NEW AMERICAN POETS
This group of poets included in Donald Allen’s influential 1960 anthology of the same name. Allen’s anthology, which collected 15 years of American writing, divided its contributors into groups: the New York School (John Ashbery, Barbara Guest, Frank O’Hara), the Black Mountain School (Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Denise Levertov), the San Francisco Renaissance (Robert Duncan, Robin Blaser, Jack Spicer), and the Beats (Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, Gregory Corso). Allen alleged that he was collecting the “third generation” of writers in the Modernist tradition, and his book is notable for presenting so many poets now recognized as leading figures of 20th-century poetry. The anthology’s impact was immediate, and it continues to be recognized as both a cultural document and a collection of the finest avant-garde writing of the period.
LINK TO GINSBERG READINGS:
Schools associated with: New York School, The Black Mountain School, San Francisco Renaissance, and The Beats.
Time Period: between 1945 and 1960
Located: With a collaboration of several different schools this all came from the south west region of the United States in states like California.
During this time in the United States a lot of experimental writing was produced during and after the Second World War. It took Allen until 1958 to acquire all parts of the anthology together to start working on it and it also took a ton of effort from all the artists, poets, editors and agents to make this thing happen. It was finally complete in 1960. At this time the poets were receiving much recognition through this. These artists were going against the norm with the experimental writing and were often called “counter traditions”. Before hand it was Allen’s plan to complete/revise or edit multiple anthologies every 2 to 3 years before he knew what would happen with this first. Since then he has only printed two more books in 1965 called, New American Writing, and Postmoderns. His writings had many influences on different sources small and big. He happen to be very influential to Canada as well. This influence gave Canadian writers the will power to break away from traditional British style and influences and turn more towards American now.
From the Back Cover of the book, "Donald Allen's prophetic anthology had an electrifying effect on two generations, at least, of American poets and readers. More than the repetition of familiar names and ideas that most anthologies seem to be about, here was the declaration of a collective, intelligent, and thoroughly visionary work- in- progress: the primary example for its time of the anthology-as- manifesto. Its republication today (complete with poems, statements on poetics, and autobiographical projections (provides us, again, with a model of how a contemporary anthology can and should be shaped. In these essentials it remains as fresh and useful a guide as it was in 1960." (Jerome Rothenberg, editor of Poems for the Millennium)
IMAGES:
Barbara Guest
Charles Olsen
Denise Levertov 
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