This definitive biography gives a brilliant account of the life and art of Robert Duncan (1919–1988), one of America’s great postwar poets. Lisa Jarnot takes us from Duncan’s birth in Oakland, California, through his childhood in an eccentrically Theosophist household, to his life in San Francisco as an openly gay man who became an inspirational figure for the many poets and painters who gathered around him. Weaving together quotations from Duncan’s notebooks and interviews with those who knew him, Jarnot vividly describes his life on the West Coast and in New York City and his encounters with luminaries such as Henry Miller, Anaïs Nin, Tennessee Williams, James Baldwin, Paul Goodman, Michael McClure, H.D., William Carlos Williams, Denise Levertov, Robert Creeley, and Charles Olson.

Robert Duncan, The Ambassador from Venus: A Biography

Biographies & Memoirs

Jarnot, Lisa

Arts & Literature

University of California Press

Inspired by the Beats, Black Mountain, and the New York School, Lisa Jarnot emerged in the 1990s as one of the foremost poets of the post-Language avant-garde. Joie de Vivre draws on twenty years of work, from the bold fragmentation of her mixed media debut, Some Other Kind of Mission, to the experimental lyricism of her recent Night Scenes. Following the poet's evolution through her engagements with form and music, Joie de Vivre showcases Jarnot's restless virtuosity and relentless curiosity. The archaic, the surreal, the pastoral, the political—no register of language proves too recalcitrant for her expansive sense of song.
About the Author:
Born in Buffalo, New York, in 1967, Lisa Jarnot studied with Robert Creeley at SUNY Buffalo and later earned an MFA at Brown University. The author of four full-length poetry collections and the former editor of the Poetry Project Newsletter, she has also just published Robert Duncan: The Ambassador From Venus (University of California Press, 2012), the definitive biography of the San Francisco poet. Since the mid-1990s, she has lived in New York City.

Joie de Vivre: Selected Poems 1992-2012 (City Lights Spotlight, 9)

Literature & Fiction

United States

City Lights Publishers

Now that the art of motion pictures has matured into its second century, Conjunctions has commissioned a diverse group of writers to respond--in poetry, fiction, and multi-genre works--to the countless cultural, historical, psychological and theatrical aspects of the seductive flickering medium we watch in the dark. Cinema Lingua pays creative homage to the symbiosis between filmmaking and the written word. Our authors explore, rewrite and celebrate all avenues of film, from its narrative plots to visual storytelling, from character to mood, from lighting to suspense. Each contributor presents defining visions of the movies and focuses the lens of writing on one of our liveliest modern art forms, from mainstream Hollywood to the most exotic corners of the experimental and avant garde. A movie theater of the mind, Cinema Lingua's contributors include Joyce Carol Oates, who explores the troubled relationship between Alfred Hitchcock and his leading ladies, Peter Straub writing on film noir, Peter Gizzi, who offers a multi-genre poem on silent film, Frederic Tuten, whose Never Never Land Near Marienbad is based on the Alain Resnais film, as well as works by Peter Hutton, Elizabeth Willis, Robert Coover, William H. Gass, Tan Lin, Kent Jones, Joshua Furst and many others.

Conjunctions: 42, Cinema Lingua

YAU, John

Lin, Tan

COOVER, Robert

Gizzi, Peter

Jones, Kent

Willis, Elizabeth

Gass, William

Hutton, Peter

OATES,JOYCE CAROL

Literary

Bard College

New Mannerist Tricycle

Smith, Rod

Luoma, Bill

Beautiful Swimmer Press

Poetry. Simply one of the most admired and imitated poets of her generation, Lisa Jarnot's third volume of poetry does what only Jarnot can do. Decidedly lyrical, always reliant on repetition and rhythm, what emergies in this book is a catalog of loves and laments: "Just the eldergrass and him, the fog, unpoliced and safe inside the train, the thoughts of rain, Apollo, and the sun..." As Stan Brackage has said of Jarnot, "[H]er words are never severed from the means that engendered them; and the consequent meanings are never detached from the meditative drama of each whole poem."

Black Dog Songs (Flood Editions)

Poetry

Flood Editions

Poetry. In NIGHT SCENES, the fourth book from best-selling poet Lisa Jarnot, we are returned to the "first melody" through mock archaisms, neologisms, rollicking rhymes, and childlike delight. Her circling lyrics sing the pleasure of naming itself, with pastoral dreams occasionally giving way to waking life in Brooklyn. Like William Blake's songs, NIGHT SCENES privileges wonder over reason in a triumph of the imagination: "Be jumpy / or unhinged / with joy / enlightened / fry cakes / Staten hoy."

Night Scenes (Flood Editions)

Poetry. Artwork by Emilie Clark. "Lisa Jarnot writes the meter of everything in A PRINCESS MAGIC PRESTO SPELL. As she does this, she reminds us what matters. In case you don't know, it is the small animals and the plum trees and the mothers of friends and the moon and her dreams. This book is funny and yet also is an elegy. I read it. And then I read it several more times because I didn't want it to end. It is that lovely."—Juliana Spahr

A Princess Magic Presto Spell

History & Criticism

Solid Objects

Poetry. Lisa Jarnot began A PRINCESS MAGIC PRESTO SPELL after the birth of her daughter, setting the modest goal of writing three words a day. Now a decade-long work-in-progress, these fragments of language are collected into a shorthand chronicle of family life that is intimate and yet open to all the world. Full of nimble transitions and non sequiturs, the poem captures the harrowing joys of parenthood alongside "funerals, dentists, divorces," in a give and take between the routine and the extraordinary.

A Princess Magic Presto Spell: Parts 1-9 (Flood Editions)

Ring of Fire combines the lyricism of Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson and the experimentation of the New York and Beat Schools. These poems meditate on the human condition, documenting and constructing the self in relation to everyday environments."Truly a treasure."- Anselm Hollo"This delicious book compounds the classic rites of passage with brilliant insight and invention."- Robert CreeleyLisa Jarnot is the author of Some Other Kind of Mission and is currently writing a biography of poet Robert Duncan. She teaches in Brooklyn, New York and Boulder, Colorado.

Ring of Fire

Zoland Books

An expanded version of Ring of Fire, originally published by Zoland Books, Boston, 2001. This full-length collection includes individual lyric poems as well as a previously published chapbook Sea Lyrics and a new collaborative piece "Dumb Duke Death" with illustrations by Jennifer Jarnot.

Salt Publishing

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Books by Jarnot, Lisa