Donald Merriam Allen influential editor

Editing

Editing is the process of selecting and preparing written, visual, audible, and film media used to convey information through the processes of correction, condensation, organization, and other modifications performed with an intention of producing a correct, consistent, accurate, and complete...

, publisher, and translator of contemporary American literature. He is perhaps best known for his project The New American Poetry 1945-1960

The New American Poetry 1945-1960

The New American Poetry 1945–1960 was a poetry anthology edited by Donald Allen, and published in 1960. It aimed to pick out the "third generation" of American modernist poets, and included quite a number of poems fresh from the little magazines of the late 1950s. In the longer term it attained a...

(1960), among the several important anthologies of contemporary American innovative writing he made available to the public. Allen began his career, in part, as a translator. He was one of the first translators of French-Romanian Absurdist playwright Eugène Ionesco, and his 1958 volume Four Plays of Eugène Ionesco

Eugène Ionesco

Eugène Ionesco was a Romanian and French playwright and dramatist, and one of the foremost playwrights of the Theatre of the Absurd...

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. Along with editing work by Lew Welch

Lew Welch

Lewis Barrett Welch, Jr. was an American poet associated with the Beat generation of poets, artists, and iconoclasts.Welch published and performed widely during the 1960s...

, Allen edited Frank O'Hara

Frank O'Hara

Francis Russell "Frank" O'Hara was an American writer, poet and art critic. He was a member of the New York School of poetry.-Life:...

, including the seminal Collected Poems (1971; 1991) and a Selected Poems(1974). He is referred to directly in O'Hara's "Personal Poem" which is in Lunch Poems

Lunch Poems

Lunch Poems is a book of poetry by Frank O'Hara published in 1964 by Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s City Lights, number 19 in their Pocket Poets series. The collection was commissioned by Ferlinghetti as early as 1959, but O'Hara delayed in completing it. Ferlighetti would badger O'Hara with questions...

, a book Allen also edited. He says, in reference to a conversation he had with LeRoi Jones, "we don't like Lionel Trilling/we decide, we like Don Allen." He served as the CEO of Grey Fox Press, publishing important work by Jack Spicer

Jack Spicer

Jack Spicer was an American poet often identified with the San Francisco Renaissance. In 2009, My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer won the American Book Award for poetry.-Life and work:...

 along with such volumes as Enough Said (1980) by Philip Whalen

Philip Whalen

Philip Glenn Whalen was an American poet, Zen Buddhist, and a key figure in the San Francisco Renaissance and close to the Beat generation.-Biography:...

 and I Remain (1980), a collection of Welch's letters.

While working with the Four Seasons Foundation, Allen assisted in the publication of (among others): Interviews (1980) by Edward Dorn, A Quick Graph: Collected Notes and Essays (1970) by Robert Creeley

Robert Creeley

Robert Creeley was an American poet and author of more than sixty books. He is usually associated with the Black Mountain poets, though his verse aesthetic diverged from that school's. He was close with Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, Allen Ginsberg, John Wieners and Ed Dorn. He served as the Samuel P...

, and The Graces (1983) by Aaron Shurin

Aaron Shurin

Aaron Shurin is an American poet, essayist, and educator. Since 1999, he has co-directed the Master of Fine Arts in Writing Program at the University of San Francisco.-Life and work:...

. In 1997, he helped edit, along with Benjamin Friedlander, the Collected Prose of Charles Olson

Charles Olson

Charles Olson , was a second generation American modernist poet who was a link between earlier figures such as Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams and the New American poets, which includes the New York School, the Black Mountain School, the Beat poets, and the San Francisco Renaissance...

(University of California Press).

External links

• Great Anthology: The New American Poetry: 1945-1960 article at "The Academy of American Poets" website
• Whose New American Poetry? article by Marjorie Perloff
  Marjorie Perloff
  Marjorie Perloff is an Austrian-born U.S. poetry critic.Perloff was born Gabriele Mintz into a secularized Jewish family in Vienna. Faced with Nazi terror, her family emigrated in 1938 when she was six-and-a-half, going first to Zürich and then to the United States, settling in Riverdale, New York...
  
  
• to Donald M. Allen at Empty Mirror Books website
• Jacket Magazine tribute by Kevin Killian
• Extensive Interview with Donald Allen