San Francisco Poems

Poems about the City by the Bay by its first official Poet Laureate.

Poetry. Asian American Studies. POETA EN SAN FRANCISCO is the winner of the highly prestigious James Laughlin Award for 2005, awarded annually from the Academy of American Poetry and the only prize for a second book of poetry in the United States. Although Reyes' first book was not as widely known as the first book of many of the other eligible poets, the judges nevertheless courageously chose this risky, radical, and deserving second book put out by an energetic but very small publisher. Reyes received her undergraduate education at UC Berkeley, where she also served as Editor-in-Chief of the Filipino American literary publication Maganda. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her first book, Gravities of Center, was published by Arkipelago Books (SF) in 2003.

Flagship poetry anthology defining and presenting the underground Babarian genre and social movement in America.

Poetry. California Studies. Foreword by Robert Hass. The poems in this anthology embody what it's like to live in the astonishing weave of cities and towns, landscape and language, climate and history that make up the greater San Francisco Bay Area. Selected by the members of Sixteen Rivers Press, a regional poetry collective named after the web of rivers that flow into San Francisco Bay, the poems in THE PLACE THAT INHABITS US are drawn from both a physical and a metaphoric watershed. From the granite slopes of the Sierra to the Delta, through the Coastal Range to the bay and shores of the Pacific, one hundred poems by poets well known and not well known, living and dead, map this improbable region. There are egrets and grievous losses here; prayers, panhandlers, Delta mornings and sunsets in the 'hood; the fog, certainly, and the bridges, but there are shades of Dante on a Miwok trail, and Wang-wei haunts the slopes of Grizzly Peak. These poems are internal maps, "the mental maps that for humans," writes Robert Hass in the foreword, "make a place a place." Gathered together, they evoke the San Francisco Bay watershed, the place that inhabits us.

San Francisco Beat is an essential archive of the Beat Generation, a rich moment in a fortunate place. America, somnolent, conformist and paranoid in the 1950s, was changed forever by a handful of people who refused an existence of drudgery and enterprise, opting instead for a life of personal, spiritual and artistic adventure. In these intimate, free-wheeling conversations, a baker's dozen of the poets of San Francisco talk about the scene then and now, the traditions of poetry, and about anarchism, globalism, Zen, the Bomb, the Kabbalah and the Internet. Diane di Prima, William Everson, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Jack Hirschman, Joanne Kyger, Philip Lamantia, Michael McClure, David Meltzer, Jack Micheline, Kenneth Rexroth, Gary Snyder, Lew Welch, Philip Whalen " . . . as we begin to slip into a national slumber somewhat akin to that of the Eisenhower years, it’s exhilarating to have this squall line of Beats pass through our consciousness."—Kirkus Reviews " . . . fierce engagement executed with humor and vernacular sensitivity."—Dale Smith, Austin Chronicle David Meltzer (1937-2016) was the author of many books of poetry, including Tens, The Name, Arrows: Selected Poetry 1957-1992 and Two-Way Mirror (City Lights). He was the editor of Birth, The Secret Garden, Reading Jazz and Writing Jazz, among other collections. His agit-smut fictions include The Agency Trilogy. Meltzer read poetry at the Jazz Cellar in the 1950s and in the 1960s fronted the band, "Serpent Power."

In The God of San Francisco, James J. Siegel examines queer grief during the onset of the AIDS crisis through a lavender-and-leather pantheon: St. Christopher, Allah, and the God of San Francisco transubstantiate a sarcoma's cicatrix into sequins, a viral dowry into a benevolent plume of dazzling feathers. From Laramie, Wyoming, to Toledo, Ohio, Siegel performs a magisterial frilling of historical attention, always emerging as "an extraordinary conflagration. A beautiful immolation." At once an elegiac columbarium and search-and-rescue map for future bliss, The God of San Francisco trills from the Castro Funeral Home to North Beach and back, surmising death as something honeyed and lissome, "eulogies eulogized." Desire masquerades as "a raven gliding / on the backdrop of midnight" and "Jesus in fishnets, / crossdressing his way through Nazareth," and desire cedes each poem's boy, spectral or otherwise, a warm hand, green grass, "the sun's rays on our skin."

An entertaining read as well as a practical walking (and driving) tour, this guide covers the entire Bay Area, and comes with an introduction by Lawrence Ferlinghetti.

COMING SOON! San Francisco's first Latino poet laureate offers new poems written in the native tongue of contemporary America: English-and-Spanish.ALERT ME WHEN THE BOOK BECOMES AVAILABLE

The brilliant new collection from Vijay Seshadri, author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning 3 Sections No one blends ironic intelligence, emotional frankness, radical self-awareness, and complex humor the way Vijay Seshadri does. In this, his fourth collection, he affirms his place as one of America’s greatest living poets. That Was Now, This Is Then takes on the planar paradoxes of time and space, destabilizing highly tuned lyrics and elegies with dizzying turns in poems of unrequitable longing, of longing for longing, of longing to be found, of grief. In these poems, Seshadri’s speaker becomes the subject, the reader becomes the writer, and the multiplying refracted narratives yield an “anguish so pure it almost / feels like joy.”

The San Francisco Renaissance is the first review of this major American literary movement.