Samuel Charters | The Poet Sees His Family Sleeping

Samuel Charters,

like Whitman, asserts the mundane, every day occurrences, the back and forth realities. You are me. I am you. In his first poem in this small volume of poetry, he brushes our ears, takes us on an intimate journey through his writing rooms. The reader becomes the child, parent, sky, night, ”I move slowly for a last time from one to the other.”

Charters is open; he presents lust in a casual, dignified manner. ”what she presents of her elegant thigh, slides beneath her swirling skirt.” His poems open all the windows and doors on a spring day, even the heat of autumn bearing down over our laden walk, we sit on his bench and breath.

Readers will enjoy the intimacy, the fit in your hand size, the smooth way in which the poems appear and gather into a complete song. Review by Irene Koronas. Read the full review here

”Your edition of Sam’s book may be the most beautiful (perfect) limited edition chap I’ve ever seen. No wonder you wanted to start your own press, with the total aesthetic control it gives you. And every chap of mine you’ve ever worked with has been infinitely enhanced by your artistic contribution.

And Sam’s poems are just right: genuine, clearly heartfelt personal lyricism, tastefully and economically expressed. You two really did each other right with this creation—there is a perfect symmetry of tone, music, and line in the art, design, and sentences. I can’t seem to get away from the words “perfect” and “perfectly.” Your efforts simply coincided in a flawlessly visual-musical voice. Chamber music!

I can only congratulate you without reservation. But I think the two of you are such superior craftsmen that you must sense what you have accomplished here”. Gerald Locklin

” the samuel charters chapbook, writings and literature is a-one, like it is so very honest and loving, the poem about the girl on the bus which beside the title poem was my literary favvvvvvvvorite, oh yeah” t.k.splake

”the splendid book ”The Poet Sees His Family Sleeping.” Please convey my thanks to Samuel Charters, for these exciting and beautiful poems. Ahh… Warm wishes, Henry, and may the time shortly to commence on the island give you the pleasure this book has given me. t.l.kryss

THE POET SEES HIS FAMILY SLEEPING

poems by Samuel Charters

34 pages of unpublished poems. First edition, 200 copies, all signed by the poet. Mini-chapbook format, in wraps. Cover artwork and author portrait by Henry Denander.

[quickshop:The Poet Sees His Family Sleeping – Samuel Charters – Kamini Press:price:10:shipping:0:shipping2:0:end]10 EURO incl. shipment cost world-wide

Samuel Charters began his life with small presses in the 1950s in New Orleans when he shared a rundown French Quarter building with Gypsy Lou and Jon Webb and made his first magazine appearance in an issue of their ground-breaking magazine The Outsider. Beginning in the mid-1960s his poetry chapbooks, broadsides, and literary essays were published by Berkeley’s Oyez Press, many designed and printed by the legendary Graham MacIntosh. With their own Portents press, he and his wife Ann published small pieces by, among many others, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, Charles Olson, and Robert Creeley. With Ginsberg they created the book Scenes Along The Road, the first look at the story of the Beat Generation.

In the other world of publishing he has written innumerable books on jazz and the blues, as well as novels, biographies, translations, and travel memoirs, and worked with Ann on the first biography of Jack Kerouac. He is also responsible for the poetry section of their college introduction-to-literature textbook Literature And Its Writers, now in its 4th edition. Their current project is the authorized biography of Beat novelist John Clellon Holmes. His own most recent book is the first history of New Orleans jazz, A Trumpet Around The Corner.

A sample poem from The Poet Sees His Family Sleeping:

Conundrum

a

There is no hell,
but I stumble there – often.
No heaven,
but I journey there – sometimes.