Product Description

This anthology presents material selected from the collection of Angel Hair magazine and books edited by Anne Waldman and Lewis Warsh between 1966 and 1978. Included are substantial sections of writing--in some cases entire books--from an impressive range of poets including Clark Coolidge, Alice Notley, Hannah Weiner, Robert Creeley, Bernadette Mayer, Kenward Elmslie, Tom Clark, Joanne Kyger, Bill Berkson, Ted Greenwald, Lorenzo Thomas, John Wieners, Joe Brainard, Ron Padgett, as well as Waldman and Warsh, among many others. From the nascent St. Mark's Poetry Project on the Lower East Side of Manhattan to Bolinas and Boulder, Angel Hair published an idiosyncratic cross-section of innovative writing in distinctive format, becoming one of the longest-lived and most influential publishers on the small press scene. The anthology of literary writings is supplemented with brief memoirs by more than twenty writers, and the book also includes an annotated checklist by Aaron Fischer and Steven Clay that comprises a citation and photograph of each of the approximately eighty books, magazines, broadsides and catalogues issued by the Press.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1148954 in Books
• Published on: 2001-06-15
• Released on: 2001-09-02
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 500 pages

From Publishers Weekly
From 1966-1978, poets Anne Waldman and Lewis Warsh edited the magazine Angel Hair (six issues from 1966-69) and published more than 60 low-tech, high-quality books, chapbooks and literary salvos from their Lower East Side press of the same name. The two poets have returned to their youths to cull angel hair sleeps with a boy in my head: The Angel Hair Anthology, which collects work from press and magazine, representing such poets as John Ashbery, Ted Berrigan, Clark Coolidge, Barbara Guest, Joanne Kyger, Bernadette Mayer, Alice Notley, John Wieners and 62 others. The book is a beautifully produced snapshot of an extraordinary time and place in American poetry.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

About the Author
Joe Brainard grew up in Tulsa, Oklahoma and moved to New York at the age of 20 in 1961. A writer and visual artist, he is associated with the New York School poets, many of whom collaborated with him. His early paintings and collages show the influences of Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol, and Joseph Cornell, but his work soon distinguished itself with its combination of lyricism, wit, and congeniality. He died in 1994. A retrospective of his work organized by the Berkeley Art Museum toured the United States in 2002.

Eminent experimental writer Clark Coolidge was raised in Providence, Rhode Island, and lived for many years in western Massachussetts. He has been writing poetry since the 1950s and is considered an essential link between the countercultural poetry of the late 50s and early 60s and the Language writing movement of today. He is the author of numerous collections including Odes of Roba, The Crystal Text, The Book of During, and Own Face. Aside from working with Keith Waldrop, he has also collaborated with the artist Phillip Guston. Coolidge currently lives and works in Petaluma, California.

"Kenward Elmslie is a poet whose many books include Circus Nerves and Motor Disturbance, which won a Frank O'Hara award. He has written six opera librettos, including Lizzie Borden, and the books and lyrics for the Broadway musical The Grass Harp. A singing poet, he has toured widely, giving solo performances of his musical, Postcards on Parade. He lives in Calais, Vermont."

Lewis Warsh is the author of numerous books of poetry, fiction and autobiography, including Ted's Favorite Skirt (2002), Origin of the World (2001), Touch of the Whip (2001), Debtor's Prison (in collaboration with Julie Harrison, 2001), Money Under the Table (1998) and Avenue of Escape (1996). He is coeditor of The Angel Hair Anthology, editor and publisher of United Artists Books and Director of the MFA program at Long Island University in Brooklyn. "Lewis Warsh's thought is not circular, but spiral, in fact--and is, in this way, totally appropriate for the times. All propositions turn back on themselves; the image of truth is uncertainty; and all that we know about a thing is limited to our knowledge of its limits. The sense that this isn't quite fair, or right, is what gives his thought, his work, its moral power, and humor." --Fanny Howe

Born in Arlington, Massachusets in 1926, Robert Creeley attended Harvard University from 1943-1946. Through the Black Mountain Review and his own critical writings, Creeley helped to define an emerging counter-tradition to the literary establishment--a postwar poetry originating with Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, and Zukofsky and expanding through the lives and works of Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, Allen Ginsberg, Denise Levertov, Edward Dorn, and others.

"The author of over thirty books and pamphlets of poetry, Anne Waldman received the Shelley Memorial Award in 1996. She has taught at the Schule fur Dichtung in Vienna an has led the Naropa University's study abroad program to Bali, Indonesia. She is co-founder of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University."

Alice Notley, poet, was born in 1945, and grew up in Needles, California, in the Mohave Desert. Educated at Barnard and The Writers Workshop, University of Iowa, Notley spent 16 years on the Lower East Side, where she was an important force in the second generation of the New York School of poetry. Now living in Paris, she is the author of more than 25 books of poetry, including the epic poem The Descent of Alette, which was published by Penguin in 1996, and Mysteries of Small Houses (1998), which was a Pulitzer Prize finalist and winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poetry.