"This comprehensive selection from the influential City Lights Pocket Poets Series is a landmark retrospective, celebrating forty years of publishing and cultural history.From the introduction by Lawrence Ferlinghetti: “Even though some say that an avan
A literary time capsule from the decade that changed the world
From civil rights to free love, JFK to LSD, Woodstock to the Moonwalk, the Sixties was a time of change, political unrest, and radical experiments in the arts, sexuality, and personal ident
What do Marcel Duchamp and Italo Calvino have in common? The Oulipo, or Ouvroir de litterature potentielle. Raymond Queneau and Francois Le Lionnais founded their "Workshop for Potential Literature" in 1960 to find out how abstract restrictions could be c
Los Angeles has always been a place of paradisal promise and apocalyptic undercurrents. Simone de Beauvoir saw a kaleidoscopic "hall of mirrors," Aldous Huxley a "city of dreadful joy." Jack Kerouac found a "huge desert encampment," David Thomson imagined
For centuries, poets have looked into the mirror of classical myth to show us the many ways our emotional lives are still reflected in the ancient stories of heroism, hubris, transformation, and loss that myths so eloquently tell. Now, in Gods and Mortals
Octavio Paz, asserts Eliot Weinberger in his introduction to these Selected Poems, is among the last of the modernists "who drew their own maps of the world." For Latin America's foremost living poet, his native Mexico has been the center of a global man
"I have assumed a great deal in the selection of the poems from such a large and various number, making them a discourse unavoidably my own as well as any Olson himself might have chosen to offer. I had finally no advice but the long held habit of our usi
Fiercely moving, the two long narrative poems of Martín Meditations on the South Valley revolve around the semi-autobiographical figure of Martin, a mestizo or "detribalized Apache." Abandoned as a child and a long time on the hard path to building his
