Poets from California

Armantrout, Rae (1947-). Partly: New and Selected Poems, 2001-2015. Wesleyan Poetry Series. 2017, 252 pages. VSCPL.

California Poetry: From the Gold Rush to the Present. Edited by Dana Gioia, Chryss Yost, and Jack Hicks. Great Valley Books, 2003, 640 pages. VSCPL. Excellent collection.

Beat Poets. Edited by Carmela Ciuraru. Everyman's Library, 2002, 256 pages. VSCPL. Used, $6.35.

The California Poems. By Eleni Sikelianos. Coffee House, 2004, 200 pages. VSCPL.

California Rewritten: A Jouney Through the Golden State's New Literature. By John Freeman. Heyday, 2025, 400 pages.

Everson, William (1912-1994), Brother Antoninus, Shaman Everson. Archtype West: The Pacific Coast as a Literary Region. Oyez, 1976, 181 pages. Find his "Canticle to the Water Birds."

Hass, Robert (1941-) California Professor, Author, Translator, Poet, Critic, Teacher, Guide. See Poets above. Collaborated with and translated works by Czeslaw Milosz at UC Berkely in San Francisco.

McClure, Michael (1932-2020). Selected Poems. City Lights, 1986, 132 pages. VSCPL. Taught at the California College of the Arts, in Oakland, for 40 years.

Milosz, Czeslaw (1911-2004). Collected Poems. Ecco, 1990, 528 pages. Paperback, VSCPL. "To find my home in one sentence, concise, as if hammered in metal. No to enchant anybody. Not to earn a lasting name in posterity. An unnamed need for order, for rhythm, for form, which three words are opposed to chaos and nothingness. - Czeslaw Milosz. He lived and worked at the University of California at Berkeley for forty of his adult years. Collaborated with Robert Hass UC Berkely in San Francisco.

Michael P. Garofalo (1946-) 25 Steps and Beyond: Collected Works. I lived and worked in East Los Angeles from 1946 to 1998, and lived and worked in Red Bluff, North Sacramento Valley, California, from 1998 to 2017.

Ginsberg, Allen. The Essential Allen Ginsberg. Harper, 2015, 448 pages. VSCPL.

Gioia, Dana. 99 Poems: New and Selected. Graywolf Press, 2017, 208 pages. Paperback, VSCPL.

Poets from California

Sikelianos, Eleni. The California Poem. Coffe House, 2004, 195 pages. VSCPL.

Snyder, Gary (1930-) West Coast poet, lives in Sierra Nevada foothills, Zen influenced, from Portland. See Poets above.

Winters, Yvor. The Selected Poems of Yvor Winters. Edited by R. L. Barch. Introduction by Helen Pinkerton Trimpi. Swallow Press, Ohio University, 1999, 128 pages.

Rae Armantrout, Charles Bukowski, Thomas Cleary, Deng Ming-Dao, Robert Duncan, Dana Gioia, Lawrence Ferlinghetti,
Robert Hass, Juan Felipe Herrera, Lee Herrick, Robinson Jeffers, Jack Kerouac, Philip Levine, Jack London
Czeslaw Milosz, John Muir, Carol Muske-Dukes, Kenneth Rexroth, Gary Snyder, Jack Spicer, Alan Watts,
Philip Whalen, Yvor Winters

Armantrout, Rae (1947-). Partly: New and Selected Poems, 2001-2015. Wesleyan Poetry Series. 2017, 252 pages. VSCPL.

What Light Can Do: Essays on Art, Imagination, and the Natural World. By Robert Hass.Harper, 2012, 476 pages. FVRL.

Notes, Research, Bibliography,
Links, Sources, Favorites, Authors

San Francisco Renaissance, by Nasrullah Mambrol, 2020

Quotations, Notes, Comments

"The West Coast was still close enough to its wilderness past and present for the natural world to be an essential thread in the genetics of northern California poetry, and its poets were still affected by that wilderness as much as they were by the city. Kerouac’s city-boy inability to cope mentally with the seclusion of Ferlinghetti’s cabin in Big Sur or, on Snyder’s suggestion, the isolation of a firewatch tower in the Cascades is partially the result of an eastern detachment from nature and is the perfect demonstration of a fundamental difference between the two groups."
- Nasrullah Mambrol, San Francisco Renaissance, 2020

term San Francisco Renaissance: “a vatic, confessional mode; imagist precisionism; satire and self-projection; surrealism; personalist meditation” (Davidson 4).

Poetry by Mike Garofalo: Online

25 Steps and Beyond: Collected Works

Bundled Up: Quintains, Pentastichs, Tankas

At the Edges of the West
Highway 101 and Hwy 1: Pacific Coast

Cuttings: Haiku, Senryu, Brief Poems

The Gushen Grove Sonnets

At the Edges of the Fertile West
Highway 99 and Interstate 5

Cantos of the Hands

Poetry Research

Mike Garofalo lives in Vancouver,
Washington. He worked for 50 years
in city and county public libraries,
and in elementary schools. His degrees
are in philosophy, library science, and
education. He has been a web publisher
since 1998.

Biography

25 Steps and Beyond: Collected Works

Text Art and Concrete Poetry

This document was last edited, revised,
reformatted, added to, relinked,
changed, improved, or modified
by Mike Garofalo
on August 11, 2025.