Don't Touch the Poet views the turbulent 1950s and 1960s through the life of Greenwich Village poet Joel Oppenheimer. Oppenheimer wrote poetry, essays, plays, and stories from the early 1950s until his death in 1988. A student under poet Charles Olson at Black Mountain College, he was anthologized as one of the original "Black Mountain Poets" in Donald Allen's pivotal New American Poetry (1960).

His play The Great American Desert was the first to be produced at the influential Judson's Poets Theater in New York City, and in 1966 he became the first director of the major East Coast center for alternative poetry, the St. Mark's Poetry Project on Manhattan's Lower East Side.

He became the director of New York's Teachers and Writers Collaborative, organizing the famous "Writers in the Schools" project, and for fifteen years he wrote regular columns in the Village Voice on topics ranging from politics to sports and literature to the seasons.