The City Lights Pocket Poets Series is a series of poetry collections published by Lawrence Ferlinghetti and City Lights Books of San Francisco since August 1955. The series is most notable for the publication of Allen Ginsberg's literary milestone "Howl", which led to an obscenity charge for the publishers that was fought off with the aid of the ACLU.
The series is published in a small, affordable paperback format with a distinctive black and white cover design. (This design was borrowed from Kenneth Patchen's An Astonished Eye Looks Out of the Air (1945), published by Oregon's Untide Press.)[1] The series gave many readers their first introduction to avant-garde poetry. Many of the poets were members of the Beat Generation and the San Francisco Renaissance, but the volumes included a diverse array of poets, including authors translated from Spanish, German, Russian, and Dutch. According to Ferlinghetti, "From the beginning the aim was to publish across the board, avoiding the provincial and the academic...I had in mind rather an international, dissident, insurgent ferment." [2]
List of books in the City Lights Pocket Poets Series
Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Pictures of the Gone World, August 1955 (reissued & expanded, 1995)
Kenneth Rexroth (translator), Thirty Spanish Poems of Love and Exile, 1956
Kenneth Patchen, Poems of Humor and Protest, 1956
Allen Ginsberg, Howl and Other Poems, 1956
Marie Ponsot, True Minds, 1956
Denise Levertov, Here and Now, 1957
William Carlos Williams, Kora in Hell : Improvisations, 1957
Gregory Corso, Gasoline, 1958 (reissued with The Vestal Lady on Brattle, 1978)
Jacques Prévert, Paroles, 1958 (reissued bilingually, 1990)
Robert Duncan, Selected Poems, 1959
Jerome Rothenberg (translator), New Young German Poets, 1959
Nicanor Parra, Anti-Poems, 1960
Kenneth Patchen, The Love Poems of Kenneth Patchen, 1960
Allen Ginsberg, Kaddish and Other Poems, 1961
Robert Nichols, Slow Newsreel of Man Riding Train, 1962
Yevgeni Yevtuschenko, etc., Anselm Hollo (translator), Red Cats, 1962
Malcolm Lowry, Selected Poems of Malcolm Lowry, 1962
Allen Ginsberg, Reality Sandwiches, 1963
Frank O'Hara, Lunch Poems, 1964 (reissued 50th Anniversary Edition, 2014)
Philip Lamantia, Selected Poems 1943-1966, 1967
Bob Kaufman, Golden Sardine, 1967
Janine Pommy-Vega, Poems to Fernando, 1968
Allen Ginsberg, Planet News, 1961-1967, 1968
Charles Upton, Panic Grass, 1968
Pablo Picasso, Hunk of Skin, 1968
Robert Bly, The Teeth-Mother Naked At Last, 1970
Diane DiPrima, Revolutionary Letters, 1971
Jack Kerouac, Scattered Poems, 1971
Andrei Voznesensky, Dogalypse, 1972
Allen Ginsberg, The Fall of America, Poems of These States 1965-1971, 1972
Pete Winslow, A Daisy in the Memory of a Shark, 1973
Harold Norse, Hotel Nirvana, 1974
Anne Waldman, Fast Speaking Woman, 1975 (reissued & expanded, 1996)
Jack Hirschman, Lyripol, 1976
Allen Ginsberg, Mind Breaths, Poems 1972-1977, 1977
Stefan Brecht, Poems, 1978
Peter Orlovsky, Clean Asshole Poems & Smiling Vegetable Songs, 1978
Antler, Factory, 1980
Philip Lamantia, Becoming Visible, 1981
Allen Ginsberg, Plutonian Ode and Other Poems 1977-1980, 1982
Pier Paolo Pasolini, Roman Poems, 1986 (reissued bilingually, 2005)
Scott Rollins (editor), Nine Dutch Poets, 1982
Ernesto Cardenal, From Nicaragua With Love, 1986
Antonio Porta, Kisses From Another Dream, 1987
Adam Cornford, Animations, 1988
La Loca, Adventures on the Isle of Adolescence, 1989
Vladimir Mayakovsky, Listen!, 1991
Jack Kerouac, Pomes All Sizes, 1992
Daisy Zamora, Riverbed of Memory, 1992
Rosario Murillo, Angel in the Deluge, 1992
Jack Kerouac, The Scripture of the Golden Eternity, 1994
Alberto Blanco, Dawn of the Senses, 1995
Julio Cortázar, Save Twilight: Selected Poems, 1997
Dino Campana, Orphic Songs, 1998
Jack Hirschman, Front Lines: Selected Poems, 2002
Semezdin Mehmedinovic, Nine Alexandrias, 2003
Kamau Daaood, The Language of Saxophones, 2005
Cristina Peri Rossi, State of Exile, 2008
Tau by Philip Lamantia and Journey to the End by John Hoffman, 2008
