurence Foshee · Rating 5 out of 5]

I wish I owned a paperback of this -- looks amazing!

[Paul Kerschen]

A revealing look back at a time when the turtlenecked academic dereferentializers still had to rub shoulders with the sweaty guys on peyote, because nobody had quite worked out who was who.