Reality Prime - Selected Poems (Hardcover)

Walter Lowenfels broke major ground as a surrealist and as a political poet. Closely identified with Henry Miller and Anais Nin, he was a key figure in the Paris avant-garde during the 1920s and 1930s.

Returning to the United States, he became a full-time Communist Party organizer and an editor of The Daily Worker, jailed in 1951 for violating Smith Act. Although he was eventually acquitted, the incident returned him to poetry, and from the early 1960s until his death, he was a familiar presence in non-academic literature. Championing avant-garde African-American poetry and poetry from "America's Third World", he was well known as a politically radical anthologist.

Reality Prime, the first in the Talisman series "Classic American Poets", will be the most comprehensive collection of Lowenfel's poetry available. Its cornerstone will be his three "Death Elegies". Crucial texts for the avant-garde during Lowenfel's Paris years, they will appear together for the first time.

Walter Lowenfels (1897-1976) was among principal figures in "the revolution of the word", the movement to modernize American writing the early years of this century. Accomplished first as a surrealist and later as a political writer, Lowenfels early in his career joined Michael Fraenkel and Henry Miller in their so-called "death school", which shaped much of his celebrated early work. His leftist affiliations and conviction under the Smith Act, although reversed, led many to view him as a political martyr at a particularly repressive moment in American history.