Garrett Caples – författare

Rediscover Joyce Mansour, the most significant Surrealist poet to emerge from 1950s Paris.“You know very well, Joyce, that you are for me—and very objectively too—the greatest poet of our time. Surrealist poetry, that’s you.”—André Breton Joyce Mansour, a Syrian Jewish exile from Egypt, was 25 years old when she published her first book in Paris in 1953. Her fierce, macabre, erotically charged works caught the eye of André Breton, who welcomed her into his Surrealist group and became her lifelong friend and ally. Despite her success in surrealist circles, her books received scant attention from the literary establishment, which is hardly surprising since Mansour's favorite topics happened to be two of society's greatest fears: death and unfettered female desire.Now, over half a century later, Mansour's time has come. Emerald Wounds collects her most important work, spanning the entire arc of her career, from the gothic, minimalist fragments of her first published work to the serpentine power of her poems of the 1980s. In fresh new translations, Mansour's voice surges forth uncensored and raw, communicating the frustrations, anger, and sadness of an intelligent, worldly woman who defies the constraints and oppression of a male-dominated society. Mansour is a poet the world needs today.

"The Collected Poems of Philip Lamantia" represents the lifework of the most visionary poet of the American postwar generation. Philip Lamantia (1927-2005) played a major role in shaping the poetics of both the Beat and the Surrealist movements in the United States. First mentored by the San Francisco poet Kenneth Rexroth, the teenage Lamantia also came to the attention of the French Surrealist leader Andre Breton, who, after reading Lamantia's youthful work, hailed him as a "voice that rises once in a hundred years". Later, Lamantia went "on the road" with Jack Kerouac and shared the stage with Allen Ginsberg at the famous Six Gallery reading in San Francisco, where Ginsburg first read "Howl". Throughout his life, Lamantia sought to extend and renew the visionary tradition of Romanticism in a distinctly American vernacular, drawing on mystical lore and drug experience in the process. "The Collected Poems" gathers not only his published work but also an extensive selection of unpublished or uncollected work; the editors have also provided a biographical introduction.

The Collected Poems of Philip Lamantia represents the lifework of the most visionary poet of the American postwar generation. Philip Lamantia (1927-2005) played a major role in shaping the poetics of both the Beat and the Surrealist movements in the United States. First mentored by the San Francisco poet Kenneth Rexroth, the teenage Lamantia also came to the attention of the French Surrealist leader André Breton, who, after reading Lamantia’s youthful work, hailed him as a “voice that rises once in a hundred years.” Later, Lamantia went “on the road” with Jack Kerouac and shared the stage with Allen Ginsberg at the famous Six Gallery reading in San Francisco, where Ginsburg first read “Howl.” Throughout his life, Lamantia sought to extend and renew the visionary tradition of Romanticism in a distinctly American vernacular, drawing on mystical lore and drug experience in the process. The Collected Poems gathers not only his published work but also an extensive selection of unpublished or uncollected work; the editors have also provided a biographical introduction.

Leonora Carrington meets Georges Bataille in these outlandish surrealist tales."Mansour saw in the erotic the possibilities for individual and collective freedom. Inside the void, a reimagining of the self and the world can occur, illuminating new ways to live that contrast with the default world of the everyday."—Ama Kwarteng, Los Angeles Review of BooksEgyptian exile Joyce Mansour was one of the most important writers to join André Breton's Paris Surrealist group after the Second World War. This exciting follow-up to City Lights' acclaimed selection of Mansour's poems (Emerald Wounds, 2023) is a milestone in the ongoing rediscovery of one of the most powerful voices of 20th-century Surrealism. Known during her lifetime primarily as a poet, Mansour also published a small but significant body of prose. Satisfied Sarcophagi collects her complete short stories, drawing from her two collections published in France, Les Gisantes Satisfaits (1958) and Ça (1970).Mansour portrays a universe of constant transformation and constant violence, weaving an eroticized surrealist texture from unsettling areas of the psyche, replete with Sadean excess, incestuous relations, and her usual complement of bodily fluids. In "Mary, or the Honor of Serving," the protagonist endures a series of grotesque events, deciding to remain with her murderous lover rather than escape to a banal bourgeois life. "Cancer" depicts a boy's obsession with an old woman's hump, which threatens to subsume her. "The Tip" and "Infinitely . . . on the Lawn" explore oedipal struggles, the one featuring a gender-switching protagonist caught between the family maid and his mother, the other a woman and her mother sharing the same lover. Other stories like "Dolman the Evil" and "Sunday Shakes" concern demonic beings of uncertain origin. With Satisfied Sarcophagi—brought into English by noted Mansour translator C. Francis Fisher—Joyce Mansour rightly claims her place as a take-no-prisoners bad-girl progenitor of a growing body of women's writing known in the 21st century as "fantastic/erotic horror."

The original American surrealist returns in a new edition of the 1967 classic."I am eager to do a book of yours," Lawrence Ferlinghetti wrote to Philip Lamantia in Nerja, Spain in 1966. "What about SELECTED POEMS OF PHILIP LAMANTIA?" The missive came at the right time, as Lamantia had recently reembraced the surrealism of his youth and sought to publish his current work alongside his key poems of the 1940s, when the then-15-year-old poet was published by war-exiled leader of the Surrealist Movement, André Breton. For Breton, the young poet was a new Rimbaud, but Lamantia also became known as a poet of the Beat Generation, participating in the 1955 Six Gallery Reading where Allen Ginsberg debuted "Howl." A pioneer of San Francisco's psychedelic culture, Lamantia reemerged through City Lights at the crest of the Summer of Love.Selected Poems of Philip Lamantia reflects each facet of the poet's development up to the point of its publication. "Revelations of a Surreal Youth (1943–1945)" includes the incendiary poems from his teenage years which brought him early avant-garde fame, including his signature "Touch of the Marvelous." "Trance Ports (1948–1961)" covers the Beat years, evincing increasing involvement with mysticism, esoterism, and religion. Finally, "Secret Freedom (1963–1966)" heralds his return to surrealism, cementing his countercultural bona fides with the LSD-fueled "Blue Grace," the zig-zagging Kundalini-inspired "What Is Not Strange?" and the Aquarian Age ode "Astro-Mancy," which prefigures his later engagement with Native American culture.This new edition includes an afterword by poet and editor Garrett Caples, recounting the book's genesis through correspondence between Lamantia and Ferlinghetti and including archival images. A much-needed restoration to the Pocket Poets Series of today, Selected Poems of Philip Lamantia glows like a red-hot coal still burning with the revolutionary fervor of its time.

The last living member of the original circle of Anarcho-pacifist poets at the birth of the San Francisco Renaissance, Richard O. Moore presents his second book, Particulars of Place. The title poem is a meditation on life in the twilight of American Empire, posing the question of how to live in an age of endless warfare. Throughout, Moore's commitment to social justice mingles with his interest in Wittgenstein's linguistic philosophy, resulting in a poetic amalgam unique to Moore himself. Reflecting a lifetime of devotion to the art of poetry, Particulars of Place confirms Moore's paradoxical position as a newly emerging old master.

A power ballad was a hair metal band's voyage into the softer side of rock, compromising to the integrity of the genre, but genuine and trailblazing. So too is Caples' Power Ballads. His poems and prose pieces are bizarre and hilarious, in which Dylan and Bowie sit alongside the French surrealists, with the occasional turn into heartfelt romanticism.

“Philip was a visionary like Blake, and he really saw the whole world in a grain of sand.” —Lawrence Ferlinghetti“An inspired consciousness set at full tilt in raging protest, kisses, prayers, blessings, and outraged demands. All from the deepest silence and farthest travel.” —Michael McClurePreserving Fire recounts the life and thought of the Surrealist, Beat Generation, and San Francisco Renaissance poet Philip Lamantia through his fugitive prose works. Ranging from poetry to politics to mythology to dance, from manifestos to travelogues to wartime declarations of conscientious objection, these writings, expertly collected by friend and longtime City Lights editor Garrett Caples, offer a dynamic picture of Lamantia’s multifaceted intellectual life and the artistic movements he helped shape.Philip Lamantia (1927–2005) was an influential Surrealist, Beat, and San Francisco Renaissance poet. He is the author of many books, including Erotic Poems, Touch of the Marvelous, Meadowlark West, Tau and Journey to the End, and The Collected Poems of Philip Lamantia.Garrett Caples is the author of many books, most recently Power Ballads and Retrievals. He is the co-editor of The Collected Poems of Philip Lamantia and is an editor at City Lights Books, where he curates the Spotlight Poetry Series.

In Lovers of Today, Garrett Caples is his most playful and heartfelt. Here are poems that generously place the reader in a particular poetic moment that is both elegiac and also wildly entertaining. Taken from a bar of the same name in New York City, Lovers of Today is a collection of poetry that pays tribute to friendships including Kevin Killian, John Ashbery, Joanne Kyger, and Bill Berkson, among others, wherein each poem is a celebration of life’s ephemerality.

In Lovers of Today, Garrett Caples is his most playful and heartfelt. Here are poems that generously place the reader in a particular poetic moment that is both elegiac and also wildly entertaining. Taken from a bar of the same name in New York City, Lovers of Today is a collection of poetry that pays tribute to friendships including Kevin Killian, John Ashbery, Joanne Kyger, and Bill Berkson, among others, wherein each poem is a celebration of life’s ephemerality.

In the grand tradition of poet’s fiction, Proses: Incomparable Parables! Fabulous Fables! Cruel Tales! is a collection of nine phantasmagorical stories by beloved poet and City Lights editor, Garrett Caples.Resolutely turning its back on the ethos of traditional narrative, Proses draws on Marcel Schwob, magical realism, and speculative fiction for inspiration, projecting worlds dominated by dream logic and impossible (and often hilarious) dimensions. Spectral nuns, xenobots, explosive phraseology, and even Ringo Starr are just some of the unexpected dilemmas confronting the various protagonists of Proses. Poets such as Andrew Joron, Kit Schluter, and Claude Grind of Verdoux Books, make cameo appearances—including, at times, Caples himself! While each story is a standalone, the collection amounts to an intricate whole, as themes, objects, and even characters recur, encouraging readers to enjoy the book sequentially. Regardless of how it is enjoyed, Proses is at once a satire of the world of contemporary poetry and publishing and a celebration of that world's fantastic and infinite imagination.

“Who was Samuel Greenberg?” editor Garrett Caples asks: “The short answer is ‘the dead, unknown poet Hart Crane plagiarized.’” In the winter of 1923, Crane was given some of Greenberg’s notebooks and called him “a Rimbaud in embryo.” Crane included many of Greenberg’s lines, uncredited and slightly changed, in his own poetry. Poems from the Greenberg Manuscripts was edited by James Laughlin, who first published it in 1939. As well as Laughlin’s original essay, Caples includes a new selection of poems from Greenberg’s notebooks, along with some of his prose. Now the work of this mysterious, impoverished, proto-surrealist American poet, who never published a word in his life, is available to a new generation of readers.

"Frank Lima is an American Villon."--David Shapiro "Highly recommended for -reasons that go beyond historical -completeness."--Library Journal, starred review "This collection is not to be missed."--Publishers Weekly, starred review Protege of Frank O'Hara, Kenneth Koch, and Allen Ginsberg, Frank Lima (1939-2013) was the only Latino member of the New York School during its historical heyday. After enduring a difficult and violent childhood, he discovered poetry as an inmate of a juvenile drug treatment center under the tutelage of the painter, Sherman Drexler, who introduced him to his poet friends. After his poetry debut in the Evergreen Review in 1962, Lima appeared in key New York School anthologies and published two full-length collections of his own. In the late 1970s, Lima left the poetry world to pursue a successful career as a chef, though he returned intermittently and continued to write a poem a day until his death. Incidents of Travel in Poetry is a landmark re-introduction to the work of this major Latino poet.Beginning with poems from Inventory (1964), his installment in the legendary Tibor de Nagy poetry series, Incidents includes selections from Lima's previous volumes, tracing his development from his early snapshots of street life to his later surrealist-influenced abstract lyricism. The bulk of the collection comes from his later unpublished manuscripts, and thus Incidents represents the full range of Lima's work for the very first time. Praise for Incidents of Travel in Poetry: "Finally. Finally. Finally. Here's the Frank Lima collection that poetry lovers worldwide have been waiting for. Lima was an authentic outlier and Incidents of Travel transcends and decolonizes any attempt at easy categorization. With this new body of work, we are reaping the price Lima paid for being ostracized. Our reward? The dream we wish we could have, whispers that hint of a new waste land, and we'll always be in his debt for having Lima as a guide."--Willie Perdomo, The Essential Hits of Shorty Bon Bon. "Frank Lima is a masterful writer of ecstatic, devastating, and hauntingly personal poetry.His candor is irresistible and transformative, as cuttingly witty in one poem as elegiac and sorrowful in the next. Complete with its nuances and disappointments, nobody writes the poetry of domestic reverence quite like Lima. In this generous selection of work from the poet's life, including poetry from 1997 onward, we can finally solidify Lima as a figure of crucial importance to our understanding of the New York School writers. This work shines with all the love and labor of Lima's thoroughly American experience, one which is inextricable from the trauma of cultural duality. Lima's voice speaks to us like an intimate friend, a co-conspirator in hope. 'Blessed are the poets who invented us as poets,' he writes in a poem for David Shapiro, an ode to both his best friend and to poetry. Blessed are we now to have this landmark collection of work from Frank Lima. This book is a long overdue treasure."--Wendy Xu From his first contact with poetry while incarcerated as a juvenile offender in Harlem, through his meetings with Langston Hughes and Frank O'Hara, his years with Berkson and Padgett and Berrigan, his stint as a chef, and his years of living his Vow to Poetry when he wrote at least a poem a day in total obscurity--Lima's life is an epic of contradictions. Frank Lima is a poet the world has been waiting to discover. Now we can."--Bob Holman

“A true poet of modern classic culture in mid-twentieth century U.S.A.”—Allen Ginsberg“At their best the poems have an intensely oral, I would like to call it glossolalic, freedom, as if they captured the essence of what one might like to express in the moment of rapture.”—David RattrayBeginning in the 1950s until his untimely death at age 49, Stephen Jonas (1921-1970) was an influential if underground figure of the New American Poetry. A gay African-American poet of self-obscured origins, heavily influenced by Ezra Pound and Charles Olson, the Boston-based Jonas was a pioneer of the serial poem and an erudite mentor to such acknowledged masters as Jack Spicer and John Wieners, even as he lived a shadowy existence among drug addicts, thieves, and hustlers.Arcana: A Stephen Jonas Reader is the first selection of his work to appear in 25 years. With a biographical introduction and a postscript delving into recent discoveries concerning the poet's birthplace and background, Arcana is a crucial corrective to our understanding of post-war American poetry, restoring Jonas to his rightful place among the period’s vanguard. Featuring previously uncollected and unpublished work, a section of never-before-seen facsimiles from notebooks, and a generous selection from his innovative serial poem Exercises for Ear (1968), Arcana is a much-needed retrieval of an overlooked American poet, as well as a valuable contribution to African American and Queer literature.Praise for Arcana:"The work of Steve Jonas, though vital to many of his more illustrious contemporaries, has remained obscured far too long, particularly as we've become unaccustomed to the high stakes once involved in the life of poetry. Accompanied by a reprint of Joseph Torra’s invaluable introduction, as vital and fresh now as when it came out 25 years ago, along with David Rich’s extraordinary archaeological dig into genealogical records and biographical materials to clarify Jonas’s self-effaced origins, the publication of Arcana is an important event in our increasingly evanescent cultural history, evidence of what is real."––Ammiel Alcalay

"I adore [Caples'] prescription to read widely and even perversely; and his breezy style is engaging." --Don Share "Caples' discussions are careful, nuanced, personal, and opinionated." --Steven Fama "Caples is part of a younger generation of writers reinvigorating contemporary poetry by combining modernist and Language-poetic verbal angularity with the sheer enthusiasm and lustiness of adolescence." --Publishers Weekly "Caples supplies us with a full aesthetic meal, with alarming images right out of the French Surrealists. He also means what he says; regardless of any implications to the contrary, Caples is writing out of emotion, even well-done sentiment." --Rain Taxi From "Theory on Retrievals": The concept of the poet-critic has always been a compelling one to me; it's hard not to admire 19th century French poets like Gautier, writing elegant prose in newspapers on topics the general public was more interested in reading about than it was in reading his poetry. (I've never been one to hold the general public's lack of interest in poetry against it; that's the way of the world.)The compensation was that being a poet gave one a certain license as a critic to roam among all the arts. Retrievals is a book of essays written over the course of ten years about underrecognized poets, unfairly discredited critics, and artists obscured by more famous relations. Garrett Caples is the author of The Garrett Caples Reader (Angle Press/Black Square Editions, 1999), Complications (Meritage Press, 2007), and Quintessence of the Minor (Wave Books, 2010). He is the co-editor of The Collected Poems of Philip Lamantia (University of California Press, 2013). He is the poetry editor at City Lights Books, and curates the Spotlight Poetry Series there. He has a PhD in English from the University of California, Berkeley, and lives in Oakland.

"I adore [Caples'] prescription to read widely and even perversely; and his breezy style is engaging." --Don Share "Caples' discussions are careful, nuanced, personal, and opinionated." --Steven Fama "Caples is part of a younger generation of writers reinvigorating contemporary poetry by combining modernist and Language-poetic verbal angularity with the sheer enthusiasm and lustiness of adolescence." --Publishers Weekly "Caples supplies us with a full aesthetic meal, with alarming images right out of the French Surrealists. He also means what he says; regardless of any implications to the contrary, Caples is writing out of emotion, even well-done sentiment." --Rain Taxi From "Theory on Retrievals": The concept of the poet-critic has always been a compelling one to me; it's hard not to admire 19th century French poets like Gautier, writing elegant prose in newspapers on topics the general public was more interested in reading about than it was in reading his poetry. (I've never been one to hold the general public's lack of interest in poetry against it; that's the way of the world.)The compensation was that being a poet gave one a certain license as a critic to roam among all the arts. Retrievals is a book of essays written over the course of ten years about underrecognized poets, unfairly discredited critics, and artists obscured by more famous relations. Garrett Caples is the author of The Garrett Caples Reader (Angle Press/Black Square Editions, 1999), Complications (Meritage Press, 2007), and Quintessence of the Minor (Wave Books, 2010). He is the co-editor of The Collected Poems of Philip Lamantia (University of California Press, 2013). He is the poetry editor at City Lights Books, and curates the Spotlight Poetry Series there. He has a PhD in English from the University of California, Berkeley, and lives in Oakland.