Beatitude 29. Our Twentieth Anniversary Issue. Gregory Corso, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, John T. Chance, Allen Ginsberg, Ted Joans, Kirby Doyle, Jack Kerouac, Carol Berge, Harold Norse, Anne Waldman, Jack Micheline, Peter Orlovsky, David Meltzer, Jonas Mekas, Neeli Cherkovski & more… Erskine Lane’s Pessoa translations / The Unknown Poe / The Poems of Samuel Greenberg / A tribute to Bob Kaufman: New Poems 1975-1978.
(San Francisco, Beatitude Magazine, fall 1979).
4to, publisher’s pale-yellow printed wrappers, first side photo-illustrated with a portrait of Bob Kaufman by André Lewis. 83 pp., 16 b/w illustrations, and 7 photographic portraits. Complete. First and only edition.
Important anniversary issue of the famous Beat poetry magazine founded in 1959, « the most important Beat-associated little magazine out of San Francisco in the late 1950s » (Steven Belletto, The Beats: A Literary History, (2020), p. 29).
This issue is especially notable for a lengthy tribute to Bob Kaufman (1925-1986), the “black American Rimbaud”, one of the magazine’s founders. There are several poems by Kaufman from 1975-78 as well as an analysis of his poems by Raymond Foye. Other contributors include a “Who is Who” of the San Francisco poetry scene, including Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Jack Kerouac, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Carol Bergé, Harold Norse, Neeli Cherkovski, Anne Waldman, Peter Orlowsky, Ted Joans, and many others, including some who are published for the first time.
Elusive copy signed on the first page by two cult members of the San Francisco poetry scene: Lawrence Ferlinghetti (1919-2021) and Neeli Cherkovski (b.1945).
A few faint tiny stains on the cover, a very good copy.
