American poet Jack Spicer was born in 1925 in Los Angeles, where he graduated from Fairfax High School in 1942 and studied at the University of Redlands from 1943 and 1945. After having worked as a movie extra and private investigator, Spicer moved to Berkeley, where he attended the University of California and started writing and publishing poetry. Together with his friends Robert Duncan and Robin Blaser, Spicer set out to create a new kind of poetry….
Ted Berrigan (1934-1983) was an American poet associated with the second generation of the avantgardist New York School. He served in the US army for three years before taking a B.A. in English at the University of Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1959. Berrigan, who considered himself a late Beat poet, was active in Chicago for a number of years before he relocated to New York City in the early 1960s. There he published and edited various books and his C Magazine, collaborated with other poets…
Lawrence Ferlinghetti was born to European immigrants in 1919 in Yonkers, New York. His father having died shortly before he was born and his mother having been committed to a mental hospital soon after, Ferlinghetti was first raised by an aunt and then by foster parents. After having earned a B.A. in journalism in 1941 he published his first short stories while making a living as a sports journalist. He served in US Navy during World War II and after the war earned a degree…
Ever since its foundation in 1953 by Peter D. Martin and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, City Lights has been a seminal publishing house and a leading independent bookstore. Named after the Chaplin film City Lights, the store started out in San Francisco as the first all-paperback bookstore in the US and its press as the publisher of early works by San Francisco Renaissance poets such as Kenneth Rexroth, Philip Lamantia, Jack Spicer, Robert Duncan and Ferlinghetti himself. In…
Bardo Matrix started out as a psychedelic lightshow team in Boulder, Colorado in the second half of the 1960s. Of its original members (John Chick, Craig Love, Dana Young and Greg Sharits) Chick and Young followed the hippie trail to Kathmandu in 1969, where the former started his Spirit Catcher bookstore on Freak Street. It was from that bookstore that Chick continued Bardo Matrix as a printing press for Western travellers and American expats. When…