The City Lights Pocket Poets Series is a series of poetry collections published by
Lawrence Ferlinghetti and
City Lights Books of San Francisco since August 1955.
The series is most notable for the publication of
Allen Ginsberg's literary milestone "
Howl", which led to an
obscenity charge for the publishers that was fought off with the aid of the
ACLU.
The series is published in a small, affordable paperback format with a distinctive black and white cover design. This design was borrowed from
Kenneth Patchen's An Astonished Eye Looks Out of the Air (1945), published by
Untide Press in
Oregon.[1]
The series gave many readers their first introduction to avant-garde poetry. Many of the poets were members of the
Beat Generation and the
San Francisco Renaissance, but the volumes included a diverse array of poets, including authors translated from
Spanish,
German,
Russian, and
Dutch. According to Ferlinghetti, "From the beginning the aim was to publish across the board, avoiding the provincial and the academic...I had in mind rather an international, dissident, insurgent ferment."[1]
List of books in the City Lights Pocket Poets Series
Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Pictures of the Gone World, August 1955 (reissued & expanded, 1995; 60th Anniversary Edition, 2015)
Kenneth Rexroth (translator), Thirty Spanish Poems of Love and Exile, 1956