National Poetry Month 2021

This year is the 25th National Poetry Month. The Academy of American Poets has 30 ways to celebrate on their website.

This year I want to honor Lawrence Ferlinghetti who died this year at the age of 101. You can read a nice bio and overview of his work at the Poetry Foundation. We of course also have many of his works in our library:

Little Boy

Ferlinghetti’s Greatest Poems

How to Paint Sunlight: Lyric Poems & Others (1997-2000)

These are My Rivers: New & Selected Poems, 1955-1993

Starting from San Francisco

He was also the founder of City Lights, a bookstore and a publisher in San Francisco. This 2013 blog post “A Literary Meeting Place: The History Behind City Lights Bookstore” is a good place to start to understand the legacy of City Lights. Here is a selection of titles that they have published:

City Lights Pocket Poets Anthology

City Lights Anthology

Every Day We Get More Illegal by Juan Felipe Herrera

Funeral Diva by Pamela Sneed

Collected Poems of Bob Kaufman

Heaven is All Goodbyes by Tongo Eisen-Martin

And Then We Became by Devorah Major

Save Twilight selected poems of Julio Cortázar ; translated by Stephen Kessler