Full Description
"Printer's ink is the greater explosive."—Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Lawrence Ferlinghetti founded the City Lights publishing house sixty years ago in 1955, launching the press with his now legendary Pocket Poets Series. First in the series was Pictures of the Gone World—and within a year, he had brought out two more volumes, translations by Kenneth Rexroth and then, poems by Kenneth Patchen. But it was the success and scandal of Number Four, Howl & Other Poems by Allen Ginsberg (1956), that put City Lights on the map, positioning the Pocket Poets Series at the forefront of the literary counterculture.
A landmark sixtieth retrospective celebrating 60 years of publishing and cultural history, this edition provides an invaluable distillation of the energetic, iconoclastic and still fresh body of work represented in the ongoing series. Ferlinghetti has selected a handful of poems from each of the sixty volumes, including the work of Ginsberg, Kerouac, Corso, Pasolini, Voznesensky, Prévert, Mayakovsky, Cortázar, O'Hara, Ponsot, Levertov, di Prima, Duncan, Lamantia, Lowry, and more, all of the Pocket Poets Series' innovative, influential, and often ground-breaking American and international poets.
Contents
City Lights Pocket Poets Anthology
60th Anniversary Edition
Edited by Lawrence Ferlinghetti
40th Anniversary edition, published in 1995, contained a selection of three poems each from every Pocket Poet book published in the series, up through Number 52.
This edition picks up where that left off, including all of the above, and adding three poems each (selected again by Ferlinghetti, series editor) from the titles/poets published in the series since then:
Number 53
SAVE TWILIGHT
Julio Cortázar
Number 54
ORPHIC SONGS
Dino Campana
Number 55
FRONT LINES
Jack Hirschman
Number 56
NINE ALEXANDRIAS
Semezdin Mehmedinovic
Number 57
THE LANGUAGE OF SAXOPHONES
Kamau Daáood
Number 58
STATE OF EXILE
Cristina Peri Rossi
Number 59
TAU
Philip Lamantia
Number 60
WHEN I WAS A POET
David Meltzer
