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Here at
Kamini Press we are very proud to present
the second chapbook in our poetry series:
THE POET SEES HIS FAMILY SLEEPING
poems by Samuel
Charters
34 pages of
unpublished poems.
First
edition, 200 copies, all signed by the poet.
Mini-chapbook format, in wraps. $ 6
Cover
artwork and author portrait by Henry Denander.
In Sweden, please pay SEK 60,- per book to Bankgiro 5889-0781,
price including postage. SEK 50,- per book if you buy two or more.
Samuel Charters began his life with small presses in
the 1950s
in New Orleans when he shared a rundown French Quarter
building with Gypsy Lou and Jon Webb
and made his first magazine
appearance in an issue of their ground-breaking
magazine
The Outsider.
Beginning in the mid-1960s his poetry chapbooks,
broadsides,
and literary essays were published by Berkeley's Oyez Press,
many designed and printed by the legendary Graham
MacIntosh.
With their own Portents press,
he and his wife Ann published small
pieces by, among many others, Jack
Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg,
Gary Snyder, Charles Olson, and Robert Creeley. With
Ginsberg
they created the book Scenes Along
The Road, the first look at
the story of the Beat Generation.
In the other world of
publishing he has written innumerable books on
jazz and the blues, as well as
novels, biographies, translations, and
travel memoirs, and worked with Ann on
the first biography of
Jack
Kerouac. He is also responsible for the poetry section of their
college introduction-to-literature textbook Literature
And Its Writers,
now in its 4th edition. Their current project is the
authorized biography
of Beat novelist John Clellon Holmes. His own most recent book is the
first history of New Orleans jazz, A
Trumpet Around The Corner.
A sample poem from The Poet Sees His Family Sleeping:
Conundrum
There is no hell,
but I stumble there – often.
No heaven,
but I journey there – sometimes.
COMMENTS/REVIEWS:
Gerald Locklin writes:
"Your edition of Sam’s book may be the most beautiful
(perfect)
limited edition chap I’ve ever seen. No wonder you wanted
to start
your own press, with the total aesthetic control it gives you.
And every chap of mine you’ve ever worked with has been infinitely
enhanced
by your artistic contribution.
And Sam’s poems are just right: genuine, clearly
heartfelt personal
lyricism, tastefully and economically expressed. You two
really did
each other right with this creation—there is a perfect
symmetry of tone,
music, and line in the art, design, and sentences. I
can’t seem to get
away from the words “perfect” and “perfectly.”
Your efforts simply
coincided in a flawlessly visual-musical voice.
Chamber music!
I can only congratulate you without reservation. But I think
the two of
you are such superior craftsmen that you must sense what you have
accomplished here.
Doug Holder's Blog
Review by Irene Koronas:
Samuel Charters, like Whitman, asserts the mundane,
every day occurrences, the back and forth realities.
You are me. I am you. In his first poem in this small
volume of poetry, he brushes our ears, takes us on an
intimate journey through his writing rooms. The reader
becomes the child, parent, sky, night, "I move slowly
for a last time from one to the other."
Charters is open; he presents lust in a casual,
dignified manner. "what she presents of her elegant
thigh, slides beneath her swirling skirt." His poems
open all the windows and doors on a spring day, even
the heat of autumn bearing down over our laden walk,
we sit on his bench and breath.
...
Readers will enjoy the intimacy, the fit in your hand
size, the smooth way in which the poems appear and
gather into a complete song.
Read the full review here
t.l. kryss
"the splendid book "The Poet Sees His Family Sleeping."
Please convey my thanks to Samuel Charters, for these
exciting and beautiful poems.
Ahh...
Warm wishes, Henry, and may the time shortly to commence
on the island give you the pleasure this book has given me.
t.k. splake
" the samuel charters
chapbook, writings and literature is a-one,
like it is so very honest and
loving, the poem about the girl on the
bus which beside the title
poem was my literary favvvvvvvvorite, oh yeah"
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