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In terms of its defining "anti-academic" role in the 1960s anthology wars, its impact on later collections and editors, its importance for later poets, and its central place in most readings or structurings of postwar literary history, Donald Allen's The New American Poetry (1960) is generally considered the single most influential poetry anthology of the post-World War II period. A high percentage of the largely unknown Black Mountain, New York school, San Francisco Renaissance, Beat, and other poets whom Allen introduced to a broader reading public went on to significant writing careers, and a number have become widely read, taught, anthologized, and commented upon. As regards writing practice, The New American Poetry, more than any other anthology, helped promote and canonize ideas of field composition based on Charles Olson's "Projective Verse"; a.(re)definition of poetic form as immanent and processual; a poetics of dailiness and of the personal (as distinct from the confessional); and a poetry of humor and play (as distinct from wit). It is the anthology, in short, that marked the early postmodern turn, in Charles Altieri's terms, "from symbolist thought to immanence." And it retains enough staying power as an anthological touchstone for alternative poetries that editors of avant-garde anthologies continue to invoke it as a model over thirty years after its publication.
The New American Poetry's imminent reprinting (with a new afterword) from the University of California Press-that rarest of fates for an earlier poetry anthology-both stands as further testimony to the text's historical importance and makes this an especially fitting moment to examine the process of that text's original construction. The process of editing poetry anthologies is still rarely discussed in concrete detail, even while it is assumed to be a highly contingent one. It is also a social process. Initiated and completed as an individual labor of love (Allen typed the whole manuscript himself), The New American Poetry also reveals a good deal about the possible role of poets, and the networks to which they belong, in compiling an influential anthology. The collection is as much the product of multiple, interacting poetic communities and affiliations, of correspondence among contributors and editor, as it is the work of an individual editor himself. In this sense, The New American Poetry is very...