Howl: Original Draft Facsimile, Transcript, and Variant Versions, Fully Annotated by Author, with Contemporaneous Correspondence, Account of First ... Pres (Harper Perennial Modern Classics) 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.

 

* First Blues ~
Allen Ginsberg | Format: Audio CD new/used
Bob Dylan (Contributor)
and Allen Ginsberg
This reissue of a long out-of-print LP is a 2 CD set spanning 1971-1981 collects Ginsberg performing 24 pieces - sometimes accompanying himself, some tracks collaborating with Bob Dylan, New York underground legend Arthur Russell, and visionary producer John Hammond. It also contains the original detailed liner notes by G insberg, and a cover photo by the legendary Robert Frank.  
Release Date: Feb. 21, 2006

WILLIAM EMERSON
William Everson: The Life of Brother Antoninus
by Lee Bartlett
Everson was one of the San Francisco Renaissance poets (the Beats) and a member of the Dominican Order.This biography of explores the poet's life that began on a San Joaquin Valley farm as a young poet , later finding himself in a camp for conscientious objectors during World War II—writing and printing pacifist poems and literature from a printing press from the camp. and a monk in the Dominican Order for 18 years.One of the most controversial figures of the pre-beat San Francisco Renaissance and—of course—a key personality of the Beat Generation.

Dark God of Eros: A William Everson Reader (California Legacy) A carefully chosen selection of poems, autobiographical writings, essays, letters, handpress portfolio items and photographs that highlight the many fascets of William Everson's work and his varied life. The poetry featured is among his most significant poems from the mid-1930's through the 1990's

DEVORAH MAJOR

Where River Meets Ocean (San Francisco Poet Laureate Series)
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

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.

Street Smarts by devorah major 

PHILIP LAMANTIA
Tau Journey to the End (City Lights Pocket Poets Series)
Philip Lamantia's mystical poems and the long-lost "Six Gallery" poems by legendary hipster John Hoffman.
This is the latest installment of the Pocket Poets Series and two long-lost books from the classic Beat period.


PHILLIP WHALEN

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

JACK SPICER

* My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer (Wesleyan Poetry Series)
Bay Area authors Kevin Killian, Lewis Ellingham, D.A. Powell, Robert Gluck, Leslie Scalapino, Lisa Robertson and many others pay tribute to this influential writer. (November 30, 2008)

* 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.

 

*The Beat Book: Writings from the Beat Generation
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.

*Love Works (San Francisco Poet Laureate Series)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.

* Bohemia: Where Art, Angst, Love and Strong Coffee Meet Bohemia: Where Art, Angst, Love
and Strong Coffee Meet by Herbert Gold
To visit what many consider to be Bohemia’s golden age, there is no better source than Gold.
Herbert Gold was awarded the Sherwood Anderson Prize for fiction in 1989. Raised in Cleveland, he has lived in various Islands of Bohemia, including Greenwich Village, Paris, Haiti, and South Beach in Miami. He is a longtime resident of San Francisco. Publisher: Axios Press (Sept. 2007)

* California Poetry: From the Gold Rush to the Present
by editors, Dana Gioia, Chryss Yost, Jack Hicks
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.

* 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.


* 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.

***Beatitude Golden Anniversary 1959-2009
(Beatitude Literary Magazine, Volume 50)
edited by Latiff Harris and Neeli Cherkovski

* The City's Voice: Pioneer Prose And Poetry From The Overland Monthly (Early California Writers Series)The City's Voice: Pioneer Prose And Poetry From The Overland Monthly (Early California Writers Series)
by Devorah Knaff
San Francisco's first successful literary journal. Mark Twain and Bret Harte to Ambrose Bierce and John Muir, these authors and more are in this collection of essays, short stories and poems, published together for the first time in over a century.

* Women of the Beat Generation: The Writers, Artists and Muses at the Heart of a Revolution by Brenda Knight and Ann Charters (Foreword) Anne Waldman
Women of the Beat Generation shares the stories of the wives, lovers and literary companions to many of the founders of the Baeat Movement.The writers include: Carolyn Cassady, Joyce Johnson, Edie Parker Kerouac,Joan Burroughs, and Lucian Carr.Many other selections covering the work of Diane di Prima, Anne Waldman, Denise Levertov, Joanna McClure and others. Thisl book a must for anyone interested in Beat history from woman who loved it.

Poetry Readings in the Cellar Kenneth Rexroth
Best of Word Jazz 1 Ken Nordine
His Royal Hipness Lord Buckley
The Beat Generation various artists box-set
Voice Of: Selected Poetry & Prose

JACK KEROUAC

Classics
CD:The Jack Kerouac Collection3 disc Box Set

 
* All That's Left (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).

*The Last American Valentine
by Jack Hirschman
an anthology of exhilarating modern love poetry. Each author has been paired up with some of the best American graphic designers for this annual collection of stunning work. Featuring acclaimed authors, musicians and barflys such as MICHAEL MCCLURE JACK HIRSCHMAN MINDY NETTIFEE RICHARD SWIFT NATHAN WILLET (cold war kids) RICK LUPERT BRENDAN CONSTANTINE BEAU SIA AGNETA FALK MICHAEL ROBERTS MICHAEL C FORD BUDDY WAKEFIELD AMBER TAMBLYN JOHN GARDINER CRISTIN OKEEFE APTOWICZ SHAPPY SEASHOLTZ ROGER BONAIR AGARD LYNNE PROCOPE VICTOR INFANTE DERRICK BROWN 216 pages.

*Only Dreaming Sky: Poems 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 isto propagandize for love." -Jack Hirschman.

*Art on the Line: Essays by Artists About the Point Where Their Art & Activism Intersect by Jack Hirschman
Cultural Writing. "Art on the Line" is a collection of essays by writers and artists from the U.S., Latin America, Europe, Asia, and Africa who believe art can move people to action and speaking about where their own social commitment and their art intersect.

*In Danger: A Pasolini Anthology a newly released collection of Pasolini's writings
edited and introduced by Jack Hirschman

DAVID MELTZER

*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 Meltzer  
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 taught in the graduate Poetics and undergraduate Humanities programs at New College of California.

*Serpent Power/Poet Song David Meltzer ~ Audio CD 25 tracks
David Meltzer reading in Petaluma, CA from Rockpile on Vimeo.


*When I Was a Poet (City Lights Pocket
Poets Series)
by David Meltzer.
fresh off the press!
City Lights Publishers (May 31, 2011)

MICHAEL McCLURE

*Mysteriosos and Other Poems by Michael McClure
New Directions (April 23, 2010)
A spiritual odyssey by preeminent Beat Generation poet Michael McClure.
These new poems explore the last seven years and speak of working toward freedom and beauty during a time of interminable war, and the destruction of our natural surroundings.

Ray Manzarek & Michael McClure: The Third Mind  DVD
Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Alan Ginsberg, Ray Manzarek, Michael McClure (VI), Jim Carroll
Equal parts documentary and performance film, THE THIRD MIND is former Doors organist Ray Manzarek and legendary Beat poet Michael McClure discussing the impact of Beat poetry on 1960s and '70s music while illustrating their observations with piano-spoken-word collaborations featuring footage of Allen Ginsberg, Jim Carroll, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti.

Rain Mirror: New Poems
by Michael McClure (Sep 1, 1999)
These poems by McClure are divided into two sections. "Crisis Blossom" records the traumatic aftereffects of a near-fatal airplane accident, following McClure from tarmac to hospital. "Haiku Edge" focuses, Zen-like, on life in Oakland, California, where McClure has lived.

Scratching the Beat Surface: Essays on New Vision from Blake to Kerouac
by Michael McClure (November 1, 1994)

Touching the Edge
 
by Michael McClure (April 6, 1999)

Antechamber, & Other PoemsAntechamber, and Other Poems
  by Michael McClure (April 6, 1999)

I Like Your Eyes Liberty by Terry Riley and Michael McClure (Audio CD - Jan 3, 2005)

The Beard and Vktms: Two Plays by Michael McClure

Love Lion  Audio CD by Ray Manzarek and Michael McClure (Aug 21, 1993) out of print but available new and used

 

JOHN NORTON

Air Transmigra
A collection of new poems  
by San Francisco poet,
John Norton

GARY SYNDER

Tamalpais Walking: Poetry, History, and Prints
Tom Killion (Illustrator)
and Gary Snyder(Author)

 

 

The Real Work: Interviews & 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: Prose, Poetry, and Translations
by Gary Snyder

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

* Mountains and Rivers Without End by Gary Synder

* Turtle Island (New Directions Books)
This book won Gary Snyder the Pulitzer back in 1975

* Riprap and Cold Mountain Poems by Gary Snyder

“The world is our consciousness, and it surrounds us. There are more things in mind, in the imagination, than ‘you’ can keep track of—thoughts, memories, images, angers, delights, rise unbidden. The depths of mind, the unconscious, are our inner wilderness areas.”Gary Synder, the poet, Buddhist, and eco-activist, teacher

JACK FOLEY

* 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.

Jack Foley is a widely published poet and critic who for the past several years has hosted a show of interviews and poetry presentations on Berkeley radio station KPFA.

Visions & Affiliations: A California Literary Time Line Part One
Visions & Affiliations: A California Literary Time Line Part Two
by Jack Foley (Pantograph Press (March 25, 2011)

PETER COYOTE

* 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.

GEORGE TSONGAS

* The Trieste Chronicles (Donald S. Ellis Books)
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. George has been writing poems, plays, and novels since he arrived in San Francisco in 1945. The 81-year-old poet continues to be a regular at Caffe Trieste and is putting the finishing touches on his new book which will be coming out later this summer. Trieste Chronicles is Out of Print but available used from Amazon.com

... like a finely woven tapestry... Tsongas is one of the true masters of the short poem... -- A.D. Winans, author of San Francisco Streets

ANNE WALDMAN
* In the Room of Never Grieve:
New and Selected Poems 1985-2003
 
by Anne Waldman

 

First Baby Poems by Anne Waldman
This book was begun when Anne Waldman wad spending most of her time with her infant son in a small cabin in the mountains.During that time it felt natural for her to begin writing in the voice of the baby.