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. He was 79. His friend since childhood, poet 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."
Gallup's life as a poet had a fortuitous start when, in 1949, his family moved from Massachusetts to Tulsa, Okla., buying a house across the street from 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 was living in the East Village in Manhattan, where he soon 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).
After a move to Boulder, Colo., to teach at the Naropa Institute in the mid-'70s, his book Above the Tree Line (1976) was released, but Gallup "began to feel a desire to withdraw from the poetry world and to go wherever his fancy dictated," Padgett observed, noting that the place he chose was San Francisco, "where for the rest of his life he led a somewhat secluded existence, driving a taxi all night, reading science fiction, playing guitar for his own pleasure, and raising his son, with whom he later shared an apartment."
Gallup brought out one more collection, Plumbing the Depths of Folly (1983), but had stopped writing, 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.
In a tribute published by the Brooklyn Rail, Nick Sturm wrote that Gallup's "presence in American poetry has remained, as he writes in the poem 'Easter,' as ephemeral as the '[r]ustling in the light breeze/ Which is my life.'