THE POCKET POETS SERIES (CITY LIGHTS BOOKS)
Series Notes: The Pocket Poets Series, published by City Lights, San Francisco, began in 1955 with Lawrence Ferlinghetti's Pictures of the Gone World. Conceived as an inexpensive, portable poetry series, it helped make modern poetry available beyond academic and elite literary circles. Its small paperback format became closely associated with City Lights' independent, radical, and international publishing identity.
The series is best known for Allen Ginsberg's Howl and Other Poems (No. 4, 1956), whose obscenity trial made City Lights central to postwar literary free-speech history. Although strongly linked with the Beat Generation and the San Francisco Renaissance, the series has always been wider in scope, including poets such as Kenneth Rexroth, Denise Levertov, Frank O'Hara, Bob Kaufman, Diane di Prima, Jack Kerouac, and Anne Waldman. It also introduced major international voices in translation, confirming its role as a continuing archive of experimental, dissident, and globally engaged poetry.
The earliest Pocket Poets volumes, Nos. 1-6, were issued under the imprint "The City Lights Pocket Bookshop" between 1955 and 1957. With No. 7, William Carlos Williams's Kora in Hell: Improvisations (1957), the imprint changed to "City Lights Books", which remained the regular Pocket Poets imprint through the rest of the twentieth-century. The currently imprint is "City Lights Publishers".
Further reading: Publishing - City Lights Booksellers & Publishers
Serial Number/Poet or Editor/Book Title/Date
1. Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Pictures of the Gone World, August 1955 (reissued & expanded, 1995)
2. Kenneth Rexroth (translator), Thirty Spanish Poems of Love and Exile, 1956
3. Kenneth Patchen, Poems of Humor and Protest, 1956
4. Allen Ginsberg, Howl and Other Poems, 1956
5. Marie Ponsot, True Minds, 1956
6. Denise Levertov, Here and Now, 1957
7. William Carlos Williams, Kora in Hell: Improvisations, 1957
8. Gregory Corso, Gasoline, 1958 (reissued with The Vestal Lady on Brattle, 1978)
9. Jacques Prévert, Paroles, 1958 (reissued bilingually, 1990)
10. Robert Duncan, Selected Poems, 1959
11. Jerome Rothenberg (translator), New Young German Poets, 1959
12. Nicanor Parra, Anti-Poems, 1960
13. Kenneth Patchen, The Love Poems of Kenneth Patchen, 1960
14. Allen Ginsberg, Kaddish and Other Poems, 1961
15. Robert Nichols, Slow Newsreel of Man Riding Train, 1962
16. Yevgeni Yevtuschenko, etc., Anselm Hollo (translator), Red Cats, 1962
17. Malcolm Lowry, Selected Poems of Malcolm Lowry, 1962
18. Allen Ginsberg, Reality Sandwiches, 1963
19. Frank O'Hara, Lunch Poems, 1964 (reissued 50th Anniversary Edition, 2014)
20. Philip Lamantia, Selected Poems 1943-1966, 1967
21. Bob Kaufman, Golden Sardine, 1967
22. Janine Pommy-Vega, Poems to Fernando, 1968
23. Allen Ginsberg, Planet News, 1961-1967, 1968
24. Charles Upton, Panic Grass, 1968
25. Pablo Picasso, Hunk of Skin, 1968
26. Robert Bly, The Teeth-Mother Naked At Last, 1970
27. Diane DiPrima, Revolutionary Letters, 1971
28. Jack Kerouac, Scattered Poems, 1971
29. Andrei Voznesensky, Dogalypse, 1972
30. Allen Ginsberg, The Fall of America, Poems of These States 1965-1971, 1972
31. Pete Winslow, A Daisy in the Memory of a Shark, 1973
32. Harold Norse, Hotel Nirvana, 1974
33. Anne Waldman, Fast Speaking Woman, 1975 (reissued & expanded, 1996)
34. Jack Hirschman, Lyripol, 1976
35. Allen Ginsberg, Mind Breaths, Poems 1972-1977, 1977
36. Stefan Brecht, Poems, 1978
37. Peter Orlovsky, Clean Asshole Poems & Smiling Vegetable Songs, 1978
38. Antler, Factory, 1980
39. Philip Lamantia, Becoming Visible, 1981
40. Allen Ginsberg, Plutonian Ode and Other Poems 1977-1980, 1982
41. Pier Paolo Pasolini, Roman Poems, 1986 (reissued bilingually, 2005)
42. Scott Rollins (editor), Nine Dutch Poets, 1982
43. Ernesto Cardenal, From Nicaragua With Love, 1986
44. Antonio Porta, Kisses From Another Dream, 1987
45. Adam Cornford, Animations, 1988
46. La Loca, Adventures on the Isle of Adolescence, 1989
47. Vladimir Mayakovsky, Listen!, 1991
48. Jack Kerouac, Pomes All Sizes, 1992
49. Daisy Zamora, Riverbed of Memory, 1992
50. Rosario Murillo, Angel in the Deluge, 1992
51. Jack Kerouac, The Scripture of the Golden Eternity, 1994
52. Alberto Blanco, Dawn of the Senses, 1995
53. Julio Cortázar, Save Twilight: Selected Poems, 1997
54. Dino Campana, Orphic Songs, 1998
55. Jack Hirschman, Front Lines: Selected Poems, 2002
56. Semezdin Mehmedinovic, Nine Alexandrias, 2003
57. Kamau Daaood, The Language of Saxophones, 2005
58. Cristina Peri Rossi, State of Exile, 2008
59. Tau by Philip Lamantia and Journey to the End by John Hoffman, 2008
60. David Meltzer, When I Was A Poet, 2011
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Author: David Paul Wagner
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