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
- David Meltzer, When I Was A Poet, 2011