An Interview with Joy Priest

Joy Priest is the author of HORSEPOWER (Pitt Poetry Series, 2020), winner of the Donald Hall Prize for Poetry. She is the recipient of a 2021 NEA fellow- ship and a 2019-2020 Fine Arts Work Center fellowship, and has won the 2020 Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize from APR, and the Gearhart Poetry Prize from The Southeast Review. Her poems have appeared in the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, The Atlantic, and Virginia Quarterly Review, among others. Her essays have appeared in The Bitter Southerner, Poets & Writers, ESPN, and The Undefeated, and her work has been anthologized in Breakbeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop, The Louisville Anthology, A Measure of Belonging: Writers of Color on the New American South, and Best New Po- ets 2014, 2016 and 2019. Joy received her M.F.A. in poetry, with a certificate in Women & Gender Studies from the University of South Carolina. She is currently a doctoral student in Literature & Creative Writing at the University of Houston.

Charles Olson (1910–1970)

Actively writing in the 1950s and 1960s, poet and critic Charles Olson is a key figure of both the New American Poetry and the Black Mountain school. He is best known for articulating—in his essay ‘Projective Verse’—the idea of ‘open-field’ poetics, opposed to inherited stanza form, as well as for his exploration of the long poem in The Maximus Poems.

The New Inter-American Poetry

This chapter shows how revolutionary enthusiasms, experimental magazines, and translation fueled inter-American relations in the 1960s on the countercultural left. Previous critics note the Boom, but most US accounts of the period’s poetry center on the intra-national polarities (“margin versus mainstream” or “raw versus cooked”) inflamed by Donald Allen’s The New American Poetry (1960). The chapter instead describes a larger formation called “the new inter-American poetry,” recovering dialogues best emblematized by the hemispheric little magazine El Corno Emplumado, and the reciprocations engendered between the works of rebellious Beats and revolutionary Cuban barbudos, Paul Blackburn and Julio Cortázar, Clayton Eshleman and Javier Heraud, Pablo Neruda among his English translators, and others. These exchanges were not without their blind spots, and the chapter concludes by comparing the communities imagined by Frank O’Hara’s Lunch Poems (1964) to poems by contemporaneous visitors to Manhattan such as Mario Benedetti (Uruguay) and Alcides Iznaga (Cuba).

Small is Quite Beautiful: Tarasque Press

The 1960s saw an explosion of mimeographed poetry magazines and books on both sides of the Atlantic. Chapter four provides a broad overview of this ‘mimeo revolution,’ tracing its origins back to the do-it-yourself ethos of Black Mountain and the burgeoning of the ‘New American Poetry.’ As chapter 4 discusses, with this explosion of small-scale publishing, however, came more problematic issues of quality, both with regard to the production standards of the publications and the poetry they published. Chapter 4 examines how the British little magazine Tarasque and the eponymous small press established by Stuart Mills and Simon Cutts responded to this side of the mimeo revolution with a potent mix of trenchant irony and a championing of the small poem—as practiced by Finlay and Williams—that emphasized impersonal, constructed formal objectivity in answer to the expressive solipsism of the time.