Series: Donald Allen and The New American Poetry 1945-1960, Part 3

September 21, 2017

After the success of the original New American Poets 1945-1960 through the decade of the 1960s Donald Allen created a franchise of updated anthologies. By the way, the original edition is still in print and I always used it for a textbook for my course in literature of the Beat Movement. Beginning in 1973 Allen issued The Poetics of the New American Poetry, another anthology in which he collected every statement on the poetic craft and theory he could from 1950s-1960s avant-garde poets. The next series I will begin for The Scene will be these statements of poetics from the New American poets themselves.

Then in 1982 he updated his anthology altogether, making it more inclusive of women and poets of color, titled The Postmoderns: The New American Poetry Revisited. Also Ekbert Faas published in 1978 Towards a New American Poetics: Essays and Interviews, a widely quoted critical work that ultimately gave the term “New American Poetry” credence. Today, virtually any study of the poetry of such writers as Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan, Charles Olson, and Allen Ginsberg still refers to the idea of New American Poetry.

Be sure to follow The Scene: Radical Poetics from the ZigZag Edges.

Paul Varner