Serving House Books Announces Publication of Talking All Night: The New York Poets Interviews, Photographs, Letters.

Talking All Night: a collection of poet/photographer Mark Hillringhouse’s interviews with the most influential poets of the New York poetry scene.

NY, UNITED STATES, July 25, 2025 /EINPresswire.com/ -- Serving House Books announces the publication of Talking All Night: The New York Poets, a collection of poet and photographer Mark Hillringhouse’s one-on-one interviews with 16 of the most influential poets of the New York School and the East Village poetry scene. The 400-page volume also includes his previously unseen photographs of the poets as well as their personal letters. This a very valuable and unique book for anyone interested in the history and craft of a major school of American poetry.

Gathering interviews from over a decade, Talking All Night invites readers into an up-close encounter with John Ashbery, Ted Berrigan, James Schuyler, Anne Waldman, Amiri Baraka, and a dozen other poets, inviting us into their homes for conversations that let the poets speak about their own writing, the poetry and experiences that influenced them, and how a vital, creative community, beginning in the 50s and 60s, and developing through the 70s and 80s, forged a new poetics.

“My aim in doing all these interviews was to gather as much information as I could from a diverse group of poets who formed a specific approach to poetry that ranged from the urbane and academic, to the urban and political,” says Hillringhouse. “All were part of a place and a time in the New York literary world in the days before the internet and the smart phone.” The author goes on to add that he became part of the community at the Saint Mark’s Poetry Project, and befriended many of the poets he interviewed.

The results are revelatory, as when John Ashbery admits that he listens to the radio and answers phones when writing, because “they’re the environment we live in.” And when Anne Waldman confides she had a vision to change the world and believed “poetry seemed to offer a way.” Waldman also offers a perspective on the female poet’s experience in this thriving scene. A strong believer in the need for community and mutual support, she notes that “young women poets were not published widely” at the time and sometimes allowed themselves to be exploited in order to be popular.

We hear Amiri Baraka, a fierce voice for Black poetry, dismiss “most poets celebrated by the American establishment,” and proclaim that poetry must “penetrate the realities of life in America to serve the social needs and concerns of the world we live in.”

In these interviews, the poets reveal not so much an elusive formula that drives their creativity, but a down-to-earth encounter with words, connections, sounds, world events, and the community they shared with one another.

Hillringhouse provides an in-depth introduction to each of the interviews which include: John Ashbery, Amiri Baraka, Ted Berrigan, Edwin Denby, Barbara Guest, Bob Holman, Kenneth Koch, Bernadette Mayer, W.S. Merwin, Howard Moss, Simon Pettet, James Schuyler, Tony Towle, Gerald Stern, Paul Violi, and Anne Waldman.

About the Author: Mark Hillringhouse is a poet, essayist, and art photographer, whose work has appeared in The American Poetry Review, The New York Times, The New Jersey Monthly, and The Paris Review, among others. A three-time recipient of the New Jersey State Council on the Arts Fellowship and a two-time recipient of the Allen Ginsberg Poetry Award (2012, 2024). Talking All Night is his third publication from Serving House Books, following Between the Frames (2012) and Paterson: Light and Shadow (2017).

William Lawrence
Serving House Books
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