William Grimes on the Life and Legacy of A. Alvarez (1929-2019)

Poet, critic, editor A. Alvarez has died. At the New York Times, William Grimes reminds us of Alvarez's friendship with Sylvia Plath, his Plimptonesque report from the 1981 World Series of Poker at Binion’s Horseshoe Casino in Las Vegas (published in the New Yorker then expanded into the book The Biggest Game in Town), and his proclivity to swim in outdoor ponds during his twilight years, chronicled in Pondlife: A Swimmer's Journal (2015). Grimes writes, "Mr. Alvarez’s enormously influential anthology 'The New Poetry,' published in 1962, brought the poetry of Mr. Hughes, Thom Gunn and Geoffrey Hill and the American confessional poets John Berryman and Robert Lowell to a wide audience in Britain. Ms. Plath and Anne Sexton were added to the 1966 edition." From there: 

In his polemical preface, Mr. Alvarez railed against the genteel tradition in English poetry and what he called “the cult of rigid impersonality.” The new poetry, he argued, took emotional risks. It embraced “experience sometimes on the edge of disintegration and breakdown.”

The book was a standard text in schools and universities for decades. In his book “The Alvarez Generation: Thom Gunn, Geoffrey Hill, Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, and Peter Porter” (2015), William Wootten wrote, “Whether as a commentator, popularizer or provocateur, Alvarez not only helped create the taste by which these poets were enjoyed, his prose affected how they would regard their own and each other’s work.”

Mr. Alvarez drew on his own passion for poker to deliver a behind-the-scenes report for The New Yorker on the 1981 World Series of Poker at Binion’s Horseshoe Casino in Las Vegas. He expanded the article into “The Biggest Game in Town,” published in 1983.

“I felt like I had walked into a Sam Peckinpah movie,” Mr. Alvarez wrote in his 1999 memoir, “Where Did It All Go Right?,” recalling the poker pros he encountered: “cowboys in alligator boots, wildcatters wearing Stetsons and Dior ties, gnarled good old boys with eyes like ferrets, who farmed in West Texas.”

What Tom Wolfe did for the Mercury 7 space program in “The Right Stuff,” Mr. Alvarez did for professional poker. The book introduced readers to Texas Hold ’em, a hitherto obscure poker variant, and elevated top players like Thomas Preston Jr., better known as Amarillo Slim, and Stu Ungar, known as The Kid, to the status of culture heroes.

Read more at the New York Times.