Preface

The materials published in this feature are led by my introduction to a symposium on the poetry and poetics of 1960. The introduction you'll read here is more or less just as I spoke it a few months ago at the Writers House in Philadelphia. Since then, Gordon Faylor and I have gathered somewhat revised versions of the presentations made that evening. We then solicited responses from various others and we are happy to present these also as part of our 1960 feature, along with several other images and documents. I have been obsessively tracking 1960 doings and writings — reading, watching (film and TV), researching, interviewing, cross-referencing, following apparently meaningless leads; some of these have been posted to my blog “1960.” Needless to say, then, I was delighted to have 1960-obsessed company for a night in December 2010 — and then, further, throughout the following weeks and months as I worked with the original presenters and added respondents. I wish to thank Gordon, who has been the super-precise editor of this elaborate feature and who is responsible for all ways in which the gathering looks good; insofar as it looks bad, suffers from biases and gaps, etc. — that's fully my doing.

A note on the media: The PennSound page devoted this symposium is the best place to go if you want links to segmented audio and a video recording of the entire proceeding. The Jacket2 pages featuring the final, revised text of each presentation — listed in the table of contents below — include links to audio and, where possible, to a segmented portion of the video. We have also created a page that enables anyone to use embedding code so that the video can be made available on web sites, blogs and social media sites.