Friends in San Francisco have an opportunity to sit with one of my favorite poets, Cedar Sigo, tomorrow evening at City Lights Books (also online).
"Cedar Sigo’s latest poetry collection, Siren of Atlantis, is an introspective odyssey of remarkable poetic and personal resonance.
"Here are poems that speak to Sigo’s profound experience of learning to write again after suffering a stroke in 2022. In creating this work, the author retraces poetic sources and reexamines style and tone, using a variety of compositional techniques to renegotiate what is at stake in the work. There is a joy in this collection, as Sigo allows us to bear witness to the rediscovery of language, imparting the work with a new and dramatic clarity, for the poet and ultimately for the reader as well."
#poetry #CityLights #WaveBooks
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Cedar Sigo | City Lights Booksellers & Publishers
Today in Labor History March 25, 1957: U.S. Customs seized copies of Allen Ginsberg's poem "Howl" on obscenity grounds. Poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and City Lights manager, Shigeyoshi Murao, were arrested on obscenity charges for publishing and distributing the poem. Howl was inspired, in part, by a terrifying peyote vision Ginsberg had in which the façade of the Sir Francis Drake Hotel, in San Francisco, appeared as the monstrous face of a child-eating demon. The obscenity charges stemmed from homophobic responses to his explicit references to homosexuality. Ginsberg’s first experience with LSD, as well as Kerouac’s and Burroughs’s, was with acid provided by the anthropologist Gregory Bateson, one-time husband of and long-time collaborator with Margaret Mead. You can read more about Bateson and Mead’s early experimentation with, and promotion of, psychedelics (and their collaboration with the CIA) in the recent book, “Tripping on Utopia.”
#workingclass #LaborHistory #poetry #howl #lgbtq #allenginsburg #homophobia #lawrenceferlinghetti #citylights #obscenity #censorship #bannedbooks #kerouac #williamburoughs #lsd #peyote #margaretmead #gregorybateson #psycheldelics #books #writer #author #poet @bookstadon
Today in Labor History March 24, 1919: Poet and activist Lawrence Ferlinghetti was born. Ferlinghetti is most well-known for his book of poetry, “A Coney Island of the Mind” (1958) and for cofounding City Lights bookstore and publishing, in San Francisco. The authorities arrested him for publishing Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” because they deemed it obscene. However, a jury acquitted him in 1957. Politically, Ferlinghetti considered himself an anarchist. His politics were influenced by Anarchist poet and IWW member Kenneth Rexroth.
#workingclass #LaborHistory #anarchism #IWW #beatniks #Ferlinghetti #obscenity #CityLights #publishing #poetry @bookstadon
Manchmal fehlen einem beim Fotografieren sehr oft fotografierter Sehenswürdigkeiten ja ein bisschen die 'kreativen Ideen', aber hier hab ich es auf jeden Fall hinbekommen.
The circular overpass act 3.
#photography #blackandwhite #bwphotography #bwphotos #blackandwhitephotography
#blackandwhitestreet
#bnwphoto #monochrome #noiretblancphotographie #streetphotography #fotografie #cityscape #citylights #nightphotography #EveningGlow #raw_architecture #futuristic #stairway #pixelfed