American poet Dick Gallup, who in the 1960s and 1970s established himself as an important figure in the New York School of poets, died January 27 at age 79. In 1949, his family moved from Massachusetts to Tulsa, Okla., buying a house across the street from poet Ron Padgett. They became friends and, in 1958, while in high school, founded (with artist and writer Joe Brainard, also a classmate) a small literary magazine, the White Dove Review, which published Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Leroi Jones (Amiri Baraka), Robert Creeley, as well as a new friend in Tulsa, Ted Berrigan. After college, Gallup lived in the East Village in Manhattan, where he became an active member of the downtown art and literary scene, giving readings, publishing widely in magazines, and publishing books, including Hinges (1965), The Bingo (1966), and Where I Hang My Hat (1970). He moved to Boulder, Colo., in the mid-'70s to teach at the Naropa Institute, where he wrote Above the Tree Line (1976), after which he moved to San Francisco and stopped writing.
Gallup released only one more collection, Plumbing the Depths of Folly (1983), though he did agree to let Alan Kornblum, his former student, bring out Shiny Pencils at the Edge of Things: New and Selected Poems at Coffee House Press in 2001. Ron Padgett wrote that what made Gallup's "poetry special was its combination of graceful lyricism and everyday language, and a willingness to explore unexpected corners of the mind and yet maintain a sense of humor about it all. His work was like him: intelligent, sensitive, hip, and gentle, quietly oblique and funny, but always with a clear-eyed view of human folly."