Poetry readings at Harvard can be high profile events. Two weeks ago, the usual audience of corduroyed intellectuals and well-dressed Cambridge ladies buzzed in anticipation as John Ashbery '49-Pulitzer Prize winner, post-modern poster boy, darling of Harold Bloom and Helen Vendler-took to the stage in a reading sponsored by the Grolier Poetry Book Shop and the Harvard University Art Museums.

Ashbery read "Some Trees," a lyrical piece written during his time as a Harvard undergraduate (later published in 1956), "The Painter" (see your Norton Anthology), and several recent works illustrative of his trademark style. The language of the poems was straightforward and casual; the content associative and complex; the meaning elusive. The applause was great.

How does a poet, once underground, unrecognized, and, to most people, incomprehensible, become beloved by the academic world?

That kind of question can take a career to answer, but a good place to begin is at what Ed Sanders has called "a secret location on the lower east side," that fortuitous confluence of cheap rent and raw talent that produced some of the last century's most important writers: Allen Ginsberg, Frank O'Hara, William Bourroughs, Clark Coolidge, Bernadette Mayers.

Throughout the fifties, sixties, and early seventies, these and many other poets flooded New York City to form the community that may rightly be called America's last avant-garde. Decidedly unconventional and anti-academic, they stapled together 8 1/2 inch by 11 copies of their own poems in dingy church basements, distributed them to a small group of subscribers or friends, or published in magazines with names like Lines or Fuck You: A Magazine for the Arts. It was cheap, efficient, bohemian and fun. But these once unknown writers have come a long way since then. Random House and Alfred Knopf are their venues now.

That's why Ashbery's Harvard reading was more than just a celebration of the starving artist who made it big. He was here promoting the re-release of One Hundred Multiple Choice Questions-a prescient burlesque, it seems, of "Who Wants to Be A Millionaire"-and the small press that first published it 30 years ago, Adventures in Poetry. Edited by Larry Fagin, a iconic figure in New York underground, Adventures in Poetry was one of several dozen shoestring publishing ventures that burst onto the scene during the "Mimeo-revolution" of the 1960s. The revival of the press represents an effort both to rehabilitate the spirit of community that characterized the New York avant-garde while highlighting what Fagin thinks are the best minds of the present generation.

Adventures in Poetry