Allen Ginsberg's Howl and Other Poems was originally published by City Lights Books in the Fall of 1956. Subsequently seized by U.S. customs and the San Francisco police, it was the subject of a long court trail at which a series of poets and professors persuaded the court that the book was not obscene.

Howl & Other Poems is the single most influential poetic work of the post-World War II era, with over 1,000,000 copies now in print.

"Howl was Allen's metamorphosis from quiet, brilliant, burning bohemian scholar trapped by his flames and repressions to epic...

Planet News collecting seven years' Poesy scribed to 1967 begins with electronic politics disassociation & messianic rhapsody TV Baby in New York, continues picaresque around the globe, elan perceptions notated at Mediterranean, Galilee & Ganges till next breakthrough, comedown Poem at heart & soul last days in Asia The Change 1963; tenement doldrums & police-state paranoia in Manhattan then half year behind Socialist Curtain climaxed as Kral Majales May King Prague 1965, same years' erotic gregariousness writ as Who Be Kind To for International Poetry Incarnation Albert Hall London; next...

Spontaneous poetry by the author of On the Road, gathered from underground and ephemeral publications; including -San Francisco Blues, - the variant texts of -Pull My Daisy- and -American haiku.-

HERE DOWN ON DARK EARTH

before we all go to Heaven

VISIONS OF AMERICA

All that hitchhikin

All that railroadin

All that comin back

to America --Jack Kerouac

Jack Kerouac (1922-1969) was a principal actor in the Beat Generation, and a companion of Allen Ginsberg and Neal Cassady in that great adventure. His books include On the...

The Italian film-maker Pier Paolo Pasolini was first and always a poet--the most important civil poet, according to Alberto Moravia, in Italy in the second half of this century. His poems were at once deeply personal and passionately engaged in the political turmoil of his country. In 1949, after his homosexuality led the Italian Communist Party to expel him on charges of -moral and political unworthiness, - Pasolini fled to Rome. This selection of poems from his early impoverished days on the outskirts of Rome to his last (with a backward longing glance at his native Friuli) is at the...

The original manuscript of this book, written between 1954 and 1965, has been in the safekeeping of City Lights all the years since Kerouac's death in 1969. Reaching beyond the scope of his Mexico City Blues, here are pomes about Mexico and Tangier, Berkeley and the Bowery. Mid-fifties road poems, hymns and songs of God, drug poems, wine poems, dharma poems and Buddhist meditations. Poems to Beat friends, goofball poems, quirky haiku, and a fine, long elegy in -Canuckian Child Patoi Probably Medieval . . . an English blues.- But more than a quarter of a century after it was written, Pomes...

These classic Kerouac meditations, zen koans, and prose poems express the poet's beatific quest for peace and joy through oneness with the universe.

-The Scripture of the Golden Eternity is fueled by Kerouac's discerning meditation on the nature of impermanence & consciousness, subtle like the dharma it invokes. We're here to disappear, therefore let's be as vivid & generous as we can. The intelligence & compassion behind this text is still alive.- --Anne Waldman, The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics

The Scripture of the Golden Eternity is Jack Kerouac's...

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, invocations, laments, ritual rants. Archaic beliefs in magic and ecstasy meet current notions of the power of the spoken word. Waldman writes, -The poem is a textured energy field or modal structure. The poems for performance seem to manifest as psychological states of mind. They come together in a mental, verbal, physical, and emotional...

A long-awaited collection from a pioneer of the spoken word movement, these poems soar and sway with the syncopation and melodies of jazz. Portraits, chronicles, incantations and invocations, drawn from a lifetime of prolific activity.

From his early days in the Black Arts Movement and up to the present, Daaood has been a powerful artistic and social force, an inspired seer/seeker. Whether collaborating with renowned musicians, heading up a performance group or inspiring and nurturing new talent, he speaks to and from the urgency of his time.

Kamau Daaood, performance...