A Celebration of the Poetry of Marilyn Buck

Summary: On Wednesday, May 16, 2012, City Lights Bookstore celebrated the release of Inside/Out: Selected Poems (City Lights Books) by Marilyn Buck with David Meltzer and friends joining to pay tribute to an important activist and woman of letters.   Inside/Out is the first-ever collection of Marilyn Buck’s poetry. It is a searing, soaring, living tribute to her indomitable spirit, revolutionary intelligence, and poet’s vision.   Marilyn Buck was a committed political radical, imprisoned for over thirty years for her revolutionary activities. She was also a prolific writer and poet, publishing her work in a prize-winning chapbook, an audio CD, and in various journals and anthologies. She received a PEN American Center prize for poetry in 2001. Buck was released from prison less than a month before her death at age sixty-two from uterine cancer. This selection of her finest poetry is a living testament to the fierce intelligence and huge compassion that inspired and informed her life, and to the transcendence of her poetic vision. “Marilyn, of course references her situation in prison in many poems, but the overwhelming sense one has after reading Inside/Out is that one has just experienced a woman who, though imprisoned, is utterly free. What we have in Marilyn Buck is a poet who is unafraid to confront the deepest parts of herself with an honesty consistent with the consciousness of a revolutionary. It is the uncovering and revealing of hope that many of her works manifest.” — Jack Hirschman, poet laureate of San Francisco David Meltzer began his literary career during the Beat heyday in San Francisco and early on took his poetry to jazz for improv wonders, which he continues to astound listeners with today. City Lights published his most recent book, When I Was A Poet, as # 60 in the Pocket Poet’s Series. In 2011 he received the SF Bay Guardian’s Lifetime Achievement Award.