Lewis Warsh on Angel Hair

 

ngel Hair feature Introduction by Lewis Warsh Also see Anne Waldman’s Introduction

Click the image to go back to Angel Hair contents

Anne Waldman and I met in the earliest stages of our becoming poets. Possibly editing a magazine is a tricky idea under these circumstances. Possibly it’s the best idea — to test one’s ideas before you even have them, or when they’re pre-embryonic. In a sense doing a magazine at this early moment was our way of giving birth — as much to the actual magazine and books as to our selves as poets. We were going on nerve, all of twenty years old, but trusting in our love, which was less tricky and in the moment defied all uncertainty.       The fact that we were growing up through the editing of the magazine and writing our own poems at the same time was a complicated process and gave us a lot of permission to make mistakes, stumble and recover. It was by making mistakes, as in every endeavor, that we learned. From the start, the contents of the magazine mirrored our social encounters as much as any fixed aesthetic.       Yet we also had a point of departure and context — the poets included in The New American Poetry anthology edited by Donald Allen, which first appeared in 1960. I encountered this book the summer it appeared, when I was fifteen, and eventually knew many of the poems and the biographical statements by heart.       There was also the context of The Berkeley Poetry Conference, which took place in the summer of 1965. This is where Anne and I met, at Robert Duncan’s reading. The conference was one of the major convergences of the poets included in the Don Allen anthology, with emphasis on the Black Mountain poets and the poets of the San Francisco Renaissance. (None of the first-generation New York School poets were present, though I’d heard that Frank O’Hara had been invited and couldn’t make it.) So from the start this was the tradition we wanted to explore as publishers and editors. A feeling of wanting to go beyond that tradition came later — another step in the process of becoming, of being. It was just a matter of time before we realized that our real work wasn’t simply to mine the tradition of the poets of that world, but to create our own.

The first poem in the first issue of the magazine is a translation of a poem by Pierre Reverdy by Kenneth Koch and Georges Guy. Georges was a French professor at Bennington who would frequently take Anne and me to dinner (a French restaurant, The Rain Barrel) on weekends when I’d go visit Anne, who was in her last year at college. Kenneth Koch had been my teacher at the New School in fall ’63. When we decided to start the magazine — we were in the backseat of a car driving from Bennington to New York when we looked at each other and said ‘Let’s do it’ and five minutes later ‘Let’s call it Angel Hair’ — Georges offered us this poem.       I must admit that in my first readings of the New American Poetry anthology the poets in the New York School section interested me the least. My tastes were with the Black Mountain poets, especially Robert Creeley, Denise Levertov and Paul Blackburn, and with the San Francisco poets, Jack Spicer, Robert Duncan and Robin Blaser. The way these poets internalized experience made sense to me; I’d always been involved with inner voices, and it was the tone in which these voices were speaking to me that became the ‘voice’ of my early poems. These poets also taught me that psychology, magic, history and dailiness could exist in poetry in equal measure.       The New York School poets sounded a bit too formal and rhetorical to me, too on the surface — Frank O ’Hara, most confusing of all, since he was formal and colloquial almost in the same breath — I wasn’t ready for it. This is what evolution means — the factors that create the possibility of interest, the chance encounters with books and people that influence you in ways you might not know about until years later. Though I had attended Kenneth Koch’s workshop, during which he discussed at length the poets of the New York School, my heart was really elsewhere. Yet when I was in the class, I wrote my first good poem — ‘The Suicide Rates’ — influenced mostly by Robin Blaser’s long poems, ‘Cups’ and ‘The Park,’ which I’d read in Locus Solus magazine. I realized that all the geographical/aesthetic divisions which Don Allen used to structure his anthology were open to question (as a fifteen-year-old, I assumed all those boundaries were sacred) and this insight, fueled by Kenneth’s positive response to my poem, had a lot to do with my later stance as an editor.       In April 1966 I found an apartment at 33 St. Marks Place, between Third and Second Avenues, a four-room floor-through for $110 a month. Anne graduated from Bennington in June and moved in. The first issue of the magazine had come out that spring.       I was working as a caseworker for the Welfare Department, my first job after graduating City College, cruising the streets of Bushwick with a black looseleaf notebook in my hand as proof of my identity to those who might question my presence on the streets, spending my afternoons drinking coffee at tiny formica dining room tables with young mothers with four or five children from two or three different fathers.       It was a job that affected me as much as anything I was reading but in a way that I didn’t realize until decades had passed. I was supposed to ask these women about the whereabouts of the fathers and why they weren’t paying child support. What I realized was that many of the men were paying child support — but that to tell the Welfare Department this would reduce the already miniscule grant that was being offered. Mostly I realized that it was none of my business, and when my clients figured out that I was trying to work for them — not punish them for having children, or judge them — they welcomed me with less suspicion.       So this is what I was doing at the beginning of my career as an editor. Anne, meanwhile, found a job as an assistant to a newly formed arts organization — The Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church. Joel Oppenheimer was the first director, Joel Sloman the co-director. By 1968 Anne became the director. Almost simultaneously, Ted Berrigan began visiting us at our apartment, usually late at night as he meandered home to his apartment on 2nd Street between C & D. The second issue of Angel Hairhad appeared by then and we had included a chapter from his novel, Clear the Range. I had quit my job at the Welfare Department after eight months. Anne kept her own (albeit regular) hours at the church, and we could stay up most of the night and get through the next day without much trouble.       First it was just Ted and Dick Gallup who came by regularly. We spent hours smoking dope and listening to music and talking about poetry and writing poems together and gossiping about everyone who wasn’t there and what jerks they were because they were missing out. Ted and Dick’s collaborative poem ‘80th Congress’ (to Ron Padgett) catches with awkward delicateness the initial awakening of all our new friendships: It’s 2 a. m. at Anne & Lewis’s which is where it’s at On St. Mark’s Place, hash and Angel Hairs on our minds Love is in our heart’s (what else?) dope & Peter Schjeldahl Who is new and valid in a blinding snowstorm Inside joy fills our drugless shooting gallery With repartee: where there’s smoke there’s marriage &, folks That’s also where it’s at in poetry in 1967 Newly rich but still a hopeless invalid (in 1967) Yes, it’s 1967, & we’ve been killing time with life But at Lewis & Anne’s we live it ‘up’ Anne makes lovely snow-sodas while Lewis’s           watchammacallit warms up this New Year’s straight blue haze. We think about that And money. With something inside us we float up To & onto you, it, you were truly there & now you ’re here. After awhile the crowds in our living room grew denser. Jim Brodey, Lee Crabtree (keyboardist and composer for The Fugs) and Michael Brownstein were among the initial regulars, along with Ted and Dick. Harris Schiff, my old high school friend, came later. Tom Clark was there a lot after he arrived from England. Peter and Linda Schjeldahl were there — and sometimes we all ended up at their apartment on 3rd Street, or at George and Katie Schneeman’s apartment once they moved up the block. Sometimes, well after midnight, we ended up at Max’s Kansas City. Gerard Malanga and René Ricard were around a lot.

Larry Fagin (left) and Ron Padgett, Holly Solomon's Greene Street Gallery, NYC, circa 1973. Photo by Linda P. O'Brien. Photo courtesy Larry Fagin.