All Poets Welcome: The Lower East Side Poetry Scene in the 1960s, Includes 35-track CD of audio clips of poetry readings [Paperback]

Daniel Kane (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 26, 2003 | ISBN-10: 0520233859 | ISBN-13: 978-0520233850 | Edition: 1

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 Drawing from personal interviews with many of the participants, from unpublished letters, and from rare sound recordings, Daniel Kane brings together for the first time the people, political events, and poetic roots that coalesced into a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.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Kane's volume is the first to tackle the period in New York's downtown literary history most closely tied to the group of poets known as the "Second Generation New York School," including Bernadette Mayer, Ted Berrigan, Ann Waldman, Ron Padgett and Lewis Warsh. His concise and nuanced account covers not only the poetry of the period-a light-hearted collage-aesthetic that cemented societal bonds by including the names and activities of friends and lovers was the order of the day-but also the many personalities that populated the wilds of New York's Lower East Side, from the African-American Umbra Poets (including Hendrix biographer Dave Henderson and Lorenzo Thomas), the poet/songwriter Ed Sanders (co-founder of the Fugs and editor of Fuck You: A Magazine of the Arts), Jungian "deep image" poets such as Robert Kelly and Clayton Eshlemen and proto-Language poets such as Bernadette Mayer and Clark Coolidge. Emerging out of the milieu where they read together at small cafes was not just the "mimeo revolution" (the rise of poetry journals that were run off in the basement of a "secret location on the Lower East Side") and not just cultural institutions that still have legs (and capacity for subversion) over 20 years later, such as the St. Mark's Poetry Project, but cultural spin-offs that have had global repercussions, most importantly punk rock and No Wave (via Patti Smith) and the Black Arts Movement. This volume, which includes a 35-track CD of readings by poets-including some who were just passing through, like the late Boston poet John Wieners- is a must-have for historians of American poetry in the 20th century.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Review

"Kane's volume is the first to tackle the period in New York's downtown literary history most closely tied to the group of poets known as the 'Second Generation New York School'. . . . [It] is a must-have for historians of American poetry in the 20th century."--Publishers Weekly -- Review

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 348 pages
• Publisher: University of California Press; 1 edition (March 26, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0520233859
• ISBN-13: 978-0520233850
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 6 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,366,467 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Completely fascinating history of the brightest years in NYC poetry, February 22, 2006

By 

kjgrow (Brooklyn, NY) - See all my reviews

This review is from: All Poets Welcome: The Lower East Side Poetry Scene in the 1960s, Includes 35-track CD of audio clips of poetry readings (Paperback)

This book is an academic though very accessible account of the poetic movements that came out of the reading series at two cafes in the East Village and St. Mark's Church in the 1960's. It illuminates the rise and fall of the various schools, including the Beats, New York School, Black Mountain, deep image, etc. and highlights the relationships, and occasionally the tensions, between these groups. Kane writes with real candor in these pages - some of the most fascinating passages deal with the exclusionary and machismo ethic of the Beats. All the usual suspects appear here - Ginsberg, Corso, O'Hara, Koch, but many lesser known poets as well.

Much attention is paid to the small literary journals that came out of these groups, including Ted Berrigan's C, and Ed Sander's magazine. The final two chapters on Bernadette Mayer and poetry slams provide an interesting continuing arc, but are less central to Kane's overall milieu.

Everything here is well-researched and well-executed. Scholars will find this an indispensible volume, and the simply curious will find it a highly entertaining and informative read.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars All Readers Welcome, March 12, 2006

By 

Arch Llewellyn "arch-l" - See all my reviews

This review is from: All Poets Welcome: The Lower East Side Poetry Scene in the 1960s, Includes 35-track CD of audio clips of poetry readings (Paperback)

This book is fascinating not only for what it says, but by virtue of being a book at all. Kane catches his subjects 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. In places I got the feeling that anecdotes and interview asides had been polished into authoritative fact: despite some stabs at Pierre Bourdieu, Kane's mostly content to hit "record" without doing much to put the story into a larger critical context of modern American poetics, theories of literary production, or the 20th-century avant-garde. 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. It's a valuable work of collecting and remembering that only seems odd because the scene Kane writes about is still so vital--Anselm Berrigan heading the Poetry Project is its perfect living coda.

4.0 out of 5 stars Allows intergenerational access into a coterie of literate stoners, February 5, 2008

By 

Pharoah S. Wail (Inner Space) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: All Poets Welcome: The Lower East Side Poetry Scene in the 1960s, Includes 35-track CD of audio clips of poetry readings (Paperback)

I found this book to be darned informative and entertaining. At its best it's like Sophia Patrillo from the Golden Girls. "Picture it: Les Deux Megots - 1961!". It imparts a feel for what must have been in the air during that time and that place. There's everything from goofball antics and foul language to a real joyous hope that they could make the world a better place, one poem at a time.

The chapter on the mimeos (what my generation uniformly knows as "zines") is fantastic. That's the core of the book, for me. That's the chapter that I feel delves most deeply into who was who and why (or to what degree) they were motivated to carve out their own galaxy.

What's nice is that the book doesn't focus on a big star like Ginsberg even though he was in and out of this scene. The focus here is on the people who, in some cases, made their greatest impact simply on this corner of society in this neighborhood. For someone like myself who has never read a behind-the-scenes Lower East Side poetry adventure biography before, this is a great book. It reinforced my affection or disdain for some people, and turned me on to some people whose work I'll now track down.

The language-poets chapter made the book end whith a whimper rather than a bang, I thought. It could be because I've not read those people deeply enough yet, but sometimes for paragraphs at a time I felt like I was reading intellectual blather aimed at elevating dry, emotionless poetry to the status of high-art. Maybe my mind will change later on after I've read those people more often. Or maybe language-poets aren't my thing.

In retrospect, I wish I had counted the number of times "coterie" is used. It's a bunch, I assure you. Still, this book is invaluabe both for what it elucidates on its own as well as for the number of directions in which one can fan out, using this book's notes, names, references and asides as starting points.