Lawrence Ferlinghetti was born to European immigrants in 1919 in Yonkers, New York. His father having died shortly before he was born and his mother having been committed to a mental hospital soon after, Ferlinghetti was first raised by an aunt and then by foster parents. After having earned a B.A. in journalism in 1941 he published his first short stories while making a living as a sports journalist. He served in US Navy during World War II and after the war earned a degree…
A Hornbook for Witches: Poems of Fantasy is a collection of poems by Leah Bodine Drake. It was published by Arkham House in 1950 in an edition of 553 copies only. An audiobook by the same name was released in 1976, read by American actor Vincent…
Michael Andre started his Unmuzzled OX in 1971. The quarterly, edited from New York City and Kingston, Ontario, ran for thirty years and combined poetry, art and leftist politics in a well-balanced fashion. Tapping into the US counterculture of the period, the magazine’s regular contributors boasted Allen Ginsberg, John Cage, Gregory Corso and many others and often featured photos by Gerard Malanga. Unmuzzled OX Vol. IV, No. 3 was published in 1977…
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…