All Poets Welcome: The Lower East Side Poetry Scene in the 1960s

by Daniel Kane

This landmark book, together with its accompanying CD, captures the heady excitement of the vibrant, irreverent poetry scene of New York's Lower East Side in the 1960s. Drawing from personal interviews with many of the participants, from unpublished letters, and from rare sound recordings, Daniel Kane brings together for the first time the people, political events, and poetic roots that coalesced into a highly influential community. From the poetry-reading venues of the early sixties, such as those at the Les Deux Mégots and Le Metro coffeehouses to The Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church, a vital forum for poets to this day, Kane traces the history of this literary renaissance, showing how it was born from a culture of publicly performed poetry. The Lower East Side in the sixties proved foundational in American verse culture, a defining era for the artistic and political avant-garde.

The voices and works of John Ashbery, Amiri Baraka, Charles Bernstein, Bill Berkson, Ted Berrigan, Kenneth Koch, Bernadette Mayer, Ron Padgett, Denise Levertov, Paul Blackburn, Frank O'Hara, and many others enliven these pages, and the thirty five-track CD includes recordings of several of the poets reading from their work in the sixties and seventies. The Lower East Side's cafes, coffeehouses, and salons brought together poets of various aesthetic sensibilities, including writers associated with the so-called New York School, Beats, Black Mountain, Deep Image, San Francisco Renaissance, Umbra, and others. Kane shows that the significance for literary history of this loosely defined community of poets and artists lies in part in its reclaiming an orally centered poetic tradition, adapted specifically to open up the possibilities for an aesthetically daring, playful poetics and a politics of joy and resistance.

Genres: Poetry

348 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2003

Reviews

[Kaya · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good gossip, unfortunate tumbles into overly academic prose. This era deserves a well-written treatment, and maybe its own TV series.

[Amy · Rating 3 out of 5]

I wish I had more time to read this book but I have to return it to the library.
The Lower East Side Poetry scene was really interesting and relevant for my dissertation.

[Rodney · Rating 5 out of 5]

Kane catches his poets on that weird cusp between memory and history, and it's a little unsettling to see something as shambolic as the Lower East Side Poetry scene of the `60s given the full-blown U.C. acid-free treatment. The book sometimes falls into a lazy academese that can drop "historicity," "performativity," and prim phrases like "reading a poem in this fashion therefore engaged the senses in a variety of ways" without batting an eye. But I enjoyed the heck out of it anyway, the way you might enjoy seeing your parents' home movies screened in a state-of-the-art multiplex.

[Matthew · Rating 5 out of 5]

a phenomenal material history of the poetry scene in NYC. Great CD, too.

[Selena · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is a history lesson in poetry movements, much like one you'd be required to read for success as an artist. It's intensely inspiring.

[Daniel · Rating 3 out of 5]

A very impressive amount of research/documentation, and worth reading, though the writing itself is not especially good.