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

Acknowledgments

Acknowledgments I GRATEFULLY ACKNOWLEDGE ALL THE POETS, WRITERS, SCHOLARS, AND READING series organizers who took the time to share their stories and ideas with me through interviews, phone calls, and e-mails: Bruce Andrews, John Ashbery, Carol Bergé, Bill Berkson, Charles Bernstein, Sara Blackburn, Jerry Bloedow, Peter Cenedella, Paul Chevigny, Tom Clark, Steven Clay, Andrei Codrescu, Clark Coolidge, Kirby Congdon, Stephen Cope, Michael Davidson, Allen DeLoach, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Marcella Durand, George Economou, Andrew Epstein, Clayton Eshleman, Steve Facey, Larry Fagin, Ed Foster, Kathleen Fraser, Ed Friedman, Lyman Gilmore, John Giorno, Peter Gizzi, Alan Golding, George Greene, David Henderson, Bob Holman, Lisa Jarnot, Hettie Jones, Pierre Joris, Robert Kelly, Kenneth Koch, David Lehman, Michael Magee, Jackson Mac Low, Theresa Maier, Gerard Malanga, Jack Marshall, Bernadette Mayer, Taylor Mead, Alice Notley, Rochelle Owens, Ron Padgett, Rodney Phillips, Ishmael Reed, Libby Rifkin, Jerome Rothenberg, Mark Salerno, Ed Sanders, Susan Sherman, Ron Silliman, Joel Sloman, Michael Stephens, Lorenzo Thomas, Diane Wakoski, Anne Waldman, Lewis Warsh, Eliot Weinberger, and John Wieners. Extra thanks go to those of you who gave me permission to quote from our correspondence and other archived materials. My apologies as well to anyone whose name I may have inadvertently omitted. I am especially grateful to Carol Bergé, who was adamant in her insistence that I research and learn about the Les Deux Mégots and Le Metro reading series as precursors to the Poetry Project, and to Bob Holman, who produced an oral history of the Poetry Project and who generously let me cite his unix published manuscript. Bob wanted me to ensure that everyone knew that the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (CETA)—a federally funded reeducation program for the unemployed, which resulted in the largest federally funded arts project since the WPA—enabled Holman to write his piece on the Poetry Project. To all those poets who met with me two, three, or more times: for your enthusiasm and generosity in our many interviews, on top of all those phone calls and e-mails, I thank you again. Without your input, this project would have lacked the kind of human vitality I was hoping to include. To the faculty at Kingsborough Community College and the staff at Teachers and Writers Collaborative: your intellectual, social, and technical support will always be deeply appreciated. The assistance and support of Richard Sieburth was invaluable in guiding the theoretical impulses behind this study and its overall framework. I thank Richard for reading through the various drafts and for providing excellent suggestions for revision. I am indebted to Reva Wolf, whose study on Andy Warhol’s relationship to the poetic community in the 1960s was extremely influential in my own work, and who generously took time out of her busy schedule to read through an unwieldy initial draft. To friends and colleagues Libbie Rifkin, Peter Gizzi, Rachel Turner, Lisa Jarnot, Stephen Cope, and Alice Robinson: thank you for pointing me in the right directions and for suggesting ways to revise the text. Of course, thank you to my colleagues at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England, for their support of my research. This work would not have been possible without the generous and enthusiastic help of the staff in the following libraries: Bradley D. Westbrook and Lynda Classen at the Mandeville Special Collections Library at the University of California, San Diego (which provided me with two research grants that helped me explore their incredible archive of new poetry); Rutherford Witthus at The Thomas J. Dodd Research Center of the University of Connecticut Libraries; Jean Ashton at the Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Columbia University; Rodney Phillips at the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature at the New York Public Library ; Marvin Taylor at the Elmer Holmes Bobst Library, Fales Library at New York University; and Tara Wenger at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas, Austin. Additionally, the City University of New York generously provided me with a PSC-CUNY faculty research award that allowed me to sit for weeks in the Mandeville Special Collections Library in San Diego, where I had the honor and pleasure of listening to tapes of poetry readings on the Lower East Side originally recorded by Paul Blackburn. From that collection, I culled most of the material presented on the compact disc A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S x [3.135.246.193] Project MUSE (2024-04...