beat poet

Hardcover. Brooklyn, NY, PowerHouse Books, 1st, 2014, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 96 pages. Hardcover with dust jacket. Clean, unmarked copy with only minor wear to dust jacket. Black and white pictures throughout. "It was my fate to be aligned with the Beats because of my propensity for drugs, anger, and poetry. Since they were second generation, without the same sense of immortal obsession such as the like of Kerouac and Ginsberg, they had a distinct need to be documented. Perhaps that is why they tolerated me. We were not a happy marriage and got our divorce in Mexico City. The pictures, made in 1958 and 1959, come from MacDougal Street in New York City all the way down to Mexico, and on the road in America." --Larry Fink

Softcover. NY, Thames & Hudson, 1st, 2003, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 240 pages. This comprehensive biography presents the achievements of Brion Gysin, a multi-faceted artist whose work has influenced performers such as David Bowie and Mick Jagger. Recalling the heady atmosphere of the so-called Beat Hotel in Paris in the late 1950s and 1960s, it features first-hand reminiscences by contemporaries, plus a biographical essay and chronological listings. productive literary collaboration with William Burroughs. As well as looking at his work as a sound poet and performance artist, it features reproductions of his paintings and graphics, and examples of his permutated poems and other writings.

Softcover. NY, Thames & Hudson, 1st, 2003, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 240 pages. This comprehensive biography presents the achievements of Brion Gysin, a multi-faceted artist whose work has influenced performers such as David Bowie and Mick Jagger. Recalling the heady atmosphere of the so-called Beat Hotel in Paris in the late 1950s and 1960s, it features first-hand reminiscences by contemporaries, plus a biographical essay and chronological listings. productive literary collaboration with William Burroughs. As well as looking at his work as a sound poet and performance artist, it features reproductions of his paintings and graphics, and examples of his permutated poems and other writings.

Hardcover. New York, Simon & Schuster, 1st US, 2003, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. 423 pages, SIGNED BY AUTHOR on title page. Very clean and tight copy. With "humanism, generosity, and a passionate, beating heart" (The Times, London), Janice Galloway's Clara reignites, from between the lines of history, the great love of Robert and Clara Schumann. In her lifetime, Clara was a celebrated concert pianist and composer, editor and teacher, friend of Brahms -- as well as mother of the eight Schumann children and caretaker of her husband through a series of crippling mental illnesses. In its luminous integrity the novel brings Clara Schumann to life as a woman of genius. Galloway is at once a meticulous researcher of her subjects' remarkable and highly dramatic artistic careers and a virtuoso storyteller whose imagination and empathy lead her to that place off limits to history and biography -- inside the human mind. Distilling the memories, poetry, and musical notes therein, she examines the ways artists divine patterns out of life's chaos. "Passion," writes Galloway of Clara's performance philosophy, "one might take for granted -- its control is the mechanism through which all else flows." Though music may have bent to Clara's will, love served her far more tragically. Dismissing the cliches of Great Art and rejecting the romantic conflation of Madness and Creativity, Clara boldly ventures that in a life marred by alienation and isolation, "Work alone endures."

Hardcover. New York, Henry Holt & Company, 1st, 1998, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, 332 pages. Light shelf-wear to dust jacket with slight crease to rear cover, else a clean, tight copy.

Hardcover. London, Edward Moxon, 1st, 1849, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Three hardcovers bound in polished calf, gilt rules to covers, black leather labels on spine with orate gilt decorations. Pages: xx+480+viii+464+viii+460, appendix, index. Marbled endpapers and text edges. Aside from previous owner's bookplate on inside cover of each volume, a bright, clean set. Biography of the Scottish poet, incorporating many of his letters.

Hardcover. NY, New York Review Comics, reprint, 2019, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover in pictorial boards. A reprint of Stamaty's classic 1980 book about life in New York City. Every week, from 1978 to 1980, The Village Voice brought a new installment of Mark Alan Stamaty's uproarious, endlessly inventive strip MacDoodle St. Centering more or less on Malcolm Frazzle, a blocked poet struggling to complete his latest lyric for Dishwasher Monthly, Stamaty's creation encompassed a dizzying array of characters, stories, jokes, and digressions. One week might feature the ongoing battle between irate businessmen and bearded beatniks for control of a Greenwich Village coffee shop, the next might reveal a dastardly plot involving a genetically engineered dishwashing monkey, or the frustrated dreams of an irascible, over-caffeinated painter, or the mysterious visions of a duffle-coated soothsayer on the bus. Not to mention the variable moods and longings of the comic strip itself.... And somehow, in the end, it all fits together. MacDoodle St. is more than just a hilarious weekly strip; it is a great comic novel, a thrilling, surprising, unexpectedly moving ode to art, life, and New York City. This new edition features a brand-new, twenty-page autobiographical comic by Stamaty explaining what happened next and why MacDoodle St. never returned, in a unique, funny, and poignant look at the struggles and joys of being an artist. Remainder dot top edge, otherwise like new.

Hardcover. NY, Columbia University Press, 1st, 1993, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 894 pages. Edited by Jay Parini and with poetry and poetry criticism by Anne Bradstreet and Edward Taylor by Francis Murphy, Early African American Poetry, by Carolivia Herron, The Epic in the Nineteenth Century, by John McWilliams, Longfellow in the Aftermath of Modernism, by Dana Gioia, The Transcendentalist Poets by Lawrence Buell, Emily Dickinson, Cynthia Griffin Wolff, Walt Whitman, by Donald Pease and many others, such as Dana Gioia, Gregory Orr, Ann Charters, William Pritchard, Helen Vendler, Edward Hirsch, and the work of Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, the Beat poets and Native American poets and others. SIGNED BY PARINI on the title page. Bright, clean copy.

Hardcover. Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina, 1st, 1969, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, blue boards, black cloth spine with gilt lettering. 101 pages, two b&w frontispieces, clean copy. No dust jacket.

Hardcover. NY, Penguin Press, 1st, 2012, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. 474 pages, b&w illustrations. "A "heroic" and "fascinating" biography of John Cage showing how his work, and that of countless American artists, was transformed by Zen Buddhism". (The New York Times). Where the Heart Beats is the story of the tremendous changes sweeping through American culture following the Second World War, a time when the arts in America broke away from centuries of tradition and reinvented themselves. Painters converted their canvases into arenas for action and gesture, dancers embraced pure movement over narrative, performance artists staged "happenings" in which anything could happen, poets wrote words determined by chance.