$14.99
How nice to read Hawthorne. Renewing all those people, times, memories. A great exotic Guest Book.
-Joanne Kyger
Ellen Sander’s Hawthorne, a House in Bolinas is a passionate and compelling synthesis of memory, love, and affinity between the artist and nature that reaffirms the verse epyllion as the vehicle of choice for the lyric poet.
-Dean A. Hoffman, PhD., University of North Carolina at Charlotte.
Ellen Sander’s lyrical cartography of the community of Bolinas, California is a “luminous silver ribbon” of a memoir replete with “the beauty of ordinary moments / with extraordinary beings.” Hawthorne is an unforgettable, intricate set of portraits of individuals who collectively bestowed the lingering gallantry of their youthful ideals on a passageway home of verse and song. Out of these poems will the history that matters find a definitive account that gives us both winsome pleasure and exquisite solace.
-Bill Mohr, author of Holdouts: The Los Angeles Poetry Renaissance 1948-1992
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/05/31/what-the-bolinas-poets-built
Hawthorne, a House in Bolinas
by Ellen Sander
$14.99, paper
978-1-63534-172-0
2017
A native New Yorker, Ellen Sander. after stints as a Bolinas, Los Angeles and Beijing poet, was the Poet Laureate of Belfast, Maine in 2013 and 2014. She was in the first pack of writers in the 1960s to invent and establish rock journalism, the author of Trips: Rock Life in the Sixties (now out of print) a widely cited chronicle-slash-memoir of those times. There is more at www.ellensander.com.
Lisa Siegel (verified owner) –
A House in Bolinas is an evocative tale, a tender journey back to a simpler time, a time and place when young artists, writers, musicians and philosophers hung out together and created community. The northern California town of Bolinas provides a charming backdrop to this crowd. Beautifully written, it is a deep breath and a gentle sigh combined. It is worth reading again and again.
Joel Lipman –
During the 1970’s, Ellen Sander, a legendary rock ‘n roll writer, journalist, and two-time Poet Laureate of Belfast, Maine, lived in Bolinas, the idyllic northern California coastal community village that was home to a unique nucleus of resident poets and musicians. The irreplaceable, intimate poems of Hawthorne, a House in Bolinas, embody the people and moments of that time and place.
These poems are immediate, vivid, literary and generously personal. Bob Dylan calls from the local phone booth (“no whistle no warning, brown corduroy”), stops by and sings “Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts” at her kitchen table; Joanna Leary hustles money and “attempts to steal my most beautiful dress”; Bob Creeley teases her over a game of pool, then mails her his $1.38 McGraw Hill royalty check, inscribed “for sweet Ellen Sander but/only in the bar”; Aram Saroyan sulks about advice from his famous dad; Allen Ginsberg “teaches me to meditate/in 10 seconds,” and later seduces “a visiting blond young son” in an upstairs bedroom.
In Sander’s poems you’ll meet Ramblin’ Jack Elliot, drunk and driving to Texas. There’s an instant Richard Brautigan, who “never makes it to Hawthorne.” Sander’s close friend Joanne Kyger sits at the kitchen table on her 40th birthday sharing “an amanita omelet.” Her poems give us sharp portrayals of Peter Rowan, Paul Krassner, Jann Wenner, Crawdaddy publisher Paul Williams, music mogul “Jerry Wexler and an entourage of/San Francisco writers… concerned that I/have to do all those dishes/after they leave” and other sharply caught cultural figures and local Bolinas personalities.
The poems of “Hawthorne” transport us back in time, offering glimpses of Sander in the daily company and fellowship of late-Twentieth Century Bolinas, a fragile place that has yielded to the passing of lives and the tumultuous tides of change.
Bradley Williams –
POSTED BY: BRADLEY WILLIAMS | Jan 12, 2017 21:35
I pre-bought my copy and I can’t wait. I was one of the visitors to her house and, look out Bolinas, she’s naming names!
All kidding aside, this is going to be a seriously great read.