Former staff member of the Department of English, Professor Robert Hampson, has released a new e-book of his interview with Robert Vas Dias.
In this interview, which focuses on his American career, Robert Vas Dias discusses his introduction to modern poetry through a reading by Langston Hughes; his early grounding in Yeats, Whitman, Pound, and Eliot; his first New York reading at the Five Spot (during a break by the Thelonious Monk Quartet); his friendship with Paul Blackburn; New York in the 1960s; his collaborations with visual artists; the founding of the Aspen Writers’ Workshop and his meetings with poets and artists including Mina Loy, Jonathan Williams, Basil Bunting, and Claes Oldenburg in Colorado; his return to New York where he joined the faculty of NYU with the poets Jackson Mac Low, Michael Heller, Clayton Eshleman and Charles Levendosky; and the organising and directing of the National Poetry Festivals (1971 and 1973) at Thomas Jefferson College in Michigan.
Available as a free ebook here. The full Argotist Ebooks catalogue is here.