Marites allen biography of donald
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With a deep bow of gratitude and respect to Donald Allen.
~~ Peter Coyote
Donald Allen Collection, 1930 - 2005 (MSS 3)
Donald Merriam Allen, one of the most influential editors and publishers of contemporary American literature, was born in Iowa in 1912. He had never put any of his authors on the casting couch, he said, denying indignantly the rumors that had gathered around him for years.
Other anthologies compiled by Allen are The New American Story (Grove, 1963), a collection of experimental prose, and The Poetics of the New American Poetry (Grove, 1973), a collection of aesthetic statements by many of the poets appearing in the anthologies. When I left college I came to San Francisco State to pursue a Master's Degree in Creative Writing, largely because Robert Duncan was teaching there.
Over the years, my personal orbit intersected that of Creeley's, Snyder's, McClure's, Whalen's, Lew Welch, Jim Koller, Lenore Kandel, and Robert Duncan and I'm proud to say that we became friends and many of them became mentors for me.
However, he produced only two such books over the next twenty years: New American Writing (Penguin, 1965), and The Postmoderns (Grove, 1965).
O'Hara writes, in reference to a conversation he had with LeRoi Jones, "we don't like Lionel Trilling/we decide, we like Don Allen."
In 1960, Allen moved permanently from New York to San Francisco, where he established Grey Fox Press and the Four Seasons Foundation, two significant literary presses where he continued to publish work from Beat, San Francisco Renaissance, Black Mountain, and New York School writers, as well as younger new voices.
He was one of the first translators of the Romanian-French Absurdist playwright Eugène Ionesco, and Allen's 1958 volume Four Plays of Eugène Ionesco helped to introduce the playwright to American audiences in the 1960s.
Allen's impact as an editor, publisher, and friend to poets continued to be felt well into the 21st century.
Lew Welch introduced me to him in maybe 1968, which was when Don published my embarrassingly juvenile juvenilia, Time Raid, in his Four Seasons Foundation writing series.
He was a "conversationalist" who was more interested in drawing one out than in making his "point" (unlike Lew in this regard, who was all point, no draw). He planned to start his own magazine of contemporary American writing, but the Four Seasons Quarterly never materialized.
Today, City Lights publishes the significant works from these presses in their City Lights/Grey Fox series.
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Don Allen (1912–2004)
I used to ask Don about the role of the editor but after a while I stopped asking, for he would make me gifts to illustrate his answers.
“There’s one of them.” The suitcase, with its label, “Hold for Donald Allen,” lies beneath my desk now, empty of course, the oddest conversation piece in the room. Like The New American Poetry, each of these collections has had a major impact on the shape and scope of experimental American writing. Under Allen's direction since 1964, both of these presses have published the work of such poets as Charles Olson, Gary Snyder, Michael McClure, Philip Whalen, Lew Welch and many others.
Allen's editorial career began in the mid-fifties when he accepted a position with Grove Press. Yes, he’d had sex with one of the “New Americans,” one only, that’s all, only one. Finally published in 1960, the anthology chronicled the emergence of the Beat, Black Mountain, and New York schools of poetry.
(Jack Kerouac.) He had, of course, been fond of many others, among them John Wieners, LeRoi Jones, Philip Whalen. We would tease him about sex. It would sit in a chair as though it were a person. Most of all, when you visited with Don, you learned a lot about Frank O’Hara.