On the Mesa

ed. Ben Estes & Joel Weishaus

The Song Cave presents an expanded edition of the long out of print City Lights Books classic On the Mesa: An Anthology of Bolinas Writing in celebration of its 50th anniversary.

This is a gathering of poets, writers and artists living on or around the mesa in Bolinas, California. Not so much a school of thought as a meeting of those who happened to be at this geographical location at this wobbly point in time, several divergent movements in American poetry (Black Mountain, San Francisco Renaissance, Beat, and New York School poets) came together with new Western and mystic elements at the unpaved crossroads of Bolinas.

'Bolinas retains legendary status in American poetry, an unincorporated community where in the early 1970s it was just as common to hear a Diane di Prima poem read at a school board meeting as it was to cross paths with Lewis MacAdams on his way to interview local sustainable farmers. Mixing avant-garde aesthetics with a communal ethos, the writers who settled in and visited Bolinas carved out a radical new home for the afterlives of the New American Poetry. Fifty years after its initial publication, this expanded edition of On the Mesa: An Anthology of Bolinas Writing adds 19 new contributors—including Richard Brautigan, Alice Notley, and Philip Whalen—whose work retrains our attention on the poet’s haven perched above the Pacific Ocean just north of Mt. Tamalpais. As Bobbie Louise Hawkins writes, “I swear nobody ever / had it better."'  – Nick Sturm