Poet to Publisher

Donald M. Allen’s anthology The New American Poetry, published by Grove Press / Evergreen in the U.S.A. and the U.K., burst onto the literary scene in 1960 to become the single most important and influential book of poetry in the English language published in the second half of the 20th century.

Conceived originally as a collection intended to augment the anthologies of the 1950s with the work of American poets whose careers had flourished since the Second World War, it became, through the influence of Charles Olson (Donald Allen was his editor at Grove Press), a radical and revolutionary manifesto that echoed around the world.

Spanning the period from the modernists through the poets of Origin and The Black Mountain Review, the San Francisco Renaissance, the Beat Generation, the New York poets of the Poet’s Theatre, to the first mapping and performance of a new poetry and poetics from the racial, sexual, aboriginal and cultural margins of a formerly Euro-centric and chauvinist poetry, The New American Poetry became as liberating a movement in writing and letters worldwide as abstract expressionism has been in the visual arts, and as jazz has been in music.

Poet to Publisher: Charles Olson’s Correspondence with Donald Allen tells the story of how that happened.

AUTHOR

Ralph Maud

Ralph Maud (1928–2014), a world-renowned expert on the work of Dylan Thomas, Charles Olson, and the ethnographers of the Paciﬁc Northwest, was professor emeritus at Simon Fraser University and founder of the Charles Olson Literary Society. He was the author of Charles Olson Reading (1996), the editor of The Selected Letters of Charles Olson (2000), Poet to Publisher: Charles Olson’s Correspondence with Donald Allen (2003), Charles Olson at the Harbor (2008), and Muthologos: Lectures and Interviews (2010), and the co-editor of After Completion: The Later Letters of Charles Olson and Frances Boldereﬀ (2014). He edited much of Dylan Thomas’s work, including The Notebook Poems 1930–1934 and The Broadcasts, and was co-editor, with Walford Davies, of Dylan Thomas: The Collected Poems, 1934–1953 and Under Milk Wood. Maud was also the editor of The Salish People: Volumes I, II, III & IV by pioneer ethnographer Charles Hill-Tout. He was a contributing editor to Coast Salish Essays by Wayne Suttles and The Chilliwacks and Their Neighbours by Oliver Wells, and authored A Guide to B.C. Indian Myth and Legend and The Porcupine Hunter and Other Stories — a collection of Henry W. Tate’s stories in Tate’s original English, which grew out of his survey of Franz Boas’s Tsimshian work, published as an article: “The Henry Tate-Franz Boas Collaboration on Tsimshian Mythology” in American Ethnologist. Maud’s subsequently published book, Transmission Difficulties: Franz Boas and Tsimshian Mythology, expands further on the relationship between Henry Tate and Franz Boas.

Reviews

“More than forty years after its first publication, Donald Allen’s The New American Poetry, 1945–1960 continues actively in print. Here is Allen’s collected correspondence with the master poet Charles Olson, which so shaped and defined that initiating work. Together, they undertook to change the formal disposition of poetry and so brought forward those then unknowns, who were to ‘make it new’ for American poets in all the years since.”
—Robert Creeley

“The letters make fascinating reading for their commentary on writers…and literary issues from 1957 to 1969 … ”
—Canadian Literature