When William Burroughs mailed Alan Ansen a copy of Naked Lunch on its publication in 1959, he dedicated it to “one of the few who understood Naked Lunch before I did”, testifying to the unique role Ansen played from the start of Burroughs’s career as collaborator, promoter, critic, friend and author of three essays written across three decades. A Burroughs Triptych pieces together for the first time the backstory to Ansen’s three essays which…
The first three issues of the City Lights Journal were published between 1963 and 1966. Combining English translations of European avant-garde authors and poets such as Arthur Rimbaud, Antonin Artaud, Guillaume Apollinaire and Ferdinand Céline with Beat poets such as Gregory Corso, Neal Cassady and Allen Ginsberg and leading artists as Roland Topor, Allan Kaprow and Julian Beck, the City Lights Journals proved seminal to the 1960s counterculture and set an example for many later publishing ventures…
Ever since its foundation in 1953 by Peter D. Martin and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, City Lights has been a seminal publishing house and a leading independent bookstore. Named after the Chaplin film City Lights, the store started out in San Francisco as the first all-paperback bookstore in the US and its press as the publisher of early works by San Francisco Renaissance poets such as Kenneth Rexroth, Philip Lamantia, Jack Spicer, Robert Duncan and Ferlinghetti himself. In…
“The first push towards Joglars came in the summer of 1963 at Vancouver in Warren Tallman’s kitchen. Charles Olson was telling a bunch of young poets how we ought to start a magazine to publish poets’ correspondence, specifically that between Charles and Bob Creeley. So Fred Wah, Michael Palmer, and I began discussing a possible three-way editorship. But when we all got home the plan broke in two, Fred starting Sum in New Mexico and Michael and I Joglars…
