""Printer's ink is the greatest explosive."-Lawrence Ferlinghetti -- Lawrence Ferlinghetti founded the City Lights publishing house sixty years ago in 1955, launching the press with his now legendary Pocket Poets Series. First in the series was Pictures of the Gone World-the only book of his own poems that Ferlinghetti would ever publish at City Lights. Within a year, he had brought out two more volumes, translations by Kenneth Rexroth and then poems by Kenneth Patchen. But it was the success and scandal of number four, Howl & Other Poems by Allen Ginsberg (1956), that put City Lights on the map, positioning the Pocket Poets Series at the forefront of the literary counterculture.A landmark sixtieth anniversary retrospective, this edition is a must-have collection, an invaluable distillation of the energetic, iconoclastic, and still fresh body of work represented in the ongoing series. Ferlinghetti has selected a handful of poems from each of the sixty volumes, including the work of Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Gregory Corso, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Andrei Voznesensky, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Julio Cortazar, Frank O'Hara, Marie Ponsot, Denise Levertov, Diane di Prima, Robert Duncan, Phillip Lamantia, Malcolm Lowry, and many more of the Pocket Poets Series innovative, influential, and often groundbreaking American and international poets. "--

New Directions is proud to announce a riveting and galvanizing new book by Lawrence Ferlinghetti. At ninety-three, he shows more power than most any other poet at work today. Ferlinghetti describes his new book, Time of Useful Consciousness, as "a fragmented recording of the American stream-of-consciousness, always westward streaming; a people's poetic history in the tradition of William Carlos Williams' Paterson, Charles Olson's Maximus, Allen Ginsberg's Fall of America, and Ed Sanders' America: a History in Verse. 'Time of Useful Consciousness, is an aeronautical term denoting the time between when one loses oxygen and when one passes out, the brief time in which some life-saving action is possible."Ferlinghetti's first book since Poetry as Insurgent Art, the fierce and immediate Time of Useful Consciousness presents poetry written "in ways that those who see poetry as the province of the few and educated had never imagined" (The New York Times Book Review).

A reissue of Ferlinghetti's very short experimental plays (1965) with three new plays added to the original thirteen. In this collection Ferlinghetti takes a revolutionary look at modern theater and explores the area between old-style drama and spontaneous improvisation by supplying a blueprint for dramatic actionan outline from which director and actors may create and interpret freely. In one called '"Our Little Trip" two men in conservative suits wind themselves in and out of a long bandage while a questioner circles them seeking Meaning. "Servants of the People" puts on political podium hogs in torrents of cliches. "Bearded Lady 'Dies'" features the Second Coming all decked out for newspaper coverage.