An Anthology of the Berkeley Renaissance
This is the first book on the Berkeley Renaissance. It contains both uncollected and collected texts by Robert Duncan, Jack Spicer, Landis Everson, Robin Blaser, Mary Fabilli, Virginia Admiral, Sanders Russell and Charles Olson, as well as an in-depth history, the first of its kind, of the Berkeley Renaissance.
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“Mazer must have worked his ass off, knocking on doors, digging up sources, ringing up strangers, and the pay off, turning up some wicked documents. His research is of the kind you’d have thought disappeared with Jay (The Melville Log) Leyda. I thought I knew where all the Jack Spicer material had been published, but Mazer scooped me not once but twice.”
—Kevin Killian in Jacket
“Mazer’s introduction is the best history of the Berkeley scene in the 1940s & early ’50s that I’ve ever seen.”
—Ron Silliman in Silliman’s Blog
“Editor Ben Mazer frames it precisely: ‘The postmodern has entered our everyday consciousness … awareness of its pioneering days can seem like a primeval memory of antiquity.’ This Anthology beckons with discovery, even for those who know the core poets: it goes back further in time, and it includes more of the company. It’s a wonder to enter this magical, mysterious space. What was possible after the catastrophe of the war? A poetry, Romantic and erotic, committed to personal bonds—a poetry breaking loose from the corsets of conventional and modernist verse. As much charms as poems—filled with the deliriousness of the unrequited and unconscious: insipience & retrospection. The gossamer pathos of thrall.”
—Charles Bernstein
An Anthology of the Berkeley Renaissance
edited by Ben Mazer and Blake Campbell
$22.95, paperback, 246 pp
ISBN-13: 978-1-968422-18-9
