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Gnostics have always sought to "know" rather than to accept dogma and doctrine, often to their peril. This inquiry into Gnosticism examines the character, history, and beliefs of a brave and vigorous spiritual quest that originated in the ancient Near East and continues into the present day.Lawrence Durrell writes, "This is a strange and original essay, more a work of literature than of scholarship, though its documentation is impeccable. It is as convincing a reconstruction of the way the Gnostics lived and thought as D.H. Lawrence's intuitive recreation of the vanished Etruscans."

"Get the Money!" was Ted Berrigan's mantra for the paid writing gigs he took on in support of his career as a poet. This long-awaited collection of his essential prose-written between 1960 and his early death in 1983-draws upon the many essays, reviews, introductions, and other texts he produced for hire, as well as material from his journals, travelogues, and assorted, unclassifiable creative texts. Get the Money! documents Berrigan's innovative poetics and techniques, as well as the creative milieu around the East Village New York's Poetry Project for which he served as both nurturer and catalyst. Highlights include his journals from the '60s, depicting his early poetic discoveries and bohemian activities in New York; the previously unpublished "Some Notes About 'C, '" an account of his mimeo magazine that serves as a de facto memoir of the early days of the second-generation New York School; a moving and prescient obituary, "Frank O'Hara Dead at 40"; book "reviews" consisting of poems entirely collaged from lines in the book; insightful art reviews of friends and collaborators like Joe Brainard, George Schneeman, and Jane Freilicher; and his notorious "Interviews" with John Cage and John Ashbery, both of which were completely fabricated. Get the Money! provides a view into the development of Berrigan's aesthetics in real time, as he captures the heady excitement of the era and champions the poets and artists he loves"--

Maintaining political, intellectual, and ethical hope in the heart of the world's most powerful nation.

This startling and brilliantly comic novel tells the stories of two men: a father and his estranged son. Lamprias de Bergerac is a gentle mystic and amateur botanist who spends his middle-aged years in an erotic utopia deep in the Amazonian jungle, collecting specimens of rare orchids and ultimately finding Cucla, the young and free-spirited native woman who has become the love of his life. Meanwhile, his demented son Septimus is raised by his mother in prewar Europe, seething with hatred of the father who abandoned him. He rises to power in Nazi-occupied France, where he goes mad in an obsessive pursuit of racial purity.Rikki Ducornet has a gift for combining the horrific with the hilarious, the realistic with the fantastic. Through a wildly inventive narrative, Entering Fire scrutinizes the sources of fascist mentality in nations and, potentially, in all humans."Linguistically explosive and socially relevant, [her] works are solid evidence that Rikki Ducornet is one of the most interesting writers around ... We are living in an age of intellectual and emotional starvation that is largely without spirituality, cynical about social change and disconnected from the natural world. We need writers to look at these difficult issues in a sophisticated manner. Ducornet has done this. She is the mirror of our innermost selves. And she gives us back to ourselves—despairing , hopeful, active, contemplative, fractured but surviving, playful, even happy sometimes, and always whole ... Ducornet's villains have the best lines ... one only has to think of Hitler or PolPot or any of our assorted tyrants to know that Ducornet's figures are ... taken from life."—The Nation"Entering Fire displays a cheerfully gruesome audacity and an imagination both lively and bizarre."—The New York Times"Entering Fire is about the metaphoric and potentially evil properties of language; it is about origins and motives of myth-making. This is a novel of ideas (often strange ideas) that is sustained throughout by brilliant writing."—London Sunday Times"Far from being an escapist fantasy, Entering Fire takes on some of the biggest issues of the 20th century … For sheer power, inventiveness and verbal density, [it] is the best read I've come across for a long time."—The Observer"A drastically beautiful comic writer who stitches sentences together as if Proust had gone into partnership with Lenny Bruce."—City Limits" … imaginative and unbridled fantasy."—Le Monde" … an imagination and a style as captivating as it is devastating."—Lire"Unlike anything you've ever read before."—L'ExpressRikki Ducornet has a gift for combining the horrific with the hilarious, the realistic with the fantastic. Through a wildly inventive narrative, Entering Fire scrutinizes the sources of fascist mentality in nations and, potentially, in all humans.

Revolutionary Romanticism draws on almost two centuries of intertwined traditions of cultural and political subversion. In this rich collection of writings by artists, scholars and revolutionaries, the transgressions of the past are recaptured and transvalued for the benefit of the struggles of today and tomorrow.Along the way, new light is shed on the radical sensibilities of Novalis, Friedrich Hölderlin and Friedrich Schlegel, and the profoundly oppositional poetics of Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats, Lord Byron and William Blake. The social romanticism of Jules Michelet is acclaimed for its visionary, quasi-religious breadth. The Paris Commune is figured by Karl Marx, Jules Vallès and Arthur Rimbaud. All-but-forgotten episodes of German expressionism and anarchism are recalled. The romantic outlook of Walter Benjamin and Herbert Marcuse is relocated in their absolute negation of the social order. Surrealism, "the prehensile tail of romanticism," is followed to Haiti where it catalyzes revolt. And, at the end of the twentieth century, Guy Debord and the Situationist International provide the passionate détournement of the romantic project."Drunken Boat is a courageous and worthy effort to maintain alive, in a difficult period, unfettered critical thinking. It ought to be supported by all who care about freedom and justice."—Cornelius Castoriadis, author of The Imaginary Institution of Society"In a period when politics is dreary and political art clichéd, Drunken Boat is brilliantly alive and unconventional. It summons up a world where subversion spelled art and art spelled liberation; but Drunken Boat is more than a blast from the past: it speaks to the present. Drunken Boat is the vessel of choice for these bored with chartered cruises and organized day-trips."—Russell Jacoby, author of The Last Intellectuals". . . an illuminating collection of essays that surveys the evolution–and common threads–of romantic political thought over the last 200 years."—San Francisco Bay Guardian"Provides a readable, comprehensive history of 'a continued Vision' at odds with an empirical world."—Austin Chronicle

Dino Campana wrote the unique, visionary masterwork of Italian literature Orphic Songs when he was in his twenties. The originality, rapturous language, and strange beauty of his poetry make him as important to twentieth-century poetry as García Lorca or Mayakovsky. Campana was the wild man of Italian poetry in 1914, on the eve of World War I. The war saved some young Italians from rebellion and from Fascism, but not Campana. Always an outsider, he was a vagabond who worked now and then as a gaucho, miner, fireman, organ-grinder, janitor, circus tumbler, horse groomer, and a wandering musician with a Gypsy band. He died in Castel Pulci, a psychiatric hospital, in 1932."Dino Campana's small and intensely magical body of poetry from the early years of the last century-prose and free verse that combine the visual and the visionary with astonishing vigor and haunting grace-is little known to English-speaking readers." -Oberlin College PressDino Campana (1885-1932) was an Italian lyricist and poet, known for his flamboyant personality. His only collection of poems is found in Orphic Songs. In 1918 he was admitted into a mental hospital and lived the rest of his life there.

David Lauer is a poet and translator who lives in Chihuahua, Mexico.

The best-known work by the eccentric anthropologist Jaime deAngulo, Indians in Overalls is a fascinating account of his first linguistic field trip - in 1921 - to the Achumawi tribe of northeastern California. The Pit River people had lived in the barren high country for thousands of years and, despite the harsh climate and difficult living conditions, they had developed an extraordinarily complex language and a rich mythology. As he traveled with the tribe and learned the spoken language, he observed gambling games and shamanistic practices, and he collected some of the marvelous stories told around the fire in the winter lodges. Of all the people he worked with, he felt closest to the Achumawi, among whom he discovered "the spirit of wonder, the recognition of life as power ...".

"After looking for him in the poems, we search for him in the prose. The pursuit of the Other in Pessoa's work is never-ending," writes Edwin Honig. Essential to understanding the great Portuguese poet are the essays written about (and by) his heteronyms—Alberto Caeiro, Ricardo Reis, and Alvaro de Campos—the several pseudonyms under which he wrote an extraordinary body of poetry. In Always Astonished, Pessoa and his several selves debate and discuss one another's work, revealing how Portuguese modernism was shaped. Fernando Pessoa is one of the great voices of twentieth-century literature, and these manifestos, letters, journal notes, and critical essays range through aesthetics, lyric poetry, dramatic and visual arts, and the psychology of the artist. He gives us, too, a singularly heterodox political position in his strange work of fiction, The Anarchist Banker."Eloquent, volatile and obsessed with life—and death—(Pessoa is one of the) modernist giants in whose shadow we live and who made our century one of the extraordinary richness."—The New York TimesFernando Pessoa is Portugal's most important contemporary poet. He wrote under several identities, which he called heteronyms: Albet Caeiro, Alvaro de Campos, Ricardo Reis, and Bernardo Soares. He wrote fine poetry under his own name as well, and each of his "voices" is completely different in subject, temperament, and style.

Christopher Sawyer-Laucanno writes in his introduction to Destruction of the Jaguar that ""The Books of Chilam Balam are the only principal surviving texts of the ancient Maya. Written in the Mayan language but in European script, they are generally considered to be transcriptions and recompilations from memory of material originally contained in the hieroglyphic books, all of which were apparently destroyed by the Spaniards . . . As they stand now, they are a curious and fascinating combination of prophecy, history, chronology, ritual and mythology."Here is an English translation that captures the unparalleled beauty of one of the great pre-Columbian masterpieces. This stirring, prophetic poetry haunts our own times.

Meditations, rhapsodies, elegies, confessions, and mindful chronicle writings filling inward and outward space thru mid-Seventies decade.Mind Breaths: Australian songsticks measure oldest known poetics, broken-leg meditations march thru Six Worlds singing crazy Wisdom's hopeless suffering, the First Noble Truth, inspiring quiet Sung sunlit greybeard soliloquies, English moonlit night-gleams, ambitious mid-life fantasies, Ah crossed-legged thoughts sitting straight-spine paying attention to empty breath flowing 'round the globe;' then Dharma elegy & sharp-eyed haiku. Pederast rhapsody, exorcism of mid-East battlegods, workaday sad dust glories, American ego confession & mugging downfall Lower East Side, hospital sickness moan, hydrogen Jukebox Prophecy, Sex come-all-ye, mountain cabin flashes, Buddhist country western chord changes, Rolling Thunder snowballs, a Jersey Shaman dream, Father Death in a graveyard near Newark, Poe bones, two hot hearted love poems: Here chronicled mid Seventies' half decade inward & outward Mindfulness in many Poetries