At the time, King's was one of very few British universities to offer American studies, and Mottram was to prove a pioneer in the field.
These contacts resulted in three of Mottram's best-known critical books - William Burroughs: the algebra of need (1971, British edition 1977), Allen Ginsberg in the Sixties (1972) and Paul Bowles: staticity & terror (1976).
The full correspondence was published as The Unruly Garden: Robert Duncan and Eric Mottram, Letters and Essays, edited and with an Introduction by Amy Evans and Shamoon Zamir (Peter Lang, 2007).
[1] Mottram's first book of poetry, Inside the Whale, was published by Bob Cobbing's Writers Forum in 1970.
Over the next six years, he edited twenty issues that featured most, if not all, of the key poets associated with the British Poetry Revival and carried reviews of books and magazines from the wide range of small presses that had sprung up to publish them.
Mottram also included work by a number of American poets, a fact that ultimately led to his removal from the post.
During this period, Mottram was twice a guest lecturer at Kent State University, where, along with Black Mountain poet Ed Dorn, he was an early supporter of the musical group Devo, and its founders Gerald Casale and Bob Lewis, whose poetry Mottram published when he was editor of Poetry Review.