angel hair sleeps with a boy in my head

the ANGEL anthology HAIR

edited by and

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 . 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 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 '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• at . 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 '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 Renaissance. (None of the plays and e.e. cummingsesque poems in high first-generation 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 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 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 , press. Also the perspective of an alternative to and , and the official verse culture so clearly mani• fest with the San Francisco poets, , at Berkeley was appealing. We were already Robert Duncan and . 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. The "Cups" and "The Park," which I'd read in denouement issue was pristine in its own Locus Solus magazine. I realized that all the way, sporting 's black geographical/aesthetic divisions which Don line drawing of a couple sailing off in their Allen used to structure his anthology were roadster convertible. I had wanted a differ• open to question (as a fifteen-year-old, I ent look and texture from other magazines assumed all those boundaries were sacred) we'd encountered. We weathered com• and this insight, fueled by Kenneth's positive plaints from bookstores about the magazine response to my poem, had a lot to do with being "oversized" but made no compromise. my later stance as an editor. We sent Angel Hair 1 out to a range of fam• In April 1966 I found an apartment at ily, friends, poets, other folk, receiving back 33 St. Marks Place, between Third and modest support, Ann and Sam Charters being Second Avenues, a four-room floor-through among the first subscribers. for $110 a month. Anne graduated from By the time I moved back to New York Bennington in June and moved in. The first City into 33 St. Marks Place the magazine issue of the magazine had come out that had been launched. Word came late summer spring. I was working as a caseworker for the xxii /INTRODUCTION I ANNE WALDMAN INTRODUCTION I LEWIS WARSH

1966 I'd been hired at The at Welfare Department, my first job after grad• a salary in the range of $6000 a year which uating City College, cruising the streets of would help supplement, along with Lewis' Bushwick with a black looseleaf notebook in job at the Welfare Department, our budding my hand as proof of my identity to those publishing venture. The Project would be a who might question my presence on the continuation of alternative poetry and an streets, spending my afternoons drinking active and engaged literary community. Our coffee at tiny formica dining room tables skinny floor-through "railroad" apartment with young mothers with four or five chil• became a veritable salon. First regulars (Ted dren from two or three different fathers. It Berrigan, Dick Gallup, Michel Brownstein, was a job that affected me as much as any• many others) then huge crowds would spill thing I was reading but in a way that I didn't into the premises after readings at the realize until decades had passed. I was sup• Church. Plethora of stories. The night posed to ask these women about the where• Kenneth Koch stripped down, shocking my abouts of the fathers and why they weren't mother who later made the remark that the paying child support. What I realized was New York School got "Beat" below 14th that many of the men were paying child sup• Street. The cranky lady next door often port-but that to tell the Welfare called the police as decibels mounted. Department this would reduce the already Occasionally some of the Velvet Under• miniscule grant that was being offered. ground and crowd would Mostly I realized that it was none of my busi• show up. Many nights we'd hop over to ness, and when my clients figured out that I Max'sKansas City or take a taxi to 42nd was trying to work for them–not punish Street to an all-night movie theater. Although them for having children, or judge them– con• firmedly inspired by our generation's they welcomed me with less suspicion. music, fashion, drugs, attitudes, politics and So this is what I was doing at the being caught up and shaken by the beginning of my career as an editor. Anne, devastating events of our times-the war in meanwhile, found a job as an assistant to a Viet Nam, assassinations of Bobby newly formed arts organization–The Kennedy and Martin Luther King-we Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church. Joel didn't think of ourselves as hippies. Too Oppenheimer was the first director, Joel occupied being writers and publishers, and Sloman the co-director. By 1968 Anne in my case, an infra-structure (arts became the director. Almost simultaneous• administrator) poet. Ted Berrigan jokingly ly, Ted Berrigan began visiting us at our called us the "A" stu• dents for our apartment, usually late at night as he industriousness. After the activity would meandered home to his apartment on 2nd subside we'd often stay up the rest of the Street between C & D. The second issue night working, occasionally spotting W. H. of Angel Hair had appeared by then and we Auden out our window (he lived on the next had included a chapter from his novel, block) in his University of Michigan Clear the Range. I had quit my job at the sweatshirt as he took his early morning Welfare Department after eight months. "constitutional," a London Times under his Anne kept her own (albeit regular) hours at arm. Then we'd sleep a few hours and get the church, and we could stay up most of ready for the next round of work, art, the night and get through the next day conversation. without much trouble.

INTRODUCTION I ANNE WALDMAN INTRODUCTION I LEWIS WARSH I xxiii

When we decided to publish books and First it was just Ted and Dick Gallup pamphlets we wanted texts enhanced by the who came by regularly. We spent hours work of the artists who had come into our smoking dope and listening to music and lives, particularly (also a writer talking about poetry and writing poems we were to publish) and George Schneeman. together and gossiping about everyone who Each book had its own reality. Shape and wasn't there and what jerks they were size weren't confined by an 8-l/2" x 11" because they were missing out. Ted and stapled format, although plenty of those Dick's collaborative poem "80th Congress" we published had charming distinctions. (to Ron Padgett) catches with awkward deli• Bright colored tissue endpapers often cateness the initial awakening of all our new enclosed the body of the work. Decisions friendships: were made based on budgetary concern or expediency. Early productions It's 2 a.m. at Anne & Lewis's which is where it's at (Charles Stein, Gerard Malanga, Lee On St. Mark's Place, hash and Angel Hairs on our minds Harwood) made use of elegant cover Love is in our heart's (what else?) dope & Peter Schjeldahl papers. Frank O’Hara and John Who is new and valid in a blinding snowstorm Wieners's work inspired cottage Inside joy fills our drugless shooting gallery industry George Schneeman drawing With repartee: where there's smoke there's marriage &, folks for covers with mimeo insides. That's also where it's at in poetry in 1967 To get something ready in time for a Newly rich but still a hopeless invalid (in 1967) reading or a birthday could be a push. 's Birds was timed for a Yes, it's 1967, & we've been killing time with life But at Lewis & Anne's we live it "up" reading. Giant Night with silk• Anne makes lovely snow-sodas while Lewis's screened Schneeman of a window watchammacallit warms up this with holly sprig was a Christmas New Year's straight blue haze. We think about that production. had ceremoniously And money. With something inside us we float up To & onto you, it, you were truly there & now you're here. invited Lewis and me to meet and his wife Musa in Woodstock which resulted in a generous After awhile the crowds in our living friendship and Philip's cover for Clark room grew denser. Jim Brodey, Lee Coolidge's lNG, and later a cover for Alice Crabtree (keyboardist and composer for Notley's Incidentals in The Day World, both The Fugs) and Michael Brownstein were stunning black and white drawings. Alex among the initial regulars, along with Ted Katz’s astute graphic drawing was a perfect and Dick. Harris Schiff, my old high school match for Bill Berkson's Shining Leaves. friend, came later. was there a lot When Jim Dine responded with understated after he arrived from England. Peter and cover art for Ron Padgett and Tom Clark's Linda Schjeldahl were there-and some• Bun, wittily making use of a photo of a bagel, times we all ended up at their apartment we got nervous about getting the on 3rd Street, or at George and Katie background (burnt almond?) right. Ditto, Jim Schneeman's apartment once they moved up Rosenquist’s psychedelic cover for Peter the hlock. Sometimes, well after midnight, Schjeldahl’s Dreams. Sometimes serious we ended up at Max's Kansas City. Gerard errors in the runs. Kenward Elmslie’s Girl Malanga and René Ricard were around a lot.

xxiv I INTRODUCTION I ANNE WALDMAN INTRODUCTION I LEWIS WARSH

Machine was mis-bound and upsidedown. Larry and Joan Fagin came later and Ron Back to the shop. Donna Dennis's mysteri• and Pat Padgett appeared intermittently. ous cover for Lewis's Moving Thru Air was Martha Diamond and Donna Dennis, two printed on limp cover stock, losing all edge young painters who lived across the street, and clarity. Re-do. We had standards. The were frequent visitors. I'm leaving out oth• most important thing was pleasing the poets ers. Ted was there every night until he left to and artists themselves. I mistakenly had Joe teach in Iowa in 1968. Sandy Berrigan often Brainard's cover drawing for Lee Harwood's visited by day, with her two children, David Man With Blue Eyes (our very first venture) and Kate. showed up one printed on blue paper. Joe had assumed it afternoon after she moved to the city with would be printed on white but in typical Joe• her husband Jack Boyce, and was fashion was gracious (and amused) about it. a constant self-contained presence, straight Photographs were often an option. A cover out of high school. Bill Berkson was there designed by Donna Dennis for 3 American often, especially after he moved from East Tantrums by Michael Brownstein features 57th to his apartment around the corner on an emaciated yogin. Photographs of Joe 10th Street. Brainard at various stages of childhood grace Alongside the salon atmosphere, a little the serialized I Remember, I Remember More publishing industry was rumbling in our liv• and More I Remember. Limited signed edi• ing room. We had begun doing books by tions were a point of pride. then-the English poet Lee Harwood's The My own writing was undergoing shifts Man With Blue Eyes was the first, followed by of attention and intention. Many writers of Gerard Malanga's 3 Poems for Benedetta my generation were hybrids feeding off the Barzini. It was a natural progression to go branches of the New American Poetry. My from magazine to books, a furthering of the earliest poems are confessional, soulful, commitment to the writers that interested us questioning of American values. They move most. In retrospect I think Anne and I were around the page. Poems from my last year at intent on mining all the possibilities of being Bennington fashioned into a manuscript for editors and publishers as quickly as possible graduation were denser, ponderous, ambigu• so that we could get on with our own work ous–sprung from dream, hints of relation• and whatever was to follow. Some nights we ship but distanced from palpable experience. wouldn't answer the door just to get stuff Excessively muted in tone and atmosphere, done but Ted had a special code for our they seem remote now, as if filtered through buzzer–he was always welcome, and often gauze. Serial poems of Spicer and Blaser our best-intentioned plans to spend a quiet were an influence. Yeats and Stevens, night at home were quietly sabotaged. If I Pound's "Cathay" still haunted the premises. was lucky, I could get to work by 2 or 3 am: "The DeCarlo Lots" felt genuine–a stead• type a few stencils, rewrite yesterday's poem, ier hand and sound moving in there. Then answer a few letters, mail some books into Ted Berrigan burst in haranguing, breaking the world. Read the newspaper. the narratives, taking issue with "message." There was little critical writing going Look to the painters. Words were things as on at the time. Not even reviews. Some of Gertrude Stein proclaimed. It was easy for the poets wrote art reviews for Art News and me to fall in love with Frank O'Hara's poet• The Village Voice. I wrote a few reviews for ry. 's. The Surrealist antics Poetry Magazine, but to what purpose? I

INTRODUCTION I ANNE WALDMAN INTRODUCTION I LEWIS WARSH I xxv were a kick to late-night collaborations, corps could only reiterate the ongoing decades• exquis. The education continued along, to long argument between academic and exper• paraphrase Whalen. I got looser, dumber, imental writing and try to draw attention to more playful, writing down things I over• the work of my friends (though I didn't have heard, read, names of people, places, snip• much say about what books I could review). pets from the radio, the street. O'Hara's Writing poetry criticism during the late six• "Personism" manifesto was affecting as an ties was to associate oneself with an academ• antidote to 's "Projective ic world, and a tone of voice, which was con• Verse," which was potent as well. Cut-up à la sidered inimical to the life of poetry itself. It Burroughs. Berrigan's Sonnets. I was also was more important to look out the window, reading the work of all my new poetry to feel the light coming in, or the way the friends who were regularly walking into the whole world seemed to collapse around you living room any hour of the day or night. and rearrange itself as you stepped off the Also giving readings, organizing and run• curb, than to think about poetry in a way ning countless poetry events which hosted that might improve other people's lives. many elders, being drawn more and more There was the poetry of being alive and into oral/aural performative possibilities for there was the poetry on the page. The word myself, inventing "modal structures," exper• "poet" was often used generically to describe imenting with tape cut-ups, using music and the way you lived your life, whether you film with readings, and had begun some ten• wrote anything or not. No one I knew tative musical collaboration. (I was an aspired to a tenure-track position, no one I early-though brief-student of Lamonte knew attended MLA conferences, no one I Young's in 1970.) knew had a PhD. Most of the people I knew By the late sixties the Viet Nam War didn't work at all. Visiting writing gigs at col• had escalated. An estimated 550,000 troops leges was the most one ever hoped for, but were in Southeast Asia by 1969. The Tet no one was hustling in that direction. offensive was a serious setback, discrediting This nonacademic stance, however, was the American government's optimistic and never anti-intellectual. The freedom from false reports. By the time of Nixon's illegal working regular jobs meant there was more bombing of Cambodia in 1970, the Mai Lai time to read and talk about books, and not Massacre, and gruesome casualties all just the books that arrived in the mail. And around, the anti-war movement was at its the culture of the late sixties was inviting, as height of engagement. St. Mark's was a hot• well, so that as a poet you could feel part of bed of political activity that many of us a larger world that involved music and paint• became more consumed by in the late 60's/ ing and dance and movies and politics, what early 70's. I began working with John was going on in the present, and without Giorno on various provocative "cultural feeling cynical. The songs on the radio actu• interventions" including street works, dial-a• ally had some immediate illusory connection poem. Several of us, in cahoots with the to what one might be doing as a poet. I Yippies, participated in cultural activism remember going with Anne to a special around the Chicago Seven trial. Allen screening of Blow Up in London; before the Ginsberg and I started our demonically movie came on, they played "A Day in A active "spiritual marriage" (as he called it) Life" by the Beatles-it was the first time I which began by chanting Hindu mantras in heard it. The day that the Beatles' White

xxvi I INTRODUCTION I ANNE WALDMAN INTRODUCTION I LEWIS WARSH

Daley Park in Chicago and resulted in the Album came out, we stayed up listening till founding of the School of dawn. (I can still picture Anne, curled up in Disembodied Poetics at Naropa Institute an armchair, attentive as always, as the light (now University) in Boulder, Colorado, in came up over St. Marks Place.) 1974. I had visited the Tail of The Tiger At the same time-and this might be Tibetan center in Vermont in 1970 and the true measure of how much time has begun Tibetan Buddhist practice. Life and passed–there was almost no feminist or focus were already changing by the time multicultural consciousness at work, no con• Lewis left for the West Coast in 1970. We scious attempt to balance the number of were able to keep the press going in spite of male and female poets contributing to the our separation, stayed friendly, mutually magazine, no thought of raising the political supportive, and consulted one another con• level beyond the politics of the poetry world cerning our continuing Angel Hair produc• itself. Especially embarrassing is the dearth tions, now literally from two coasts. We of women poets published in the magazine. spawned further publishing ventures with To say that there were fewer women poets new partners and situations: United Artists, writing or that the most radical political Songbird Editions, Rocky Ledge, Erudite groups at the time were sexist and homo• Fangs. phobic is no excuse. Obviously a major consequence of By the fifth issue, the magazine became Angel Hair's publishing debut books and associated almost exclusively with the The pamphlets and other items was the launch• New York School. Yet I've never felt quite ing of an array of young experimental like a bona fide New York School Poet, writers, including ourselves, onto the whatever that means. The poetry world, scene and into the official annals as sec• especially during that time, felt more com• ond-generation New York School poets. A munal to me than a cluster of different handy moniker, it doesn't cover the entire schools, and I saw no contradiction publish• territory. Of course the magazine was a ing poets associated with the west coast• project of friendships, artistic collabora• Ebbe Borregaard, Philip Whalen, Robert tion, which are defining qualities of "New Duncan, Joanne Kyger, John Thorpe and York School." Yet our project mixed up Jim Koller-alongside the poets from the East and West coast scenes and juxtaposed New York School. (The magazines I'd them in an unusual and appealing context. learned most from, Yugen and Locus Solus, We were also making up on the spot, were committed to a sense of variousness, stumbling along improvisationally. and I had no interest in editing a magazine In retrospect, Angel Hair seems a seed where the bloc of contributors was the same syllable that unlocked various energetic from issue to issue.) I'd begun reading Clark post-modern and post-New American Coolidge's poems in Aram Saroyan's Lines Poetry possibilities, giving a younger gener• magazine, and elsewhere, and felt an imme• ation cognizance that you can take your diate rush of recognition. Bernadette work, literally, into your own hands. You Mayer's 0 to 9 magazine, which she had don't have to wait to be discovered. And so• begun coediting with Vito Acconci, over• called ephemera, lovingly and painstakingly lapped and expanded the work we were produced, have tremendous power. They doing. Of all magazines published in the six• signify meticulous human attention and ties, possibly 0 to 9 is the true precursor for

INTRODUCTION I ANNE WALDMAN INTRODUCTION I LEWIS WARSH I xxvii intelligence, like the outline of a hand in a much of the experimental writing that has Cro-Magnon cave. Yet with the overwhelm• been done in the decades to follow. ing availability of information-everything The sixth and last issue of Angel Hair is known, nothing concealed-that we have a kind of denouement to the whole project. today through more and more complex Only three years had passed, but it felt like technologies, I wonder if Lewis and I would many lifetimes. Anne and I were more go about our press now in quite the manner. involved with publishing books (many of the With the same naive enthusiasm and opti• poets we knew had book-length manuscripts mism? I like to think so. and no publishers, so doing books was more We gave away our magazine and books, useful) and The World–the sent them out into the void. We saw little mimeographed magazine published every income from bookstores, many of which month or two by the Poetry Project–was never even responded. But how much more beginning to cover much of the same pleasurable to visit Donna Dennis in her stu• ground as Angel Hair. I also felt that we dio, discuss collage versions for Jim Carroll's had made our point in trying to define a 4 Ups & 1 Down, than generate computer art poetry community without coastal at a solitary "work station." Or vie and hus• boundaries–a community based on a tle constantly in the competitive world of feeling of connectedness that transcended grants. When we published a pamphlet it small aesthetic differences, all the usual was a grand occasion. We celebrated all week traps that contribute to a blinkered pony when Ted Berrigan's The Sonnets was picked vision of the world. Anne and I, however, up by Grove Press. It would seem in the new had by then created personal boundaries of millennium poets have to hide their success• our own–we were evolving, growing up, es from one another. Envy, literary "poli• growing out of ourselves, but no longer in tics," who's in, who's out--concerns seem• parallel directions–and it was time to ingly tangential to the work itself cloud the move on. atmosphere. The early years were magical. –Lewis Warsh Unself-conscious about who we were and 7/2000 what we were doing, we were our own dis• traction culture. We weren't thinking about career moves or artistic agendas. We weren't in the business of creating a literary mafia or codifying a poetics. There were no interest• ing models for that kind of life. We talked about poetry constantly, wrote a lot, worked nonstop on the magazine and press. It was the most interesting and smartest thing we could be doing. We created a world in which we were purveyors, guardians, impressarios of a little slice of poetry turf, making things, plugging in our youth, offering the gift of ourselves to help keep the ever-expanding literary scene a lively place. And it was. –Anne Waldman 10/2000