Ships Going into the Blue: Essays and Notes on Poetry collects Simpson's own iconoclastic views on poetry, both his own and others. It was published in 1994 by the University of Michigan Press.

Story Line Press issued an anthology of critical essays on narrative poetry in 1991 titled Poetry after Modernism, which discusses, among other subjects, the "New Narrative." Simpson is often cited as a major voice of "New Narrative" poetry.

Jerome Klinkowitz's The American 1960s: Imaginative Acts in a Decade of Change (1980), makes intriguing connections between the political life of the country and the imaginative lives of artists during the 1960s.

In The Levittowners: Ways of Life and Politics in a New Suburban Community (1982), Herbert Gans offers a historical look at the original inhabitants of America's most celebrated suburban development.