City Lights Pocket Poets Series

Howl and Other Poems was published in the fall of 1956 as number four in the Pocket Poets Series from City Lights Books

The City Lights Pocket Poets Series is a series of poetry collections published by Lawrence Ferlinghetti and City Lights Books of San Francisco since August 1955.

The series is most notable for the publication of Allen Ginsberg's literary milestone "Howl", which led to an obscenity charge for the publishers that was fought off with the aid of the ACLU.

The series is published in a small, affordable paperback format with a distinctive black and white cover design. This design was borrowed from Kenneth Patchen's An Astonished Eye Looks Out of the Air (1945), published by Untide Press in Oregon.[1]

The series gave many readers their first introduction to avant-garde poetry. Many of the poets were members of the Beat Generation and the San Francisco Renaissance, but the volumes included a diverse array of poets, including authors translated from Spanish, German, Russian, and Dutch. According to Ferlinghetti, "From the beginning the aim was to publish across the board, avoiding the provincial and the academic...I had in mind rather an international, dissident, insurgent ferment."[1]

  1. ^ "City Lights Pocket Poets - Cover Story".