San Francisco Poetry

Beat by Christopher Felver
This book is the most comprehensive photography collection of the people, players, and friends of the Beat era in American literature. How could I resist? I bought it and it is outstanding!...Nicole, sfheart

City Lights Pocket Poets Anthology
by Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Ferlinghetti and Peter Martin started a magazine there called 'City Lights'.
They decided to open a bookstore on the floor below as a side venture, naming it after the magazine.
The City Lights Bookstore became one of the most famous bookstores in the world, and still stands proudly in its original location.

A Coney Island of the Mind : Poems
by Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Ferlinghetti was one of the more politically-minded of the Beats, and has been continually active on behalf of liberal causes. Ferlinghetti is still active today as a poet and as the proprietor of City Lights.

Pictures of the Gone World (Pocket Poets Series) by Lawrence Ferlinghetti

The Book of Martyrdom and Artifice:
First Journals and Poems 1937-1952
by Allen Ginsberg

Journals : Early Fifties Early Sixties by Allen Ginsberg
Here are journal entries, notes, dreams, and reflections from the period when Ginsberg and his fellow Beats led the insurrection that profoundly altered America's cultural landscape.

Poet Be Like God: Jack Spicer and the San Francisco Renaissance
by Jack Spicer
Unlike his contemporaries Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and Gary Snyder, Jack Spicer was a poet who disdained publishing and relished his role as a social outcast. He died in 1965 virtually unrecognized, yet in the following years his work and thought have attracted and intrigued an international audience. Now this comprehensive biography gives a pivotal poet his due. Based on interviews with scores of Spicer's contemporaries, Poet Be Like God details the most intimate aspects of Spicer's life -- his family, his friends, his lovers -- illuminating not only the man but also many of his poems.

Beat Book by Anne Waldman
foreward by Allen Ginsberg. Contributors are: Amiri Baraka, Gary Snyder, Gregory Corso, Diane Di Prima, Jack Kerouac, Peter Orlovsky, Joanne Kyger, Philip Whalen, Allen Ginsberg, Neal Cassady, Lew Welch, Michael McClure, William S. Burroughs, John Wieners, Bob Kaufman, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Also with "A Literary Guide to Beat Places" and an excellent bibliography.

Words of My Roaring (California Fiction) By Anne Waldman
Here is an unusually diverse collection of Beat voices, including not only Kerouac, Burroughs, and Ginsberg, but Amiri Baraka, Gregory Corso, Diane di Prima, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Joanne Kyger, Michael McClure, Peter Orlovsky, Gary Snyder, and Philip Whalen. Also included are short biographies of the writers and a "Literary Guide to Beat Places" around the world.

Mindfield: New & Selected Poems by Gregory, Corso
new introduction by David Amram, this publication includes forewords by two legendary Beat writers, William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg.

New American Underground Poetry, Vol 1: The Babarians of San Francisco--Poets from Hell
By Alan Allen, David Lerner and Julia Vinograd - Editors
Paperback book of poetry from the legendary Cafe Babar from the mid - late 1980s. Many photographs included.

Love Works (San Francisco Poet Laureate Series)
by Janice Mirikitani
Janice Mirikitani is the author of three books of poetry. She has, over the past 35 years, created and directed programs for young people and people in need at Glide Memorial Church in San Francisco's Tenderloin district.

The Other Side of the Postcard
In conjunction with the San Francisco Public Library, poet laureate devorah major made a public appeal for poems that explored the realities of people's lives in a city as tough and tragic as it is beautiful and exhilarating. This anthology collects the best of this poetry by celebrated writers, school children with fresh eyes, homeless people and students, perceptive elders and working people from every ethnicity and class. A cross section of the city's voices offers a passionately experienced response to the city, the nation and the world.

City of One: Young Writers Speak to the World by Colette DeDonato
A moving collection of poetry comes from children and young adults involved in the WritersCorps program, which works with disadvantaged youth to help them develop creative writing and literacy skills. Their words depict the violence and harsh realities of their daily lives, their aversion to war and prejudices, pride in their identities/ethnicities and home countries, and their hopes for peace. A beautiful collection. Foreward by Isabel Allende.

The Beautiful
by Michelle Tea
A San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of 2004 and a Lambda Literary Award finalist.

A Writer's San Francisco: A Guided Journey for the Creative Soul
by Eric Maisel (Author), Paul Madonna (Illustrator)

The Trieste Chronicles by George Tsongas
Reflecting upon the soul of North Beach's Cafe Trieste, George Tsongas successfully captures the energy of San Francisco's valuable social landmark with The Trieste Chronicles.

Songs of Gold Mountain: Cantonese Rhymes from San Francisco Chinatown
by Marlon K. Hom
220 rhymes from two collections of Chinatown songs published in 1911 and 1915. The songs are outspoken and personal, addressing subjects as diverse as sex, frustrations with the American bureaucracy, poverty and alienation, and the loose morals of the younger generation of Americans and are arranged the songs thematically and gives an overview of early Chinese American literature

more poetry at sfheart.com
sixties poetry
Allen Cohen Poetry
Poetry   favorites by Dorothy Parker, Kahlil Gibran,
Omar Khayyam,Shakespeare, ee cummings
San Francisco Art and Poetry Events

San Francisco Beat: Talking With the Poets by David Meltzer
An essential archive of the Beat Generation, a rich moment in a fortunate place. America, somnolent, conformist, and paranoid in the 1950s, was changed forever by a handful of people who refused an existence of drudgery and enterprise, opting instead for a life of personal, spiritual, and artistic adventure. In these intimate, free-wheeling conversations, a baker's dozen of the poets of San Francisco talk about the scene then and now, the traditions of poetry, and about anarchism, globalism, Zen, the Bomb, the Kabbalah, and the Internet.

 Beat Thing by David Meltser
Author DAVID MELTZER began his literary career during the Beat heyday in San Francisco, reading poetry to jazz accompaniment at the famous Jazz Cellar. He is the editor and author of many books of poetry, including Arrows: Selected Poetry 1982–1992. He teaches in the Humanities and graduate Poetics programs at the New College of California. He lives in the Bay Area. A Tribute to David Meltzer

David's Copy : The Selected Poems of David Meltzer
David's Copy, released in 2005, is the first major collection of Meltzer's poetry in nearly ten years. It spans a career in a bohemian underground rich with diverse social experiments in life and art. Meltzer, the renowned San Francisco beatnik from Brooklyn began his literary career during the beat heyday in San Francisco, reading poetry to jazz accompaniment at the famous Jazz Cellar. This new selected collection gleaned from 30 previous books published over the course of 40-plus years proves why he is one of my very favorite poets and anyone familar with his work will most certainly want to have this book. If you do not know of David Meltzer, buy this book and you will discover why so many poetry lovers revere him. David lives in the Bay Area and teaches in the graduate Poetics and undergraduate Humanities programs at New College of California

Jazz - Jail and God: An Impressionistic Biography of Bob Kaufman
by Mel Clay

Elegy for Bob Kaufman
by Neeli Cherkovski

Whitman's Wild Children
by Neeli Cherovski

All That's Left by Jack Hirschman
(San Francisco Poet Laureate Series) by Jack Hirschman
Jack Hirschman is a San Francisco poet, translator, and editor. His powerfully eloquent voice set the tone for political poetry in this country many years ago. Since leaving a teaching career in the <60s, Hirschman has taken the free exchange of poetry and politics into the streets where he is, in the words of poet Luke Breit, "America<s most important living poet." He is the author of numerous books of poetry, plus some 45 translations from a half a dozen languages, as well as the editor of anthologies and journals. Among his many volumes of poetry are Endless Threshold, The Xibalba Arcane, and Lyripol (City Lights, 1976).

Only Dreaming Sky: Poems by Jack Hirschman
San Francisco's award-winning Poet Laureate Jack Hirschman reveals his lighter, humorous side with this new book. "Poetry is really a weapon. It's a spiritual weapon for the transformation of the world. And, of course, all my poems are love poems. The nicest thing in the world is to propagandize for love." -Jack Hirschman.

What Book!?: Buddha Poems from Beat to Hiphop by Peter Coyote
Five years in the making, What Book!?: Buddha Poems from Beat to Hiphop is a major, active anthology of modern, mindful poetry, featuring over 330 selections from over 125 authors.

Revolutionary Letters by Diane Di Prima  

The Real Work: Interviews and Talks, 1964-1979
by Gary Snyder
This book show much of Gary Synder's usual wit and concision.
The most illuminating remarks in this book pertain to shamanism and poetry. As Synder points out, Shamanism is a world-wide phenomenon, and its core is learning from the nonhuman, "not a teaching from an Indian medicine man, or a Buddhist master. The question of culture does not enter into it. It's a naked experience some people have out there in the woods." Snyder has written about the experience in his poetry and his prose has taught a generation where the documents of shamanism can be found.

The Gary Snyder Reader by Gary Snyder

Poets on the Peaks: Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen by John Suiter

The City's Voice: Pioneer Prose And Poetry From The Overland Monthly (Early California Writers Series)
by Devorah Knaff
From Mark Twain and Bret Harte to Ambrose Bierce and John Muir, many well-known writers of the Early American West got their start at The Overland Monthly — San Francisco's first successful literary journal. These authors and more are represented in this collection of essays, short stories and poems, published together for the first time in over a century.

Farming in San Francisco: Poems
by Daniel Richman
Dan Richman’s book of poems, Farming in San Francisco, is a love letter to a city from one who has lived in it long and hard, carved a life out of it, loved in it, lost in it, won in it, worked like hell in it, laughed and cried in it, walked a thousand miles in it, then thanked it for endless surprises and gifts of beauty, huge and small.

O Powerful Western Star: Poetry & Art In California by Jack Foley
This is not only an engrossing and original book. It is also–for Californians–a necessary one. Foley’s collection ranks high among the few serious investigations ever written of San Francisco literary culture. It is, however, by no means a conventional study. O Powerful Western Star is by turns historical, critical, philosophical, visionary, and poetic. It is also often autobiographical. Foley has lived in the Bay Area for nearly four decades, and his insights grow from personal involvement as well as active research. Literary criticism is rarely so intellectually wide-ranging, imaginatively suggestive, or unabashedly personal.


Foley's Books: California Rebels, Beats and Radicals by Jack Foley
collection of essays and interviews; companion volume to O Powerful Western Star.

Where River Meets Ocean (Poet Laureate Series (City Lights Foundation), No. 3.)
by Devorah Major
"A visionary of hope, with a heart big enough to embrace every neighborhood, street and alley in this magical and -poetical city. Here is a poet who shoots straight as Cupid's arrow. Zing! Right to the heart."-Alejandro Murguia

As If the World Really Mattered: Poems by Art Goodtimes
Poems which joyfully expound on the natural world and our relationship to it. Lyrical but root essential, Goodtimes speaks as one of the ancient storytellers—wise and sly...Dolores LaChapelle

California Poetry: From the Gold Rush to the Present
by Dana Gioia (Editor), Chryss Yost (Editor), Jack Hicks (Editor)
Heyday Books; (November 2003)

CALIFORNIA POETRY is the first historical anthology to provide a comprehensive survey of California poetry. This groundbreaking new book presents the work of 101 authors across two centuries, and includes poets as diverse as Ambrose Bierce, Yone Noguchi, Robinson Jeffers, Josephine Miles, Charles Bukowski, Ishmael Reed, Francisco X. Alarcón, and Marilyn Chin. With ample biographical and critical notes for each author, California Poetry goes beyond the limits of the ordinary anthology and provides a detailed and often intimate account of the Golden State's rich but often neglected cultural history.

Overtime: Selected Poems (Penguin Poets) by Phillip Whalen, edited by Michael Rothenberg
The degree of respect and admiration the beats had for Whalen is remarkable. He was adored by Kerouac, who found him easy to be with and confide in. Philip's nonjudgmental nature and education is probably one the keys here in that. Ginsberg considered Whalen the only Zen Master Poet practicing in America.The spirit of honor and admiration for Philip Whalen extends beyond the Beat Generation. ~ Michael Rothenberg