Although he is best known as a writer of prose, Jack Kerouac was an important poet, his work described by Michael McClure as "startling in its majesty and comedy and gentleness and vision". These eight extended poems, composed between 1954 and 1961, offer exuberant forays into language and consciousness that combine rich imagery, complex internal rhythms, and a reverent attentiveness to the moments.

After a lifetime, this (r)evolutionary little book is still a work-in-progress, the poet's "ars poetica," to which at 88 he is constantly adding. From the groundbreaking (and bestselling) "A Coney Island of the Mind" in 1958 to the "personal epic" of "Americus, Book I" in 2003, Lawrence Ferlinghetti has, in more than thirty books, been the poetic conscience of America. Now in "Poetry As Insurgent Art," he offers, in prose, his primer of what poetry...

A posthumous collection of more than 100 Ginsberg poems is largely comprised of spontaneously penned or forgotten works included in letters or sent to obscure publications and is arranged in chronological order and complemented by extensive author notes. --Publisher's description.

Text and Drugs and Rock'n'Roll explores the interaction between two of the most powerful socio-cultural movements in the post-war years - the literary forces of the Beat Generation and the musical energies of rock and its attendant culture.Simon Warner examines the interweaving strands, seeded by the poet/novelists Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs and others in the 1940s and 1950s, and cultivated by most of the major rock figures who...