The Ultimate Actualist Convention : A Detailed View of Iowa City Actualism in the 1970s and 1980s and Its Migration to the San Francisco Bay Area

ISBN
9780930370589
$25.00
Author Sklar, Morty
Format Paperback
Details
  • 9.0" x 6.0" x 1.2"
  • Active Record
  • Individual Title
  • 2017
  • 376
  • Yes
  • 14- UP
  • 8- UP
  • 24
  • PS228.A28U48 2017
The influence of Actualism upon our contemporary literature is as pervasive as it is untraceable, even though it gave rise to poetry presses and literary journals by the dozen.This volume is a montage, memoir, history, celebration, homage, elegy, portrait gallery, and timescape. --Fred Chappell, poet, novelist, essayist, and retired professor. Actualism sprang out of a variegated and flourishing community of writers and artists who converged in Iowa City over a period of ten-to-fifteen years. Most were drawn by the Iowa Writers' Workshop, some by the International Writing Program, and some to the Introduction to Typography course in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication, and some just wandered into town. Actualism was fundamentally based on creative endeavor by a group of writers and artists in Iowa City who originated from New York City, Hungary, San Francisco, Finland, Chicago, Saint Louis, and Newton, Iowa who eventually migrated to other poetry loci, mainly the San Francisco Bay area and New York. This anthology, edited with discernment and care, puts on the map a body of ideas about writing that can claim for itself a generous space between the New York School of poetry and the Language poetry that dominated the end of the 20th century with work closely related to poetry theory. --Andrei Codrescu, Commentator National Public Radio, novelist, essayist and poet