Career Moves: Olson, Creeley, Zukofsky, Berrigan, and the American Avant-garde

How much did "making it new" have to do with "making it"? For the four "outsider poets" considered in this book--Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Louis Zukofsky, and Ted Berrigan--the connection was everything. At once a social history of literary ambition in America in the fifties and sixties and a uniquely collective form of literary biography, Career Moves offers an intimate account of the postwar poetry underground.

Making the controversial claim that anti-Establishment poets were at least as "careerist" as their mainstream peers, Libbie Rifkin shows how the nature of these poets' ambition actually defined postwar avant-garde identity. In doing so, she clarifies the complicated link between the crafting of a literary career and the defining of a literary canon.