Bøger i City Lights Pocket Poets serien

The famed New York School bard's ruminations and deep ponderings, written during random Manhattan lunch hours.

Dino Campana wrote the unique, visionary masterwork of Italian literature Orphic Songs when he was in his twenties. The originality, rapturous language, and strange beauty of his poetry make him as important to twentieth-century poetry as García Lorca or Mayakovsky. Campana was the wild man of Italian poetry in 1914, on the eve of World War I. The war saved some young Italians from rebellion and from Fascism, but not Campana. Always an outsider, he was a vagabond who worked now and then as a gaucho, miner, fireman, organ-grinder, janitor, circus tumbler, horse groomer, and a wandering musician with a Gypsy band. He died in Castel Pulci, a psychiatric hospital, in 1932."Dino Campana's small and intensely magical body of poetry from the early years of the last century-prose and free verse that combine the visual and the visionary with astonishing vigor and haunting grace-is little known to English-speaking readers." -Oberlin College PressDino Campana (1885-1932) was an Italian lyricist and poet, known for his flamboyant personality. His only collection of poems is found in Orphic Songs. In 1918 he was admitted into a mental hospital and lived the rest of his life there.

An impressive selection, in bilingual format, from the work of one of Mexico's greatest contemporary writers.Born in Mexico City in 1951, Alberto Blanco is a dynamic and influential voice in the new poetry of Mexico. A musician, artist, essayist, translator, and storyteller, his poetry explores the connections on frontiers between verbal, visual, and aural experience. He is both an innovator and a classicist, a materialist and a mystic, a visionary and a chronicler of everyday life.Here his poems converse with their English translations, to create "a singular book…not simply a bilingual edition, but one unified voice, a poetry that speaks of a world far beyond languages and borders," (from the introduction by Jose Emilio Pacheco)."The meticulous and loving catalog of moments, animals, plants, beings, suns, and nocturnal revelations that this poetry offers us constitutes—in my way of thinking—a terrible oracle, and at last a shout of hope. To say it in a simpler, more direct way, it is a prayer." -Alvaro Mutis"Alberto Blanco's deep poetry inhabits both the world and the universe of imagination; these poems shed their own light and fly on their own wings." -Michael McClureJuvenal Acosta is an author who has published fiction, journalism, and poetry. He is now a teacher at the California College of the Arts. His books include The Tattooed Hunter and The Violence of Velvet.José Emilio Pacheco (1939-2014) was a Mexican poet, essayist, novelist and short story writer. He has been regarded as one of the major Mexican poets of the 20th Century.

These are poems written mostly in a time of war, and rooted in the land and people of Nicaragua. Zamora draws deep portraits of women of all classes, often using her own body as a metaphor and starting point. Recalling the years of revolution and resistance to U.S. intervention, she follows the riverbed of her memories through the land of her childhood, mourns the devastation of war, and illuminates the heroic lives of ordinary men and women.Daisy Zamora was program director of clandestine Radio Sandino during the revolution and later served as vice-minister of Culture in the Sandinista government.

"what a poetand the clear water is thickwith bloody blows on its head.I embraced a cloudBut when I soaredit rained."—Frank O’Hara, “Mayakovsky” (1954)Mayakovsky's is one of the most compelling voices in twentieth-century Russian poetry. Born in 1893, he joined the Futurist movement in 1912 and soon established himself as one of Russia's major poets. In 1917, he rallied to the Russian Revolution and remained the indisputable leader of its artistic avant-garde until his suicide in 1930.Many of the poems in this book are translated for the first time into English. Accompanying the poems are rare drawings and lithographs by Mayakovsky and his circle, found in private collections of futurist books.

"Plutonian Ode: Title" poem combines scientific info on 24,000-year cycle of the Great Year compared with equal half-life of Plutonium waste, accounting Homeric formula for appeasing underground millionaire Pluto Lord of Death, jack in the gnostic box of Aeons, and Adamantine Truth of ordinary mind inspiration, unhexing nuclear ministry of fear. Following poems chronologies Wyoming grass blues, a punk-rock sonnet, personal grave musing, Manhattan landscape hypertension, lovelorn heart thumps, mantric rhymes, Neruda's tearful Lincoln ode retranslated to U.S. vernacular oratory, Nagasaki Bomb anniversary haikus, Zen Bluegrass raunch, free verse demystification of sacred fame, Reznikoffian filial epiphanies, hot pants Skeltonic doggerel, a Kerouackian New Year's eve ditty, professional homework, New Jersey quatrains, scarecrow haiku, improvised dice roll for high school kids, English rock-and-roll sophistications, an old love glimpse, little German movies, old queen conclusions, a tender renaissance song, ode to hero-flop, Peace protest prophecies, Lower East Side snapshots, national flashed in the Buddhafields, Sapphic stanzas in quantitative idiom, look out at the bedroom window, feverish birdbrain verses from Eastern Europe for chanting with electric bands, Beethovinean ear strophes drowned in rain, a glance at Cloud Castle, poems 1977-1980 end with International new wave hit lyric Capitol Air

Meditations, rhapsodies, elegies, confessions, and mindful chronicle writings filling inward and outward space thru mid-Seventies decade.Mind Breaths: Australian songsticks measure oldest known poetics, broken-leg meditations march thru Six Worlds singing crazy Wisdom's hopeless suffering, the First Noble Truth, inspiring quiet Sung sunlit greybeard soliloquies, English moonlit night-gleams, ambitious mid-life fantasies, Ah crossed-legged thoughts sitting straight-spine paying attention to empty breath flowing 'round the globe;' then Dharma elegy & sharp-eyed haiku. Pederast rhapsody, exorcism of mid-East battlegods, workaday sad dust glories, American ego confession & mugging downfall Lower East Side, hospital sickness moan, hydrogen Jukebox Prophecy, Sex come-all-ye, mountain cabin flashes, Buddhist country western chord changes, Rolling Thunder snowballs, a Jersey Shaman dream, Father Death in a graveyard near Newark, Poe bones, two hot hearted love poems: Here chronicled mid Seventies' half decade inward & outward Mindfulness in many Poetries

A comprehensive selection from Ferlinghetti's famed City Lights Pocket Poets Series, published on the 60th anniversary of its founding.