“ In every community, there is work to be done. In every nation, there are wounds to heal. In every heart, there is the power to do it. ” ― Marianne Williamson
"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
Anne Waldman takes the opportunity with this twentieth-anniversary expanded edition to add twenty poems to this collection that brings into focus her lifelong engagement with “Chant” as central to contemporary performative poetry.Here are spells, invo
The Beat movement exploded into American culture in the early 1950s with the force of prophecy. Not just another literary school, it was an artistic and social revolution. William S. Burroughs proclaimed that the Beat writers were “real architects of ch
Written during a critical period of his life, Some of the Dharma is a key volume in Jack Kerouac's vast autobiographical canon. He began writing it in 1953 as reading notes on Buddhism intended for his friend, poet Allen Ginsberg. As Kerouac's Buddhist st
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
In 1951, it was suggested to Jack Kerouac by his friend Ed White that he "sketch in the streets like a painter but with words." In August of the following year, Kerouac began writing down prose poem "sketches" in small notebooks that he kept in the breast
This one-volume omnibus, planned by the author before his death and now completed by his biographer, Ann Charters, makes clear the ambition and accomplishment of Jack Kerouac's "Legend of Duluoz" - the story of his life told in the course of his many "tru
Donald Allen, the late great editor of the Evergreen Review at Grove Press and editor of the seminal anthology The New American Poetry, first met Jack Kerouac in 1956 when he and Allen Ginsberg came to visit at his West Village apartment. At the time, All
On a blind date in Greenwich Village set up by Allen Ginsberg, Joyce Johnson (then Joyce Glassman) met Jack Kerouac in January 1957, nine months before he became famous overnight with the publication of On the Road. She was an adventurous, independent-min