Measure's Measure

"MEASURE'S MEASURE collects essays by Michael Boughn concerned with the explicit poetics of an interrelated but individually distinct group of poets, most of whom came to prominence after Donald Allen published his anthology, THE NEW AMERICAN POETRY, with Grove Press in 1960. Boughn includes three poets and one philosopher that antedate the "Donald Allen" but are arguably that poetry's important predecessors and inspirers: Hilda Doolittle, Ezra Pound, and William Carlos Williams. The philosopher is Emerson. The Donald Allen poets treated are primarily Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, Jack Spicer, and Robin Blaser though with not inconsiderable glances at others. The poetic practices and thematic attentions of these writers do constitute something like an "identity" for this group, whose work may be characterized as "the poetry of initiatory transmission." The poets not only mean to present the content of their poems but to transmit the conditions of awareness, imagination, and intelligence from which that practice of poetry and thought come to be"--