Dick Gallup Archive
Dick Gallup (1941–2021) lived across the street from Ron Padgett as a child, and they both began their lives in poetry at an early age. Publishing the White Dove Review while still in high school in 1958, Gallup arrived in New York City in 1961 (after leaving Tulane University), where John Ashbery described Gallup, Padgett, and fellow Tuslan Ted Berrigan as the “Tulsa School”: an influential and charismatic core of the second generation New York School poetry scene that was burgeoning on the Lower East Side.
This archive is a dense, surprising, and valuable primary source for the study of American poetry in the 1960s–1980s: particularly the second generation of New York School poets, the Tulsa School, St. Mark’s Poetry Project, and the pedagogy of poetry. Though compact, it contains many surprises: a set of Ted Berrigan’s keys in an autograph letter that Gallup neglected to return; a Franconia Mimeograph paper sample booklet whose papers were appropriated for a “boke” titled “Proper English”; a solicitation for Gallup to publish in Rolling Stone; and meticulously-kept ledger notes on poetry readings and household expenses.
Of special note are a series of 24 notebooks, with frequent entries from 1963–1972 and regular to intermittent entries through the 1980s. With thousands of pages of Gallup’s observations, these notebooks document critical moments from the mid-1960s to early 1970s in staggering detail. Gallup, who swore never to become an “academic poet,” by his own account felt like an outsider to the world of poetry, and his notes on the social, political, and literary ramifications of his communities are incisive and reflective.
The archive has sold.