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When discussing poetry in the year 1960, there’s perhaps no volume more important than Donald Allen’s The New American Poetry. [1] However, I’d like to argue that there’s another anthology that, in terms of both prescience and precedent, sketches out a blueprint for Allen’s collection and in some ways even supersedes his achievement. Nearly forgotten half a century later, A New Folder and its editor, Daisy Aldan, are certainly deserving of a greater critical recognition. [2]

A child star of the CBS radio program, Let’s Pretend, Aldan was first published in the pages of Poetry by age twelve. After taking degrees at Hunter College and Brooklyn College, she spent thirty-five years teaching at New York’s School of Industrial Art, where her students included Art Spiegelman, Tony Bennett, Calvin Klein and Harvey Fierstein, as well as Warhol associates Gerard Malanga and Jackie Curtis. She cofounded the Tiber Press and the journal Folder with Richard Miller, releasing four issues between 1953 and 1956, then resurrected the title herself in 1959 with A New Folder, first published in a small hardcover edition, which was followed in 1960 by a paperback version. Given that much of the work originated in the subculture of little magazines, this format, which more closely mimics the portable aesthetics of those journals, seems ideal.  

Allen sought to answer manifesto with manifesto, countering the “cooked” traditionalism of New Poets of England and America (1957) with a volume that dressed itself in the raiments of canonicity (including bibliographies and statements of poetics). However, Alden’s hybrid aims for A New Folder are still quite ambitious — to combine the anthology’s snapshot view of the best and brightest of contemporary American poetry with the journal’s diverse, risk-taking scope and more modest selections (most poets are represented by a single work) — and it bears repeating that she accomplished all of this before The New American Poetry was published.

Containing approximately the same number of poets, A New Folder and The New American Poetry have sixteen authors in common, representing one-third of their respective rosters — an all-star lineup consisting of John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, Frank O’Hara, Edward Field, Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Jack Kerouac, LeRoi Jones, Paul Blackburn, Denise Levertov, Robert Creeley, Charles Olson, Larry Eigner, Madeline Gleason, Michael McClure and Philip Whalen. The selections Allen would make for both the Beats and New York School are almost identical, and many of the major Black Mountain poets are present as well, along with interesting outliers like Wallace Fowlie (who contributes a foreword), Aldan’s close friend Anaïs Nin, Kenward Elmslie, Harold Norse, James Broughton, M.C. Richards, Gerrit Lansing and formalist poets Richard Eberhart and James Merrill. Taken together, what we have is a wide-ranging chronicle of New York’s burgeoning cross-cultural scene, which works against Allen’s useful yet problematically reductive aesthetic/geographic subdivisions.

In and of itself, A New Folder’s literary content is enough to make it a notable anthology, however, the volume also contains work from a staggering array of more than thirty artists including Larry Rivers (who also contributed a poem), Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline, Joan Mitchell, Philip Guston, Willem De Kooning, Robert Motherwell, Jane Freilicher, Grace Hartigan, Helen Frankenthaler, Michael Goldberg, Robert DeNiro and Charles Henri Ford. In his preface to The New American Poetry, Allen observes that his poets are “closely allied to modern jazz and abstract expressionist painting,” and while the spontaneous bop prosody contained therein might ably represent swinging rhythms and action painting, the real thing is conspicuously absent. [3] Aldan’s black and white photoreproductions do an admirable job of conveying this vital aesthetic energy, and Library of Congress records show that she recorded a number of New Folder readings and discussions, perhaps suggesting that she intended to add yet another dimension to the volume. It’s worth noting that Alfred Leslie’s “one-shot review,” The Hasty Papers (also published in 1960) achieves a similarly effective mix of writing and visuals. However, it’s almost entirely a male affair, and this is the last, perhaps most obvious way in which A New Folder differs from its contemporaries.

While many “feminine marvelous and tough” voices could be found in The New American Poetry, there were, of course, only four women among forty-four poets in the anthology: Guest, Gleason, Levertov and Helen Adam. Guided by the eye of an experienced female editor, it’s not surprising that nearly one-third of A New Folder’s poets are women, and the same percentage holds true for its artists. Such opportunities seem unprecedented in the late fifties and early sixties: writers like Joyce Johnson and Hettie Jones have retrospectively documented the limited venues for creative expression open to women during this time, and even outside the literary counterculture, misogynistic norms held sway (New Poets of England and America, for example, contains just as few women as Allen’s anthology).

In The New American Poetry’s bibliography, Aldan’s work with both Folder and A New Folder is given prominent placement, and in the intervening decades many of her selections have proven to be leading figures in twentieth century American culture. However, Aldan herself has tragically slipped into obscurity. She’s missing entirely or given glancing mention in important critical histories of the period such as David Lehman’s The Last Avant-Garde (1999), Daniel Kane’s All Poets Welcome (2003) and Steve Clay and Rodney Phillips’ A Secret Location on the Lower East Side (1998), receiving the most notice in Reva Wolf’s Andy Warhol, Poetry and Gossip in the 1960s (1997), largely due to having been Malanga’s high school English teacher. Even among as well-informed an audience as those attending our Kelly Writers House symposium on poetry in 1960, there were only three or four people who claimed familiarity with Aldan or A New Folder. However, it’s heartening that in this era of electronic memory — and through events such as the one this commentary was initially conceived for — she might finally be given the recognition that she deserves.

[1] The New American Poetry: 1945–1960, ed. Donald Allen (New York: Grove Press, 1960).
[2] A New Folder: Americans: Poems and Drawings, ed. Daisy Aldan (New York: Folder Editions, 1959).
[3] The New American Poetry: 1945–1960, xi.

For years I heard about Stanzas for Iris Lezak and read excerpts from it in Representative Works: 1938–1985 and Thing of Beauty: New and Selected Works, though never held a copy until recently. [1] When I did, I made a surprising discovery: the great extent to which Jackson Mac Low’s work at this juncture joins with the Beat zeitgeist.

Mac Low’s “systematic-chance” poems, known for their inventiveness, expose a wide range of human values, interests, struggles, observations, desires, and joys — even if they are mechanistically derived. Catching my attention in Stanzas for Iris Lezak was something humorous, not on the surface and not so much funny as revelatory about how the author connected with broader literary movements. A nominal connection, association, or appreciation for the Beats is not disguised by Mac Low. Poems titled, “A 2-Part Poem for Ginsberg & Burroughs from Burroughs’ Letter to Ginsberg” and “Asymmetry from Ginsberg’s KADDISH—22 Sept. 1960,” are among those that appear in the book. [2]

Beyond containing many poems referencing narcotics (i.e., “The Mind and Marihuana”), Stanzas for Iris Lezak’s camaraderie with the subcultural framework of the Beats also appears in its portrayal of hedonistic sexuality. A poem strongly representing this take on the material is Section I of “6 Gitanjali for Iris”:

My you
Gain is rainy life
See
The Here end
Gain rainy end again the end see the
Feet. Utter. Cry know
Is now,
The outside when Now,
        (18 seconds of silence)
IS
Life outside void end
The outside
Feet. Utter. Cry know
My you
Gain is rainy life. [3]

The amusing and weird part, providing connective tissue to the Beats (beyond perhaps echoing Michael McClure), is not in the lines of the poem, which appear as sweet and expansive cut-up and/or slotted texts. Discovered in the “seed” text used to generate them — which “An Afterword on the Methods Used in Composing & Performing Stanzas for Iris Lezak” reports are taken from Rabindranath Tagore’s “Gitanjali” — are, however, these “exultant sentences”: “My girl’s the greatest fuck in town. I love to fuck my girl.” [4] Mac Low reads through Tagore’s book, selecting words conforming to the pattern designated by the seed phrases (e.g. first letters of the lines “My you / Gain is rainy life” spell “My Girl”). What Mac Low does with his corporeal impulse, expressed in a code a reader might or might not see, differs from the blatant sexuality found in Beat works. However, Mac Low significantly chooses to divulge this textual fact at the outset of his Afterword — so he clearly wants to let readers know it’s there!  [Photo at left by Rachel Homer, used with her permission.]

Stanzas for Iris Lezak also connects with the Beats by overt emphasis — by reference and process — on Eastern religion; it is peppered with Zen à la Kerouac’s Mexico City Blues, as in “Haiku (3 Oct. 1960)”:

Ripples in a pool
passions thoughts sensations lives
in serenity. [5]

Many poems reference Eastern iconography and inclination; one titled “Rinzai on the Self, or ‘The One who is, at this moment, right in front of us, illuminatingly, in full awareness, listening to this talk on the Dharma,” being a particularly prime example. Mac Low’s methods involve use of “auxiliary means” such as dice, playing cards, numbers, and the I Ching. [6] These algorithmic inventions serve to decentralize a subjective self from the poem — although because it is a poem, made with decisive content from human input, self-importance remains at the fringes. Mac Low revealingly writes, “the most ‘personal’ aspect of the Stanzas […] is the variety of source text.” [7] Because these are poems, published in a book, we cannot consider Mac Low’s efforts as a rejection of materialism (although its methods of materialization do not follow common convention), but rather as processed re-materialism that finds ways for one set of words to say more than one thing, confirming that multidimensionality exists within a single set of resources. In the early sixties, Mac Low’s identity was normally associated with Fluxus rather than with his bawdy beatnik contemporaries becoming well-known at the time; however, both influences are there. Mac Low references Keats in the title of Thing of Beauty; we know Mac Low and the Beats drew from the Romantics, connecting themselves to all of it, filtering multitudes unafraid to disclose liberated glory!

I title this paper “Mac Low as a Shadow Beatnik” to commemorate the observation, and have applied Mac Low’s expansion method to the book using the “seed” “Mac Low as beatnik.” Linear reading of the whole brought waves of themes — touching and reading every page and word, holding transcribing staccato blasts of constrained concept. Any reader sees how Jackson blends native with foreign, but who else becomes aware of how many pages can pass without having a word beginning with “w”? Like Emmett Williams’ IBM poems or Hugh Kenner’s Travesty, participating like this is instructive regarding language, authorial range, how limited speech is not always limited, and how cycles and patterns build force. Here are results of reading through the poetry until page sixty — seven lines made by a chance melding on the bridge between Modern and Postmodern, instructive to a culture around it:

Maharishi always concerning little of written are same beyond each added teachings no in known
Man’s actual conditioned literally on way a sangsaric but existence and true not is karmic
Mental are conceivable like of wills and such believes essentially and to nationally
intellectually keeping
Matter adopted carefulness less orient which as set before east age this no is kind-hearted Moderate affectionate catch letter only widow attractive single business ex-Navy
adventure the N.Y.C. interesting kind
Mercenary American character love one who a sense background employed attractive
travelled nice if know
Marrying away calm lady over who actor seemed being else’s at nothing in kindness
My asshole clitoris little one while Augustin since begin Eugénie’s a those kid.

[1] Jackson Mac Low, Stanzas for Iris Lezak (Millerton: Something Else Press, 1972); Jackson Mac Low, Representative Works: 1938–1985 (New York: Roof Books, 1986); Jackson Mac Low, Thing of Beauty: New and Selected Works, ed. Anne Tardos (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008).
[2] Daniel Kane, All Poets Welcome: the Lower East Side Poetry Scene in the 1960s (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 30; Allen Ginsberg, “Foreword,” in Out of This World: An Anthology of the St. Mark’s Poetry Project 1966–1991, ed. Anne Waldman (New York: Three Rivers Press, 1991), xxv. Mac Low’s intimate association and involvement with the poetry scene in New York in the 1960s is reported in Daniel Kane’s All Poets Welcome — which includes excerpts from an unpublished essay by Mac Low titled, “The New York Coffeehouse Poetry Reading Scene in New York, 1960-1967” — as well as in Ginsberg’s “Foreword” to Out of this World: An Anthology of the St. Mark’s Poetry Project 1966-1991.
[3] Mac Low, Stanzas for Iris Lezak, 203.
[4] Ibid., 400.  A description of processes used in Stanzas for Iris Lezak is also offered in Mac Low’s posthumous collection Thing of Beauty: New and Selected Works, 49–51.
[5] Ibid., 369.
[6] Ibid., 401.
[7] Mac Low, Stanzas for Iris Lezak, 405.