I met Dan Saxon through Penn - through the Writers House; he graduated from Penn in 1960. His son Jon was my student years ago, and his daughter Jerilyn and her husband Brian are members of the Writers House Board. Dan has shown interest in what we do at the Writers House for years - attends all our New York events and has been to the House itself many times. It was perhaps during our second or third meeting that Dan mentioned he'd had a connection to the avant-garde poetry scene of the early '60s in New York. Finally, a few weeks ago, I arranged for Dan to come to my office, which doubles as a recording studio, and we talked for an hour or so. A new PennSound podcast is a somewhat edited portion of that longer conversation. As you'll hear in the podcast, Dan happened upon Le Metro, where Lower East Side poets and other artists gathered, and began to publish a crude but innovative and now really valuable irregular magazine, Poets of Le Metro. Daniel Kane, in All Poets Welcome, his book about the Lower East scene, describes the importance of Dan's magazine. Below is a passage (click on the image for a larger view).
"I teach horizontally, meaning that while I might begin with a fixed idea of what I'm going to teach that day, I let it drift rhizomatically way off topic, often pulling it back when it gets too far. I rely on non-fixed materials to teach this way; the whole world is at my fingertips. Should I go off on a tangent about John and Rauschenberg and their love relationship as expressed in Rauschenberg's bed, an image of that bed is always a click away. From there, we can head anywhere into the non-fixed universe, be it film, text or sound. And of course, that always takes us elsewhere. As Cage says, 'We are getting nowhere fast.'" 
that anyone has yet got the imaginative measure of that terrifying day six years ago. Certainly our Tolstoy has not crawled out of the rubble. The closest we have, Don DeLillo, succeeded as an essayist-journalist ("In the Ruins of the Future: Reflections on Terror and Loss in the Shadow of September,” Harper’s, December 2001) but, to my mind, failed as a novelist ("Falling Man"). One reason, perhaps, is that the remembered emotion was instantly buried under a pile of cultural junk.' - Tod Gitlin in his review of Susan Faludi's The Terror Dream (written for 
