Lisa Jarnot

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. Praise for Joie de Vivre: "Riveting ... Reading this work is truly a joy."--Publishers Weekly "This compilation includes the best of Jarnot's Whitmanesque reflections and Ginsbergian outcries, speech acts that list always toward an avant-garde."--Booklist "Her ideas meddle in the traditions of form, medium, sound, and arrangement to recall the modernism of Joyce and Stein ... This selection highlights her inventiveness." --Library Journal 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.

Four Lectures by Lisa Jarnot is the seventh book in the Bagley Wright Lecture Series, comprising autobiographical essays that form an intimate, uncompromising, and generous glimpse into a remarkable life in poetry. Across the lectures, or talks, given between October of 2020 and December of 2021, Jarnot examines what it means to be a woman in a male-centered experimental tradition, to have white privilege, and to write poetry. With colloquial ease and wit, Jarnot investigates the generative tensions at the intersections of traditional and experimental forms, develops relationships between ‘deep gossip’ and ecstatic connectedness, and considers the prophetic tradition in American poetry as inflected through counter-cultural spirituality. Ultimately, Jarnot presents poetry as a calling, asking us to consider the means by which poets can envision a new heaven and a new earth.

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

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, Anais Nin, Tennessee Williams, James Baldwin, Paul Goodman, Michael McClure, H. D., William Carlos Williams, Denise Levertov, Robert Creeley, and Charles Olson.

Ring of Fire is a book of experimental lyric poetry in the tradition of American Poetry beginning with Walt Whitman and continuing through the Beat Generation, the New York School, and contemporary Language Poetry. Jarnot’s work represents a synthesis of traditional modes of verse alongside more fragmented avant-garde writing practices. The poems in this collection resonate with homages to the metaphysical masters of the 17th Century while commenting on popular culture in the Western world.