Out of print for more than 40 years, Bean Spasms is a facsimille of a classic New York School collaboration between poets Ted Berrigan and Ron Padgett, with further writings, illustrations and cover by artist and writer Joe Brainard Ted Berrigan, Joe Brainard and Ron Padgett's Bean Spasms is the defining publication of the 1960s literary/Pop scene in New York. Originally published in 1967 by Kulchur Press in an edition of 1,000, and out of print for more than 40 years, Bean Spasms is a book many have heard about but relatively few have seen, and which--until now--has been consequently shrouded in legend. The text is comprised of collaborations between poets Ted Berrigan and Ron Padgett, with further writings, illustrations and cover by artist and writer Joe Brainard. The three began collaborating in 1960, and kept a folder of their works titled "Lyrical Bullets" (a humorous homage to the well-known collaboration between Coleridge and Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads). As Ron Padgett describes, in his introduction to this new facsimile edition, their collaborations included "plays, a fictitious correspondence, a picaresque novel, goofy interviews and poems of various types and lengths, as well as mistranslations and parodies of each other's work and the work of others." Poet friends dropping by during writing sessions would also add lines, and although Berrigan and Padgett also contributed visuals, and Brainard contributed texts, all works in the book were intentionally left unattributed. Full of wild wit and joy in experimentation, competition and collaboration, Bean Spasms is a classic document of the New York School.

Presents an alphabetical reference guide detailing the lives and works of poets associated with the New York Schools of the early twentieth century.

Reveals the hidden origins of kitsch in poetry from the eighteenth century. Taking its title from John Keats, My Silver Planet contends that the problem of elite poetry’s relation to popular culture bears the indelible mark of its turbulent incorporation of vernacular poetry—a legacy shaped by nostalgia, contempt, and fraudulence. Daniel Tiffany reactivates and fundamentally redefines the concept of kitsch, freeing it from modernist misapprehension and ridicule, by tracing its origin to poetry’s alienation from the emergent category of literature. Tiffany excavates the forgotten history of poetry’s relation to kitsch, beginning with the exuberant revival of archaic (and often spurious) ballads in Britain in the early eighteenth century. In these controversial events of poetic imposture, Tiffany identifies a submerged pact—in opposition to the bourgeois values of literature—between elite and vernacular poetries. Tiffany argues that the ballad revival—the earliest explicit formation of what we now call popular culture—sparked a perilous but seemingly irresistible flirtation (among elite audiences) with poetic forgery that endures today in the ambiguity of the kitsch artifact: Is it real or fake, art or kitsch? He goes on to trace the genealogy of kitsch in texts ranging from nursery rhymes and poetic melodrama to the lyric commodities of Baudelaire. He scrutinizes the fascist “paradise” inscribed in Ezra Pound’s Cantos as well as the avant-garde poetry of the New York School and its debt to pop and “plastic” art. By exposing and elaborating the historical poetics of kitsch, My Silver Planet transforms our sense of kitsch as a category of material culture.

"Comfortably intimate—classically adroit in its formal wit and invention—altogether unique yet in no way excluding, this meticulously edited edition of a master poet’s collected works gives us the defining bridge from the 'New American Poetry' of the ’50s to that poetry now contemporary on both coasts and in all conditions. No one ever recognized the people with whom he lived more particularly than did Ted Berrigan, and no one ever brought them home to a reader with such unaggressive and persistent power. This is a great, great book for all seasons of the mind and heart."—Robert Creeley "Ted Berrigan was a leader of the New York School; his crazy energy embodied that movement and the city itself. It is wonderful to have his Collected Poems in print."—John Ashbery "A comprehensive and carefully chronicled volume that puts Ted Berrigan in historical context as one of the most influential poets of his generation. His poems: deft, light, definitely humorous, irreverent, poignant, ‘marvelous and tough.’ The truth doing its work, ‘the great man doing the ordinary thing,’ with a quick ear and a quick tongue, revealing the personal in the universal. He gives you his full attention—‘about to be born again thinking of you.’ "—Joanne Kyger "In a life devoted to experimental art, Ted Berrigan shaped his poetry and the space he occupied with a bold artistry based on his playful but powerfully skeptical view of the world. He wondered what might actually be captured within the pages of a book, but The Collected Poems allows us to again enjoy Ted Berrigan’s delightfully demanding presence."—Lorenzo Thomas "A singular balance of personal-historical vision and sentiment both sweet and sour, developed within the fractured verbalism of the late twentieth century found lyric, creates in Ted Berrigan's poems the unique colors of a particularly lived (and still intensely living) ensemble of moments."—Tom Clark, author of Late Returns: A Memoir of Ted Berrigan "Some people are just more real than others. I don't know another way to say it. Ted Berrigan is totally real and he has fashioned an important sound for all of us to listen to. He put it all together just before everyone else in his time, our time, got going. America is lucky to count him as one of its great poets."—Peter Gizzi