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The following is a selection of books of poetry, published and
unpublished, from my life's work of over 50 books of poetry, beginning
with Dawn Visions (from 1964) to the present, with poems
selected from these books. The books are in chronological order
from earliest to most recent. To read a note on poetry, click
here. |
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Dawn
Visions
Published by Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s City Lights
Books of San Francisco, 1964 (out of print, copies available
at www.abebooks.com);
written at the age of 22 and 23 in Mexico City and Bolinas,
California, Spanish Surrealism and psychedelics-inspired,
long abstract oracular lines full of imagistic fluidity (became
a kind of manual for people’s “trips”…). |
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This
Body of Black Light Gone Through the Diamond
Published by Fred Stone in Boston in 1965 as a very
limited edition experimental book using an architectural brown-line
machine (the original plates inked on acetate), 24 pages,
French sewn (rare). The poems and paintings are interwoven
in Blakean fashion, many across the double page, brown and
moody and 60s ecstatic. |
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Burnt
Heart / Ode to the War Dead
Published by Lawrence Ferlinghetti of City Lights
Books of San Francisco, 1971 (out of print, some copies available
at www.abebooks.com);
an impassioned, pressure-cooked spiritual outrage at the Vietnam
War, written after becoming Muslim, with the outer war becoming
inner, on the self’s battlefield, where its true solution
lies. |
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The
Chronicles of Akhira
Written in the early 80s in Texas, Published in Santa
Barbara, Zilzal Press, 1986, with typoglifs by Karl Kempton,
Zilzal Press (rare, one available at www.abebooks.com);
The word “akhira” in Arabic meaning “the
last, the end,” and in Islamic cosmology, the Next
World, that extends beyond death. A series of poems imagining
life in that realm, in the blessed state, based on prophetic
sources, the recognition of God, an imagined diary from one
of its residents, etc., with a final appearance of the Prophet,
peace be upon him. |
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