Introduction
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angel hair sleeps with a boy in my head the ANGEL anthology HAIR edited by anne waldman and lewis warsh granary books new york city 2001 INTRODUCTION ANNE WALDMAN I met Lewis Warsh at the Berkeley Poetry Conference and will always forever after think we founded Angel Hair within that auspicious moment. Conflation of time triggered by romance adjacent to the glam• orous history-making events of the confer• ence seems a reasonable explanation. Perhaps Angel Hair was what we made together in our brief substantive marriage that lasted and had repercussions. And sped INTRODUCTION us on our way as writers. Aspirations to be a poet were rising, the ante grew higher at LEWIS WARSH Berkeley surrounded by heroic figures of the New American Poetry. Here was a fellow Anne Waldman and I met in the earliest New Yorker, same age, who had also written stages of our becoming poets. Possibly edit• novels, was resolute, erudite about contem• ing a magazine is a tricky idea under these porary poetry. Mutual recognition lit us up. circumstances. Possibly it's the best idea-to Don't I know you? test one's ideas before you even have them, Summer before last year at Bennington or when they're pre-embryonic. In a sense where I'd been editing SILO magazine doing a magazine at this early moment was under tutalage of printer-poet Claude our way of giving birth-as much to the Fredericks, studying literature and poetry actual magazine and books as to our selves as with Howard Nemerov and other literary poets. We were going on nerve, all of twen• and creative faculty, I was encouraged by ty years old, but trusting in our love, which Jonathan Cott-comrade I'd known since was less tricky and in the moment defied all high school-to visit radical Berkeley and uncertainty. check out the poetry convention. It was cer• The fact that we were growing up tainly going to be more experimental than through the editing of the magazine and what I was exposed to at Bennington. A few writing our own poems at the same time was students had been making queries about why a complicated process and gave us a lot of no one taught Williams, Pound or Gertrude permission to make mistakes, stumble and Stein, let alone H.D. I was trying to get the recover. It was by making mistakes, as in school to invite Allen Ginsberg to read. Jon every endeavor, that we learned. From the and I had been exchanging work, he'd sent start, the contents of the magazine mirrored copies of Ted Berrigan's "C” magazine jam• our social encounters as much as any fixed ming my little rustic p.o. box. He'd known aesthetic. Yet we also had a point of depar• Ron Padgett at Columbia University. We ture and context–the poets included in The were on to the New American Poetry and New American Poetry anthology edited by the poetry net was widening, inviting. Donald Allen, which first appeared in 1960. xx / INTRODUCTION I ANNE WALDMAN INTRODUCTION I LEWIS WARSH My mother's connection to poet I encountered this book the summer Anghelos Sikelianos–he was her father-in• it appeared, when I was fifteen, and law over a decade–had decidedly informed eventually knew many of the poems and the my upbringing and aspirations to poetry. biographi• cal statements by heart. There Frances was part of the utopian Delphic was also the context of The Berkeley Poetry Ideal community in Greece in the 1930s Conference, which took place in the spearheaded by Eva Palmer Sikelianos with summer of 1965. This is where Anne and links to Isadora Duncan, Jose Clemente I met, at Robert Duncan's reading. The Orozco, others, that had a humanistic brave conference was one of the major notion that art, and Greek drama in particu• convergences of the poets included in the lar, could "save mankind." There was Don Allen anthology, with emphasis on the encouragement in our bohemian household Black Mountain poets and the poets of the towards any act of poetry. I wrote stories and San Francisco Renaissance. (None of the plays and e.e. cummingsesque poems in high first-generation New York School poets school, and sent them uneventfully off to were present, though I'd heard that Frank The Village Voice and The Evergreen Review, to O'Hara had been invited and couldn't make which I loyally subscribed. The night Lewis it.) So from the start this was the tradition and I took lysergic acid diethylamide at a we wanted to explore as publishers and friend's apartment on Nob Hill, first time, I editors. A feeling of wanting to go beyond hallucinated a lineage tree, an arbor vitae that tradition came later–another step in (prevalent archetypal "acid" icon)–resonant the process of becoming, of being. It was with what you visualize in particular just a matter of time before we realized that Buddhist practices–that included all the our real work wasn't simply to mine the people I'd ever known: family, friends, their tradition of the poets of that world, but to families, friends. Also heroes, heroines, cul• create our own. tural figures, saints, poets, ballplayers, actors, The first poem in the first issue of the movie stars, singers, many others–bad guys, magazine is a translation of a poem by Pierre enemies even. Animals, trees, plants, lakes, Reverdy by Kenneth Koch and Georges mountains, and so on. All gathered in my Guy. Georges was a French professor at brain in witness motif, gazing at one anoth• Bennington who would frequently take er and then up at the sky waiting for an Anne and me to dinner (a French restaurant, impulse to get something "going." Or make The Rain Barrel) on weekends when I'd go use of their precious time "on earth." Of visit Anne, who was in her last year at col• course all these folk were already busy, that lege. Kenneth Koch had been my teacher at wasn't the point. It was my yearning to be the New School in fall '63. When we decid• part of it all, a blueprint for community, for ed to start the magazine–we were in the sacre conversatione. More like a fifties Sci Fi backseat of a car driving from Bennington to movie? And yet the desire to belong, and to New York when we looked at each other and "lead" had a naive, albeit egotistical, purity. said "Let's do it" and five minutes later "Let's Back on the relative level, clearly Lewis call it Angel Hair"–Georges offered us this and I were bonded and destined to "do poem. something" together. Certainly meeting on I must admit that in my first readings of the West Coast and having a sense of those the New American Poetry anthology the poet poetry communities helped define or keep in the New York School section interested me the least. My tastes were with the Black INTRODUCTION I ANNE WALDMAN INTRODUCTION I LEWIS WARSH I xxi expansive the aesthetic of our magazine and Mountain poets, especially Robert Creeley, press. Also the perspective of an alternative to Denise Levertov and Paul Blackburn, and the official verse culture so clearly mani• fest with the San Francisco poets, Jack Spicer, at Berkeley was appealing. We were already Robert Duncan and Robin Blaser. The way drawn to underground "autonomous zones," these poets internalized experience made tender beauties of small press pro• duction. sense to me; I'd always been involved with White Rabbit books were sacred objects inner voices, and it was the tone in which Lewis turned me towards. Later Locus Solus, these voices were speaking to me that Art & Literature. The Floating Bear and Ed became the "voice" of my early poems. Sanders' Fuck You: A Magazine of the Arts were These poets also taught me that psychology, also galvanizing for their inti• macy and magic, history and dailiness could exist in immediacy. I had met Diane di Prima in poetry in equal measure. The New York 1963 when she was in situ at the Albert School poets sounded a bit too formal and Hotel with children and entourage and rhetorical to me, too on the surface–Frank books on alchemy. O'Hara, most confusing of all, since he was Back in Vermont I'd been working on formal and colloquial almost in the same SILO with printer Ronnie Ballou, who breath–I wasn't ready for it. This is what printed grocery lists and menus for liveli• evolution means–the factors that create the hood. He was a taciturn New Englander, possibility of interest, the chance encounters rarely smiled, but pleased with the new ven• with books and people that influence you in ture. This was not fine letterpress printing ways you might not know about until years but a modest and cheaper substitute. We later. Though I had attended Kenneth ordered out for the elegant Fabriano cover Koch's workshop, during which he discussed paper. The first Angel Hair cost less than at length the poets of the New York School, $150 to print. A large page size (9" x 12") my heart was really elsewhere. Yet when I gave ample space around the works. Simple was in the class, I wrote my first good type for our title–from Jon Cott's provoca• poem-"The Suicide Rates"-influenced tive line "Angel hair sleeps with a boy in my mostly by Robin Blaser's long poems, head"–felt consummately luxurious.