Author Description

VERY GOOD FIRST EDITION hardcover, clean text, solid binding, NO remainders NOT ex-library slight shelfwear / storage-wear; cover shows corner bumps, edgewear; no dust jacket as issued; WE SHIP FAST. Carefully packed and quickly sent. 201512265 Berrigan considered himself a “late Beat,” and, like Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, he traced his lineage as a writer to the American Expressionist tradition. The first writer to excite him was Thomas Wolfe, who had also been important to Kerouac. Berrigan had very high regard as well for Kerouac, whom he interviewed for the Paris Review, and for another writer at the core of the Expressionist tradition, William Saroyan. American Expressionism, which grounds literary authority in the personality of the writer rather than, say, a political creed or traditional aesthetics, can be traced to the work of mid-nineteenth-century writers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Walt Whitman. Among its most influential twentieth-century practitioners was Gertrude Stein. Kerouac stated his own Expressionist position in “Essentials of Spontaneous Prose,” where he said that a writer should pursue “not ‘selectivity’ of expression but following free deviation (association) of mind into limitless blow-on-subject seas of thought, swimming in a sea of English with no discipline other than rhythms of exhalation and expostulated statement.” I love reading the individual books of Ted Berrigan, Philip Whalen etc. Lucky to have the poetry library on the Southbank. In the Early Morning Rain has some nice fresh moments. I liked "Waterloo Sunset" (collaboration with Ron Padgett) and "Poem for Philip Whalen" a lot. Also a nice wee prose narrative poem called "Life Among the Woods." We recommend selecting Priority Mail wherever available. (No shipping to Mexico, Brazil or Italy.)