The Angel Hair Anthology
Angel Hair Sleeps with a Boy in My Head
Edited by Anne Waldman and Lewis Warsh
2001 • 620 pages
ISBN 9781887123501
“Angel Hair reaches us now from a moment in American history that is still a part of our cultural and spiritual present. Under the care of Anne Waldman and Lewis Warsh—young poets in what was, circa 1965, the hot center of a ‘new’ ‘American’ ‘poetry’—their economically printed and exuberantly disseminated magazine was a key vehicle for the innovative and groundbreaking work of an entire generation of poets and artists. This large and generous anthology is not only an archival masterpiece—the best of a time that’s now gone though scarce forgotten—but an incitement to keep their work alive for a still newer generation.”
—Jerome Rothenberg, co-editor, Poems for the Millennium
This anthology presents material selected from the collection of Angel Hair magazine and books edited by Anne Waldman and Lewis Warsh between 1966–1978. Included are substantial sections of writing (in some cases entire books) from an astonishing range of poets (72 in all) including Vito Acconci, John Ashbery, Bill Berkson, Ted Berrigan, Joe Brainard, Tom Clark, Clark Coolidge, Robert Creeley, Kenward Elmslie, John Giorno, Ted Greenwald, Kenneth Koch, Joanne Kyger, Denise Levertov, Gerard Malanga, Bernadette Mayer, Alice Notley, Frank O’Hara, Ron Padgett, Aram Saroyan, Lorenzo Thomas, Hannah Weiner, John Wieners, and the editors, to name just a few. From the nascent St. Mark’s Poetry Project on the Lower East Side of Manhattan to Bolinas and Boulder, Angel Hair published an idiosyncratic cross-section of innovative writing in distinctive format—it is one of the longest-lived and most influential publishers on the small press scene. The anthology is supplemented with short memoirs from about 20 writers. It also includes an annotated checklist by Aaron Fischer and Steven Clay that comprises a citation and photograph of each of the approximately 80 books, magazines, broadsides, and catalogs issued by the Press. Waldman and Warsh each contribute introductions.