The New American Poetry

New York: Grove Press, 1960. First printing. 454 pp., 5.5 x 8.25 inches. Cloth over boards, in printed dust-jacket. A tight, clean copy, with just a touch of sunning at the top and bottom edges of the cloth, and a couple of minuscule spots on the front edge of the text block. In a bright, unclipped jacket with some fading around the spine, and a few tiny chips and closed edge tears. The cloth issue is scarce, especially so in any sort of jacket; a much nicer copy than usually seen. A previous bookseller's notation on the endsheet gives the provenance as contributor "Richard Duerden's review copy."

The landmark anthology that brought the alternative and underground streams of midcentury American poetry to a wide audience for the first time, and that gave an umbrella name to the myriad postwar manifestations of nonacademic poetry. Allen gathered representative selections from forty-four poets, which he organized into five loose (and later much challenged) geographical groupings: Black Mountain (Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, Denise Levertov, Paul Blackburn, Robert Creeley, Paul Carroll, Larry Eigner, Edward Dorn, Jonathan Williams, Joel Oppenheimer); the 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, Ebbe Borregaard); the Beats (Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Peter Orlovsky); the New York School (Barbara Guest, James Schuyler, Edward Field, Kenneth Koch, Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery); and a fifth group of younger poets (Philip Whalen, Gilbert Sorrentino, Stuart Z. Perkoff, Gary Snyder, Edward Marshall, Michael McClure, Ray Bremser, LeRoi Jones, John Wieners, Ron Loewinsohn, David Meltzer).