Beat Poets [With Ribbon Book Mark]

By Carmela Ciuraru

Book Overview

Visceral and powerful, infused with an unmediated spiritual and social awareness, the poetry of the Beats is presented here in a stunning and portable hardcover selection.

This rousing anthology features the work of more than twenty-five writers from the great twentieth-century countercultural literary movement. Writing with an audacious swagger and an iconoclastic zeal, and declaiming their verse with dramatic flourish in smoke-filled caf s, the Beats gave birth to a literature of previously unimaginable expressive range.

The defining work of Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac provides the foundation for this collection, which also features the improvisational verse of such Beat legends as Gregory Corso, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gary Snyder, and Michael McClure and the work of such women writers as Diane DiPrima and Denise Levertov. LeRoi Jones's plaintive "Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note" and Bob Kaufman's stirring "Abomunist Manifesto" appear here alongside statements on poetics and the alternately incendiary and earnest correspondence of Beat Generation writers.

Everyman's Library pursues the highest production standards, printing on acid-free cream-colored paper, with full-cloth cases with two-color foil stamping, decorative endpapers, silk ribbon markers, European-style half-round spines, and a full-color illustrated jacket.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0375413324
• ISBN13: 9780375413322
• Release Date: July 2002
• Publisher: Everyman's Library
• Length: 256 Pages
• Weight: 0.54 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 4.4" x 6.2"

Customer Reviews

Solid Sampler of 28 Poets

"Beats Poets," a snug volume of various poetry from the Beat era in the 1950s and 60s, can serve as a sampler for 28 modern influential poets. Passages from Ginsberg's "Howl" and Corso's "Transformation & Escape" will draw you read these pieces in full. "Howl" is the highly controversial poem which challenged free speech and the definition of art. Creeley, Jones, and O'Hara are hear, as is Lawrence Ferlinghetti, both poet and owner of the famous San Francisco bookstore "City Lights" where so much of the Beat movement originated. Denise Levertov is notably here with five selection. Only a few Kerouac poems are published here, but his work can be easily found in larger collections. Helping capture the Beat movement, editor Carmela Ciuraru has included "Letters, Encounters and Statements on Poetics," which is a collection of short essays by a few of Beat's major players. I fully recommend "Beat Poets." Anthony Trendl editor, HungarianBookstore.com

More than twenty-five poets from the Beat movement

Compiled and edited by Carmela Ciuaru, Beat Poets provides informative coverages featuring and showcasing the work of more than twenty-five poets from the Beat movement, ranging from Bob Kaufman, to Allen Ginsburg, to Diane di Prima. Rousing poems and Beat verse classics will bring back nostalgic memories for some, while introducing a whole new generation to a diverse Beat poetry drawn from the themes and concerns of a now yesteryear of the American experience.