Dick Gallup

Dick Gallup (1941-2021)

We’ve been looking at several members of the so-called “Tulsa School” of poets on The Allen Ginsberg Project this week, Ted Berrigan, Joe Brainard, (notes on Ron Padgett can be seen here), today – Dick Gallup

Dick passed away on February of last year.  Here’s Ron Padgett’s memorial note on him

Heres John Godfrey for the Poetry Project Newsletter
Here’s Nick Sturm’s attentive note for Brooklyn Rail

We featured him here, back in 2016, spotlighting a reading he gave, back in 1976, with John Ashbery

from Allen’s introduction on that occasion:

“..And in that sangha, younger, in the late (19)50’s a group of poets came in out of Tulsa, fluttering up with The White Dove Review, edited by Dick Gallup, and I think it was Ted Berrigan ?.. or Ron? – Ron Padgett – So, I was engaged in correspondence with Ron, and indirectly with Dick (Gallup), back in (19)58, as was (Jack) Kerouac. We all sent in poems to Tulsa, Oklahoma for The White Dove Review .

Ron Padgett, Dick Gallup, Michael Marsh (sic) and Joe Brainard, 1958 – Editorial board at The White Dove Review

“And then Dick came to New York and.. I think White Dove.. was 1959, Dick went to Tulane for three years, and in the streets of New York as a school, and Columbia (graduated Columbia in 1968). Big Sky Press published Above The Tree Line – will publish – a big long collection of poems, Above The Tree Line (those’ll be his poems from 1970-1975 – Big Sky Press, edited by Bill Berkson, out there in Bolinas, California). In 1970 Harper & Row published a hardback book of poems (some copies of which may still be available in paper cover) – Where I Hang My Hat , and in 1976 , the Toothpaste Press in West Branch, Iowa, published a pamphlet, The Wacking of the Fruit Trees…”

Toothpaste Press morphing into Coffee House Press, under the visionary guidance of Allan Kornblum, one of Dick’s sometime students, some five years later, published, what remains, currently, the most-extensive gathering so far, of his poems in print – the quirkily-titled Shiny Pencils at the Edge of Things and Selected Poems (1981)

Anselm Berrigan is currently at work on the compilation of a Collected Poems.

 

In 1975 he (Dick) started teaching in the newly-founded annual summer writing program at Naropa. Apart from the previously-mentioned John Ashbery reading, there are a number of other invaluable audio recordings of him in the Naropa University Archive – notably, this (from 1977, with Joanne Kyger), this (from the same year, with Ed Dorn and Jack Collom), this (from 1978, with Larry Fagin)this (from 1979, with Richard Price) and this (from 1980, with a brief introduction by Allen). Dick also appears in Allen’s class in an earlier tape from 1975, and is documented reading and lecturing in several of his own classes (notably, this, from 1980, his (four-part) “Rotating Shakespeare” class on Richard II).

Also included in the archive is a 1978 recording of Dick reading for KGNU (Boulder Community radio) alongside Allen and Michael Brownstein.
Allen reads the following poems (of his), (laughing over the first poem,”Junk Mail”) – ‘Junk Mail’, “Father Guru”, “What’s Dead”, “Ballade of Poisons”, “Lack Love”,  a rare unpublished poem, “To Philip Lamantia (I take your God and reduce it to a shuddering morsel”)  and “From Journals” (“Oct.13, 77 4.45PM Western Airlines..”) – (poems from Poems All Over The Place.. and from Plutonian Ode)

and from the 60’s, vintage audio – here.  Michael Silverton interviews Dick Gallup for his Poetry of the Avant-Garde program on New York’s local radio,WNYC.

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