From the high deserts of western Colorado comes Danny Rosen, a poet, publisher, and bookseller after our own heart, whose Lithic Press has published a wealth of fine poetry, prose and art books in recent years, and whose bookstore and gallery of the same name in Fruita, CO has been the site of many great readings and exhibitions.

Joining him on the Bird & Beckett stage will be the inimitable wordsmith and drummer Clark Coolidge, and writer and City Lights editor Garrett Caples, as well as poet, biographer, and emcee for the day, Neeli Cherkovski.

More about the poets:

Each morning Danny Rosen pees on the bank of the largest unnamed tributary to the East Branch of Big Salt Wash which flows into the Colorado River several miles below Fruita, Colorado. Early on he learned to swing a hammer and that changed everything. He has been a poet, publisher, teacher, geologist, astronomer, and carpenter. In the middle of his journey he found himself running an astronomical observatory in the heart of the Namib Desert under the southern sky where he cultivated an optimistic outlook based on his familiarity with big space and deep time. He is the author of PRIMATE POEMS (2016), Ghosts of Giant Kudu (2013), and That Curve (2006). He founded Lithic Press in 2007 and has run Lithic Bookstore since its opening in 2015. An inveterate rock hanger, he has collaborated with beavers on a variety of landscape installations.

Clark Coolidge is the author of more than fifty books, including The Land of All Time (Lithic Press, 2020), Space, Solution Passage, The Crystal Text, At Egypt, Now It’s Jazz: Writings On Kerouac & The Sounds (Living Batch Press, 1999), The Act of Providence, 88 Sonnets (Fence Books, 2012), A Book Beginning What And Ending Away, and most recently, Poet. Connected to both the Language movement and the New York School, his poetry utilizes syntactical and sonic patterns to engage, and generate, meaning. In a 1968 poetics statement, he noted, “Words have a universe of qualities other than those of descriptive relation: Hardness, Density, Sound-Shape, Vector-Force, & Degrees of Transparency/Opacity.” Initially a drummer, he was a member of David Meltzer’s Serpent Power in 1967 and Mix group in 1993-94. More recently, Coolidge performed duos with Thurston Moore (Among The Poetry Stricken, on Fast Speaking Music) and free improv with Ouroboros.

Garrett Caples is the author of Lovers of Today (2021), Power Ballads (2016), Retrievals (2014), Quintessence of the Minor: Symbolist Poetry in English (2010), Complications (2007), and The Garrett Caples Reader (1999). He is an editor at City Lights Books, where he curates the Spotlight poetry series. Caples was also a contributing writer to the San Francisco Bay Guardian and has coedited the Collected Poems of Philip Lamantia (2013), Particulars of Place (2015) by Richard O. Moore, and Incidents of Travel in Poetry: New and Selected Poems (2016) by Frank Lima. He lives in San Francisco.

Neeli Cherkovski is the author of many books of poetry, including From the Canyon Outward (2009), and The Crow and I (2015). He was the coeditor of Anthology of L.A. Poets (with Charles Bukowski) and Cross-Strokes: Poetry between Los Angeles and San Francisco. Cherkovski also wrote biographies of Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Charles Bukowski, as well as the critical memoir Whitman’s Wild Children (1988). His papers are held at the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. He has lived in San Francisco since 1974.