Lisa Jarnot, author of “Robert Duncan: The Ambassador from Venus” (University of California Press), will read from, discuss, and sign copies of her new biography of the visionary Black Mountain College and San Francisco Renaissance poet tonight (Wednesday) at 7 p.m. at Talking Leaves Books, 3158 Main Street in Buffalo. The event is free and open to the public.
Jarnot's
biography traces Duncan's life and art across a broad cultural template, from
his birth in Oakland, California in 1919 and his upbringing in a Theosophist
household through the Depression era, to his emergence as one of America's
great postwar poets and a central figure in what came to be known as New
American Poetry of the 1960's. The book
also examines Duncan's role as a public intellectual, and as openly gay man
living in the rapidly changing cultural landscapes of San Francisco and New
York City from the 1940's until his death in 1988.
Jarnot, a Buffalo area native and UB graduate who also studied a Brown
University, is the author of four much-praised full length collections of
poetry, "Some Other Kind of Mission" (Burning Deck Press, 1996),
"Ring of Fire" (Zoland Books, 2001 and Salt Publishers, 2003),
"Black Dog Songs" (Flood Editions, 2003) and "Night Scenes"
(Flood Editions, 2008). During her years
at UB and Brown, she edited two small magazines--No Trees (1987-1990) and
Troubled Surfer (1991-1992)--that became and remain important documents of the
poetics of that era.
City Lights Books will publish her “Selected Poems” in 2013.
--R.D. Pohl
