All Poets Welcome: The Lower East Side Poetry Scene in the 1960s

Abstract

§ Daniel Kane. All Poets Welcome: The Lower East Side Poetry Scene in the 1960s. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. 306 pp. $27.50 Emphasizing the public performance of poetry at such now-legendary forums as St. Mark's Church and Le Metro, Manhattan's Lower East Side poetry scene in the 1960s and 70s encompassed a menagerie of poetic and political temperaments, from soi-disant revolutionaries to the relatively dapper and mannered New York School poets. The Lower East Side, now gentrified into the East Village, was a hotbed of sixties radicalism and inanity, a pseudo-bohemia of cheap rent and urban grittiness. Daniel Kane's thesis in All Poets Welcome is that "in terms of the growing poetry scene, the Lower East Side as a neighborhood proved helpful in lending 'alternative' status to artistic production." The West Village, New York's prewar artistic epicenter, had ossified into an "overpriced, bourgeois, and co-opted" neighborhood of poseurs, while the Lower East Side retained its "tradition of working-class radicalism and resistance." Into this fiery parcel flocked dozens of poets who were or would become associated with "an increasingly established number of often ill-defined and porous poetic'schools.'" The Beats; the "generations" of the New York School; Black Mountain; Deep Image; Umbra; the San Francisco Renaissance; Language: these and more were represented and in some cases formed or consolidated in the coffeehouses and other public spaces of the Lower East Side. It is no exaggeration to say that this milieu transformed American poetry-establishing the styles and ideas that continue to define our literary imagination. Kane is at his best as a social chronicler of the scene, constructing an enthralling journalistic history of the participants' antics and contradictions, rivalries and ribaldries. Some of the most interesting material in the book is pleasantly gossipy and anecdotal-none more so, for this reader, than the pages devoted to the New York School. While Charles Olson was declaiming from the mountain about the breath and kinetics, Kenneth Koch was grumbling against "the myth, the missus, and the midterms." The mostly homosexual, urbane, and anti-programmatic New York School poets, with their uptown sensibilities, made many on the scene uneasy at first. While for John Ashbery, Frank O'Hara, and Koch, lunch dates and cosmopolitan conversations with the likes of Willem de Kooning were of the utmost compositional importance, self-important shamans like Jerome Rothenberg and Clayton Eshleman were trying to "reach down among the lost branches" to attain "a moment of seeing" (as Rothenberg put it). The conflict between this misty brand of romanticism and the playful, Francophile sensibilities of the New York School was typical of the internecine fractures that could result from aesthetic and political tensions among the assorted personalities and coteries on the scene. One is reminded of Kerouac's heckle (recounted in David Lehman's The Last Avant-Garde): "You're destroying American poetry, O'Hara!" And Frank O'Hara's retort: "That's more than you ever did for it." Kane fastidiously documents the famous Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church, still going strong after nearly forty years, which boasted a roster of poets that comprised a who's who of what Donald Alien called "the New American Poetry." The (at least nominal) democracy of the poetry readings that took place in such venues across the Lower East Side-where "all poets [were] welcome to come and read," as an ad for readings at Les Deux Megots had itproduced a feedback loop of artistic ferment and acted as a generator both of poetic energy and of spiraling discord. The strange decline and fall of Le Metro coffeehouse-replete with fistfights, legal troubles, and rumors of Mafia involvement-is a case in point, as is the "assassination" of Kenneth Koch by the justly forgotten Alien Van Newkirk, which Kane vividly recounts (and a recording of which is included on the valuable CD that accompanies the book). …