A report on Allen Ginsberg, Beat Generation and City Lights Bookstore
As a student at Columbia University in the 1940s, he began friendships with William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac, forming the core of the Beat Generation.
- Allen GinsbergAllen Ginsberg's Howl (1956), William S. Burroughs' Naked Lunch (1959), and Jack Kerouac's On the Road (1957) are among the best known examples of Beat literature.
- Beat GenerationBoth the store and the publishers became widely known following the obscenity trial of Ferlinghetti for publishing Allen Ginsberg's influential collection Howl and Other Poems (City Lights, 1956).
- City Lights BookstoreLawrence Ferlinghetti, of the new City Lights Bookstore, started to publish the City Lights Pocket Poets Series in 1955.
- Beat GenerationIn addition to books by Beat Generation authors, the press publishes literary work by such authors as Charles Bukowski, Georges Bataille, Rikki Ducornet, Paul Bowles, Sam Shepard, Andrei Voznesensky, Nathaniel Mackey, Alejandro Murguía, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Ernesto Cardenal, Daisy Zamora, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Juan Goytisolo, Anne Waldman, André Breton, Kamau Daáood, Masha Tupitsyn, and Rebecca Brown.
- City Lights BookstoreBefore Howl and Other Poems was published in 1956 by City Lights, he worked as a market researcher.
- Allen Ginsberg6 related topics with Alpha
Howl (poem)
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"Howl", also known as "Howl for Carl Solomon", is a poem written by Allen Ginsberg in 1954–1955 and published in his 1956 collection Howl and Other Poems.
It came to be associated with the group of writers known as the Beat Generation.
It is not true that "Howl" was written as a performance piece and later published by poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti of City Lights Books.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
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Lawrence Monsanto Ferlinghetti (March 24, 1919 – February 22, 2021) was an American poet, painter, social activist, and co-founder of City Lights Booksellers & Publishers.
He was arrested for publishing Allen Ginsberg's Howl, resulting in a First Amendment trial in 1957, where Ferlinghetti was charged with publishing an obscene work—and acquitted.
Ferlinghetti published many of the Beat poets and is considered by some as a Beat poet as well.
Kenneth Rexroth
2 linksAmerican poet, translator, and critical essayist.
American poet, translator, and critical essayist.
Although he did not consider himself to be a Beat poet, and disliked the association, he was dubbed the "Father of the Beats" by Time magazine.
With Rexroth acting as master of ceremonies, Allen Ginsberg, Philip Lamantia, Michael McClure, Gary Snyder, and Philip Whalen performed at the famous Six Gallery reading on October 7, 1955.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti recalled that Rexroth self-identified as a philosophical anarchist, regularly associated with other anarchists in North Beach, and sold Italian anarchist newspapers at the City Lights Bookstore.
Philip Lamantia
1 linksAmerican poet and lecturer.
American poet and lecturer.
Lamantia was one of the post World War II poets now sometimes referred to as the San Francisco Renaissance, and later became involved with the San Francisco Beat Generation poets and the Surrealist Movement in the United States.
He was on the bill at San Francisco's Six Gallery on October 7, 1955, when poet Allen Ginsberg read his poem Howl for the first time.
Hoffman's poetry collection Journey to the End (which includes the poems that Lamantia read at the Six Gallery) was published by City Lights Bookstore in 2008, bound together with Lamantia's own Tau, a poem-cycle also dating from the mid-fifties.
Bob Kaufman
0 linksRobert Garnell Kaufman (April 18, 1925 – January 12, 1986) was an American Beat poet and surrealist as well as a jazz performance artist and satirist.
In New York, reportedly he met William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg.
City Lights published several books of Kaufman's poems during his lifetime, however, including Abomunist Manifesto, Second April in 1959, and Does the Secret Mind Whisper in 1960.
Diane di Prima
0 linksDiane di Prima (August 6, 1934October 25, 2020) was an American poet, known for her association with the Beat movement.
From 1974 to 1997, di Prima taught poetry at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, of the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado, sharing the program with fellow Beats Allen Ginsberg and Anne Waldman (co-founders of the program), William Burroughs, Gregory Corso, and others.
Revolutionary Letters. City Lights. 1971. (expanded edition, City Lights, 2021)