Mutiny Magazine Anti-Beat Campaign
New York: Mutiny Magazine of the Arts, 1961. Large offset poster, two mimeograph letters, one of which with autograph additions and signed by Esty in blue ink, blue offset return envelope. With the original printed mailing envelope. Various sizes, the largest being the poster, 22 x 17 in. Very good; poster with four original folds, the verso with some toning and stray spots. Item #7429
In 1961 the poet James Dickey published a scathing review of Allen Ginsberg’s Kaddish, along with a negative (though somewhat more approving) opinion of Charles Olson’s The Distances and The Maximus Poems in the New York Times Book Review. Notably, the review also contained a fawning assessment of Mountain, Fire, Thornbrush by Harvey Shapiro — then the deputy editor of the NYTBR — which he described as “completely poetry in the best sense.”
This review greatly pleased Jane Esty and Paul Lett, editors of Mutiny Magazine of the Arts, who despised the Beats. They sent a letter of congratulations and praise to the Times for taking a critical position against them: “James Dickey’s fine review … cuts right through the cancer in contemporary American poetry; without cant or hypocrisy it clearly says: the beats are simply NOT poets.” They began a campaign of support for Dickey and the Times, mailing out letters to their associates and sympathetic writers, encouraging that they send in their own letters of (dis)approval.
This group of material contains a large poster which reproduces Dickey’s review, Esty’s and Lett’s letters, along with pro-Beat letters that the Times had printed following the review. It also contains a statement, designed to be a signed testimonial, for the undersigned to “agree with James Dickey and the editors of Mutiny that THE BEATS are not poets”; as well as a rallying letter, titled “A MUTINY ALERT,” here mailed to John Taylor, with an additional note in manuscript: “Know you’ll join with us and various friends who are poets, editors, in putting down this BEAT nonsense now.”
An amusing relic of the literary culture wars between “the raw and the cooked.”.
Price: $125.00