1969 in Poetry - Events

Events

• FIELD magazine founded at Oberlin College
• Charles Bukowski quits his day job as a Post Office clerk in Los Angeles to embark on a writing career after being promised a $100 stipend from Black Sparrow Press. He said at the time: "I have one of two choices — stay in the post office and go crazy ... or stay out here and play at writer and starve. I decided to starve."
• Howard Nemerov named Edward Mallinckrodt Distringuished University Professor of English and Distinguished Poet in Residence at Washington University in St. Louis, posts which he will hold until his death in 1991
• The Kenyon Review is closed by Kenyon College after 30 years; it will be restarted by the college in 1979
• Sir Arthur Bliss writes a cantata "The world is charged with the grandeur of God", from Gerard Manley Hopkins' sonnet of the same first line
• Louise Bogan retires after 38 years as poetry critic for The New Yorker
• Tish literary magazine, founded in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, in 1961 and published intermittently thereafter, prints its last issue. Poets associated with the magazine included Frank Davey, Fred Wah, George Bowering, and, briefly, bpNichol when he lived in Vancouver
• First issue of poetry magazine The Lace Curtain founded and edited by Michael Smith and Trevor Joyce under their New Writers Press imprint in Dublin. It will publish six issues until 1978
• Alexander Tvardovsky, editor of Novy Mir, a Soviet literary magazine, is under attack this year and threatened with dismissal for "spreading cosmopolitan ideas", for "mocking the Soviet peoples' most sacred feelings" and for "denigrating Soviet patriotism". He responds that he was the "real patriot" and was opposed to "reactionary, nationalistic, neo-Slavophil" literary currents