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Philip Lamantia
Philip Lamantia (October 23, 1927 – March 7, 2005) was an American poet and lecturer. His poems were often visionary, ecstatic, terror-filled, and erotic, exploring the subconscious world of dreams and linking it to daily experiences, while sometimes incorporating typographical arrangements a la concrete poetry. He has posthumously been regarded as "the most visionary poet of the American postwar generation". Biography Lamantia was born in San Francisco to Sicilian immigrants, and was raised in the city's Excelsior neighborhood. His poetry was first published in ''View magazine'' in 1943, when he was fifteen, and in the final issue of the Surrealist magazine '' VVV'' the following year. In 1944 he dropped out of Balboa High School to pursue poetry in New York City. He returned to the Bay Area in 1945 and his first book, ''Erotic Poems'', was published a year later. He appeared in Maya Deren's At Land (1944), a 15-minute silent experimental film. Lamantia was one of the po ...
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San Francisco
San Francisco (; Spanish language, Spanish for "Francis of Assisi, Saint Francis"), officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California. The city proper is the List of California cities by population, fourth most populous in California and List of United States cities by population, 17th most populous in the United States, with 815,201 residents as of 2021. It covers a land area of , at the end of the San Francisco Peninsula, making it the second most densely populated large U.S. city after New York City, and the County statistics of the United States, fifth most densely populated U.S. county, behind only four of the five New York City boroughs. Among the 91 U.S. cities proper with over 250,000 residents, San Francisco was ranked first by per capita income (at $160,749) and sixth by aggregate income as of 2021. Colloquial nicknames for San Francisco include ''SF'', ''San Fran'', ''The '', ''Frisco'', and '' ...
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Beat Generation
The Beat Generation was a literary subculture movement started by a group of authors whose work explored and influenced American culture and politics in the post-war era. The bulk of their work was published and popularized by Silent Generationers in the 1950s, better known as Beatniks. The central elements of Beat culture are the rejection of standard narrative values, making a spiritual quest, the exploration of American and Eastern religions, the rejection of economic materialism, explicit portrayals of the human condition, experimentation with psychedelic drugs, and sexual liberation and exploration. Allen Ginsberg's ''Howl'' (1956), William S. Burroughs' ''Naked Lunch'' (1959), and Jack Kerouac's ''On the Road'' (1957) are among the best known examples of Beat literature.Charters (1992) ''The Portable Beat Reader''. Both ''Howl'' and ''Naked Lunch'' were the focus of obscenity trials that ultimately helped to liberalize publishing in the United States.Ann Charters, ''int ...
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Harold Norse
Harold Norse (July 6, 1916, New York City – June 8, 2009, San Francisco) was an American writer who created a body of work using the American idiom of everyday language and images. One of the expatriate artists of the Beat generation, Norse was widely published and anthologized. Life Born Harold Rosen to an unmarried Lithuanian Jewish immigrant in Brooklyn. In the early 1950s, he came up with the new last name, Norse, by rearranging the letters in Rosen. He received his B.A. from Brooklyn College in 1938, where he edited the literary magazine. Norse met Chester Kallman in 1938, and then became a part of W. H. Auden's "inner circle" when Auden moved to the U.S. in 1939. (Kallman and Auden later became lifelong partners.) However, Norse soon found himself allied with William Carlos Williams, who rated Norse the 'best poet of isgeneration.' Norse broke with traditional verse forms and embraced a more direct, conversational language. Soon Norse was publishing in ''Poetry,'' ...
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Charles Bukowski
Henry Charles Bukowski ( ; born Heinrich Karl Bukowski, ; August 16, 1920 – March 9, 1994) was a German-American poet, novelist, and short story writer. His writing was influenced by the social, cultural, and economic ambience of his adopted home city of Los Angeles. Bukowski's work addresses the ordinary lives of poor Americans, the act of writing, alcohol, relationships with women, and the drudgery of work. The FBI kept a file on him as a result of his column '' Notes of a Dirty Old Man'' in the LA underground newspaper ''Open City''. Bukowski published extensively in small literary magazines and with small presses beginning in the early 1940s and continuing on through the early 1990s. He wrote thousands of poems, hundreds of short stories and six novels, eventually publishing over sixty books during the course of his career. Some of these works include his ''Poems Written Before Jumping Out of an 8 Story Window'', published by his friend and fellow poet Charles Potts, and ...
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City Lights Books
City Lights is an independent bookstore-publisher combination in San Francisco, California, that specializes in world literature, the arts, and progressive politics. It also houses the nonprofit City Lights Foundation, which publishes selected titles related to San Francisco culture. It was founded in 1953 by poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Peter D. Martin (who left two years later). Both the store and the publishers became widely known following the obscenity trial of Ferlinghetti for publishing Allen Ginsberg's influential collection ''Howl and Other Poems'' (City Lights, 1956). Nancy Peters started working there in 1971 and retired as executive director in 2007. In 2001, City Lights was made an official historic landmark. City Lights is located at 261 Columbus Avenue. While formally located in Chinatown, it self-identifies as part of immediately adjacent North Beach. History Founding and early years City Lights was the inspiration of Peter D. Martin, who relocated from New Yor ...
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Bern Porter
Bernard Harden Porter (born February 14, 1911, Porter Settlement in Houlton, Aroostook County, Maine – died June 7, 2004, in Belfast, Maine) was an American artist, writer, publisher, performer, and physicist. He was a representative of the avant-garde art movements Mail Art and Found Poetry. In 2010, his work was recognized by an exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Biography Bern Porter was born in Maine and studied at Colby College and Brown University. He spent the last decades of his life living in Belfast, Maine. Porter's talent showed itself at Ricker Junior College and he soon received a scholarship at the prestigious private Colby College in Waterville, Maine. His main subjects were physics, chemistry and economics. Porter earned his master's degree at Brown University. In 1935, Porter received a job with the Acheson Colloids Corporation in New York. He worked on the development of the coating of the television picture tube with a graphite mixture. In Pa ...
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Nevada
Nevada ( ; ) is a U.S. state, state in the Western United States, Western region of the United States. It is bordered by Oregon to the northwest, Idaho to the northeast, California to the west, Arizona to the southeast, and Utah to the east. Nevada is the List of U.S. states and territories by area, 7th-most extensive, the List of U.S. states and territories by population, 32nd-most populous, and the List of U.S. states and territories by population density, 9th-least densely populated of the U.S. states. Nearly three-quarters of Nevada's people live in Clark County, Nevada, Clark County, which contains the Las Vegas–Paradise, NV MSA, Las Vegas–Paradise metropolitan area, including three of the state's four largest incorporated cities. Nevada's capital is Carson City, Nevada, Carson City. Las Vegas is the largest city in the state. Nevada is officially known as the "Silver State" because of the importance of silver to its history and economy. It is also known as the "Battle ...
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Washoe People
The Washoe or Wašišiw ("people from here", or transliterated in older literature as ''Wa She Shu'') are a Great Basin tribe of Native Americans, living near Lake Tahoe at the border between California and Nevada. The name "Washoe" or "Washo" (as preferred by themselves) is derived from the autonym ''Waashiw'' (''wa·šiw'' or ''wá:šiw'') in the Washo language or from ''Wašišiw'' (''waší:šiw''), the plural form of wašiw. Territory Washoe people have lived in the Great Basin and the eastern Sierra Nevada mountains for at least the last 6,000 years,Pritzker 246 some say up to 9,000 years. Prior to contact with Europeans, the territory of the Washoe people centered around Lake Tahoe (; Washo: ''dáʔaw / daʔaw / Da ow'' – "the lake"; or ''dewʔá:gaʔa /dawʔa:gaʔa / Da ow aga'' – "edge of the lake") and was roughly bounded by the southern shore of Honey Lake in the north, the West Walker River, Topaz Lake, and Sonora Pass in the south, the Sierra Nevada crest in t ...
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Peyote
The peyote (; ''Lophophora williamsii'' ) is a small, spineless cactus which contains psychoactive alkaloids, particularly mescaline. ''Peyote'' is a Spanish word derived from the Nahuatl (), meaning "caterpillar cocoon", from a root , "to glisten". p. 246. See peyotl in Wiktionary. Peyote is native to Mexico and southwestern Texas. It is found primarily in the Sierra Madre Occidental, the Chihuahuan Desert and in the states of Nayarit, Coahuila, Nuevo León, Tamaulipas, and San Luis Potosí among scrub. It flowers from March to May, and sometimes as late as September. The flowers are pink, with thigmotactic anthers (like ''Opuntia''). Known for its psychoactive properties when ingested, peyote has at least 5,500 years of entheogenic and traditional medicine, medicinal use by Indigenous people of the Americas, indigenous North Americans. Description The various species of the genus ''Lophophora'' grow low to the ground and they often form groups with numerous, crowded sho ...
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Indigenous Peoples
Indigenous peoples are culturally distinct ethnic groups whose members are directly descended from the earliest known inhabitants of a particular geographic region and, to some extent, maintain the language and culture of those original peoples. The term ''Indigenous'' was first, in its modern context, used by Europeans, who used it to differentiate the Indigenous peoples of the Americas from the European settlers of the Americas and from the Sub-Saharan Africans who were brought to the Americas as enslaved people. The term may have first been used in this context by Sir Thomas Browne in 1646, who stated "and although in many parts thereof there be at present swarms of ''Negroes'' serving under the ''Spaniard'', yet were they all transported from ''Africa'', since the discovery of ''Columbus''; and are not indigenous or proper natives of ''America''." Peoples are usually described as "Indigenous" when they maintain traditions or other aspects of an early culture that is assoc ...
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City Lights Bookstore
City Lights is an independent bookstore-publisher combination in San Francisco, California, that specializes in world literature, the arts, and progressive politics. It also houses the nonprofit City Lights Foundation, which publishes selected titles related to San Francisco culture. It was founded in 1953 by poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Peter D. Martin (who left two years later). Both the store and the publishers became widely known following the obscenity trial of Ferlinghetti for publishing Allen Ginsberg's influential collection ''Howl and Other Poems'' (City Lights, 1956). Nancy Peters started working there in 1971 and retired as executive director in 2007. In 2001, City Lights was made an official historic landmark. City Lights is located at 261 Columbus Avenue. While formally located in Chinatown, it self-identifies as part of immediately adjacent North Beach. History Founding and early years City Lights was the inspiration of Peter D. Martin, who relocated from New Yor ...
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Howl (poem)
"Howl", also known as "Howl for Carl Solomon", is a poem written by Allen Ginsberg in 1954–1955 and published in his 1956 collection ''Howl and Other Poems''. The poem is dedicated to Carl Solomon. Ginsberg began work on "Howl" in 1954. In the Paul Blackburn Tape Archive at the University of California, San Diego, Ginsberg can be heard reading early drafts of his poem to his fellow writing associates. "Howl" is considered to be one of the great works of American literature.Bill Savage (2008)Allen Ginsberg's "Howl" and the Paperback Revolution. Poets.org, Academy of American Poets. It came to be associated with the group of writers known as the Beat Generation. It is not true that "Howl" was written as a performance piece and later published by poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti of City Lights Books. This myth was perpetuated by Ferlinghetti as part of the defense's case during the poem's obscenity trial. Upon the poem's release, Ferlinghetti and the bookstore's manager, Shigeyoshi M ...
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