Story, set in the 1950s, of a naive young woman married to a womanizer.

One Small Saga

Literature & Fiction

Hawkins, Bobbie Louise

United States

Coffee House Press

The letters of the alphabet are the points of departure for Hawkins's explorations of adulthood.

My Own Alphabet

Cultural Writing. Essays. The majority of Hawkins's new book, ABSOLUTELY EDEN, comes from re-drafted pieces from her celebrated one-woman shows "Life As We Know It" and "Take Love, For Instance," which were performed at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, Naropa University, and (not least) Joe's Pub in New York. Hawkins is the much-acclaimed author of fifteen books, about whom the New York Times has said, "...Hawkins is a superb impressionist as well as a salty prose writer of American miniatures, artful distillations of our humor and humanity."

Absolutely Eden

Essays & Correspondence

United Artists Books

Poetry. Bobbie Louise Hawkins' BIJOUX explores both the hope and futility of everyday life with wit and erudition. "Most interesting works of word-art arise out of a sense of our being 'at a loss for words' - while knowing that there must be some, out there, among all the deafening racket of the outside: words we may use to counter and cut through pandemonium, to clear a space, to have this moment, in these words. Again and again, with elegant insight, wit, and compassion, Bobbie Louise Hawkins' poems invite us into such spaces of human clarity." - Anselm Hollo

Bijoux

Poetry

Farfalla Press

Poetry. Fiction. Literary Nonfiction. California Interest. African & African American Studies. Women's Studies. LGBTQIA Studies. Art. Music. Featuring Gregory Corso, Judy Grahn, Bobbie Louise Hawkins, and Ted Joans. Edited by Ammiel Alcalay, Iemanjá Brown, William Camponovo, Iris Cushing, Mary Catherine Kinniburgh, Öykü Tekten, Wendy Tronrud. LOST & FOUND: THE CUNY POETICS DOCUMENT INITIATIVE publishes unexpected, genre-bending works by important 20th century writers. Unearthed from personal and institutional archives in the United States and abroad, these materials are edited by doctoral students at the Graduate Center, CUNY. LOST & FOUND SERIES VI presents work by Gregory Corso, Judy Grahn, Bobbie Louise Hawkins, and Ted Joans. While the styles and experiences of these writers are radically different, each project presented here enacts a commitment to the exploration of knowledge unbound by disciplinary constraints. Gregory Corso: Naropa Lectures 1981, introduced by Anne Waldman, includes two transcribed and annotated lectures that illustrate Corso's vast storehouse of cultural knowledge, animating his poetics both on the page and in the classroom. Bobbie Louise Hawkins: The Sounding Word presents two very different lectures from the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, and a new interview with the author. Whether looking at iconic French novelist Colette or examining the poetics of prose, The Sounding Word describes an unflinching empirical approach to knowledge and its transmission through direct experience. Judy Grahn: Selections from Blood, Bread, and Roses explores mythic, societal, and personal relationships to menstruation throughout time, and is accompanied by a recent interview with the legendary poet, teacher, scholar, and activist. Ted Joans: Poet Painter / Former Villager Now / World Traveller, introduced by Diane di Prima, presents an array of previously unpublished texts on jazz, surrealism, travel guides to Africa and Paris, his inimitable Negative Cowboy, and photographs from his life and times. As writers, each considers and refigures the malleable conditions of historical truth and the pursuit of knowledge as part of their creative process. And as readers, we are encouraged to do the same.  SERIES VI includes:  Gregory Corso: Naropa Lectures 1981 (Part I & II) (ed. William Camponovo, Mary Catherine Kinniburgh, Öykü Tekten)  Bobbie Louise Hawkins: The Sounding Word (ed. Iris Cushing) Judy Grahn: Selections from Blood, Bread, and Roses (ed. Iemanjá Brown & Iris Cushing) Ted Joans: Poet Painter / Former Villager Now / World Traveller (Part I & II) (ed. Wendy Tronrud & Ammiel Alcalay)

Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative, Series VI

Corso, Gregory

Grahn,Judy

Joans, Ted

The Center for the Humanities, The Graduate Center, CUNY

Bobbie Louise Hawkins captures the sound of the human voice on the page with grace and honesty and allegiance to the music of the way people talk, interact, lie to themselves (and others), make speeches, converse. Her (dis)comfort zone is the fine line between past and present, who you want to be and who you are, and she always knows when to stop. Applause to Barbara Henning for gathering these minimalist-epic tales all in one place, a keepsake for the ages. —Lewis Warsh When Bobbie Louise Hawkins sets out to tell a story, a spell is cast. The entrancement of her narrative and her vivacity for real people in the quotidian of real human situations is impeccable. What supreme fortune to have her voice among us and to have now available this selected prose of her work. A prose Electric with Life! —Maureen Owen Bobbie Louise Hawkins is a remarkable master of the witty understated prose sentence and writes in the lineage of Barbara Pym and Jane Bowles; she is also a fabulous storyteller with a great ear for the "very thing": quip or bon mot. She should be more discovered and read beyond her adoring fans at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics where Bobbie presided as a grande dame teacher and consummate genius performer of her work many years. This collection is a terrific revival! —Anne Waldman

Selected Prose of Bobbie Louise Hawkins

Henning, Barbara

BlazeVOX Books

About the Author\nBobbie Louise Hawkins (1930-2018) wrote more than twenty books of fiction, non-fiction, poetry, and performance monologues including ONE SMALL SAGA (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2020), FIFTEEN POEMS (Belladonna*, 2012), SELECTED PROSE OF BOBBIE LOUISE HAWKINS (BlazeVOX books, 2012), and ABSOLUTELY EDEN (United Artists Books, 2008). She performed her work at Joseph Papp's Public Theater, Bottom Line and Folk City in New York City; at The Great American Music Hall and Intersection in San Francisco, as well as reading and performing in Canada, England, Germany, Japan, Holland, and more. In England she worked with Apples and Snakes, read at the Canterbury Festival and the Poetry Society. She was commissioned to write a one-hour play for Public Radio's The Listening Ear, and she has a record, with Rosalie Sorrels and Terry Garthwaite, Live At the Great American Music Hall, available from Flying Fish. She was invited by Anne Waldman and Allen Ginsberg to begin a prose concentration in the writing program at Naropa University where she taught for twenty years. She was also a visual artist known specifically for her collage work. Growing up in West Texas, Hawkins was raised on the family tales her grandmother told; having spent her childhood reading, Hawkins believed she would someday live in the world she only read about in books. Her life and work intersected with both that of the Beat Generation and the Black Mountain poets.\nFiction. Originally published by Coffee House Press in 1984, ONE SMALL SAGA--one of Bobbie Louise Hawkins' most personal and haunting autobiographical novels--is now back in print. This revival edition also includes a new introduction by Laird Hunt and Eleni Sikelianos, an interview with the author about the writing of ONE SMALL SAGA conducted in 2011 by Barbara Henning, and the Hawkins' long-out-of-print short story "En Route," another travel narrative, originally published as a chapbook by Little Dinosaur Press in 1982. 
The story begins in the late 1940s, when a young Albuquerque bride accompanies her husband back to his family home in Denmark, then to London and the British colonies of Jamaica and British Honduras. The narrator endures the company of both pathetic and incorrigible characters while struggling to reconcile her idealization of The Modern Marriage with the painful reality of life with a philandering husband. Through the widening eyes of her protagonist, who develops into a woman of depth and vision, Ms. Hawkins creates characters who must adjust to the demands of others and of circumstances. Some relinquish the ability to communicate with others. For a few, adjustment means learning how to communicate with grace and tolerance. Told with humor, compassion, and just a hint of sarcasm, ONE SMALL SAGA ultimately becomes a story of human compromise and adaptation to the quiet disasters of an ordinary life.

One Small Saga (Lost Literature, 29)

Contemporary

Ugly Duckling Presse

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