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 included 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, some numbers being also published in hardback.
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."
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 (Guillén, Alberti, Lorca, Machado , Neruda, Plaja, Brull, and others) Kenneth Patchen, Poems of Humor and Protest, 1956 Allen Ginsberg, Howl and Other Poems, 1956 (hardcover 40th Anniversary Edition, 1996) Marie Ponsot, True Minds, 1956 Denise Levertov, Here and Now, 1957 William Carlos Williams, Kora in Hell: Improvisations, 1957 Gregory Corso, Gasoline, 1958 (reissued with The Vestal Lady on Brattle, 1978) Jacques Prévert, Lawrence Ferlinghetti (translator), Paroles, 1958 (reissued bilingually, 1990) Robert Duncan, Selected Poems, 1959 Jerome Rothenberg (translator), New Young German Poets, 1959 Nicanor Parra, Jorge Elliott (translator), Anti-Poems, 1960 Kenneth Patchen, The Love Poems of Kenneth Patchen, 1960 Allen Ginsberg, Kaddish and Other Poems, 1961 (reissued 50th Anniversary Edition, 2010) Robert Nichols, Slow Newsreel of Man Riding Train, 1962 Anselm Hollo (editor & translator), Red Cats, 1962 Malcolm Lowry, Selected Poems of Malcolm Lowry, 1962 (re-edited and reissued, 2017) Allen Ginsberg, Reality Sandwiches, 1963 Frank O'Hara, Lunch Poems, 1964 (reissued 50th Anniversary Edition, 2014) Philip Lamantia, Selected Poems 1943–1966, 1967 Bob Kaufman, Golden Sardine, 1967 Janine Pommy-Vega, Poems to Fernando, 1968 Allen Ginsberg, Planet News, 1968 Charles Upton, Panic Grass, 1968 Pablo Picasso, Hunk of Skin, 1968 Robert Bly, The Teeth-Mother Naked at Last, 1970 Diane DiPrima, Revolutionary Letters Etc., 1971 Jack Kerouac, Ann Charters (editor) Scattered Poems, 1971 Andrei Voznesensky, Dogalypse: San Francisco Poetry Reading, 1972 Allen Ginsberg, The Fall of America: Poems of These States 1965–1971, 1972 Pete Winslow, A Daisy in the Memory of a Shark, 1973 Harold Norse, Hotel Nirvana, 1974 Anne Waldman, Fast Speaking Woman & Other Chants, 1975 (reissued & expanded, 1996) Jack Hirschman, Lyripol, 1976 Allen Ginsberg, Mind Breaths, 1977 Stefan Brecht, Poems, 1978 Peter Orlovsky, Clean Asshole Poems & Smiling Vegetable Songs, 1978 Antler, Factory, 1980 Philip Lamantia, Becoming Visible, 1981 Allen Ginsberg, Plutonian Ode, 1982 Pier Paolo Pasolini, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Francesca Valente (translators), Roman Poems, 1986 (reissued bilingually, 2005) Scott Rollins (editor), Nine Dutch Poets, 1982 Ernesto Cardenal, Jonathan Cohen (translator), From Nicaragua with Love: Poems, 1986 Antonio Porta, Anthony Molino (translator), Kisses from Another Dream, 1987 Adam Cornford, Animations, 1988 La Loca, Adventures on the Isle of Adolescence, 1989 Vladimir Mayakovsky, Maria Enzensberger (translator), Listen! Early Poems, 1991 Jack Kerouac, Pomes All Sizes, 1992 Daisy Zamora, Barbara Paschke (translator), Riverbed of Memory, 1992 Rosario Murillo, Alejandro Murguía (translator), Angel in the Deluge, 1992 Jack Kerouac, The Scripture of the Golden Eternity, 1994 Alberto Blanco, Juvenal Acosta (editor), Dawn of the Senses, 1995 Julio Cortázar, Save Twilight, 1997 (reissued in an expanded edition, 2016) Dino Campana, Orphic Songs, 1998 Jack Hirschman, Front Lines, 2002 Semezdin Mehmedinovic, Nine Alexandrias, 2003 Kamau Daáood, The Language of Saxophones, 2005 Cristina Peri Rossi, State of Exile, 2008 Philip Lamantia, Tau and John Hoffman, Journey to the End, 2008 David Meltzer, When I Was a Poet, 2011 Tongo Eisen-Martin, Heaven Is All Goodbyes, 2017 Tongo Eisen-Martin, Blood on the Fog, 2021 Will Alexander, Divine Blue Light (for John Coltrane), 2022 Nasser Rabah, Ammiel Alcalay, Emna Zghal, & Khaled al-Hilli (translators) Gaza: The Poem Said Its Piece, 2025
References
Introduction, page i. City Lights Pocket Poets Anthology. Lawrence Ferlinghetti, editor. City Lights Books, 1995. () City Lights Pocket Poets - Cover Story by Marcus Williamson