ISBN: 0914370154
San Francisco, CA: Mother's Hen, 1975. First Edition. Softcover. “Barbara Alexandra Szerlip was in San Francisco during the 1970s having just come from a stint as a student of [Kenneth] Rexroth’s at UCSB. She lived in a cottage on his property during her senior year in college and spent much time with Rexroth, having had full access to his extraordinary library. Some mentorship, this! which served her in good stead, as she was in my opinion the most studied and mature poet of those of my generation to appear in print and at readings. Having heard her and having attended her book launch for her early book titled Sympathetic Alphabet in 1975, her poem “Calentura” was and still remains one of my favorite poems from the renaissance days, which I published in my editorial issue in Beatitude No. 25 and then in the Generations anthology with NNP [New Native Press; Item No. 4178; No. 7183] in 2015. Regarding all this, she says: “Perhaps all this can be thought of as having stemmed, in one form or another, from Kenneth Rexroth’s mentorship. I certainly hope that he would be proud of my efforts.” Offered here is yet another key addition to the Second San Francisco Renaissance landscape: Sympathetic Alphabet, the 1975 book of poems by the American poet and biographer, Barbara Alexandra Szerlip (b. 1951). In American Football, there’s a concept called a “coaching tree,” — and it’s directly synonymous with something academics simply have a different name for: “institutional pedigree,” or “academic lineage.” When it comes to Barbara Szerlip’s “coaching tree,” she had one of the truly seismic figures in Mid-Century American Verse in her corner: Kenneth Rexroth (1905-1982). Rexroth’s mentorship of Szerlip, and the way he made himself available (to the extent that he could) to the poets of the Second San Francisco Renaissance is a great literary-historical compliment to the man: as he did the very same thing during the First San Francisco Renaissance. These poems reflect that tutelage: Szerlip’s verse is deft & doesn’t stutter. From the archive of Thomas Rain Crowe, the legendary American poet and co-authorial founder of the Second San Francisco Renaissance. For more information on the Thomas Rain Crowe archive (assembled & curated by Third Mind Books), see our above-mentioned book or consult the catalog for the Thomas Rain Crowe archive (Item No. 1010), which contains several excerpts and quotations from the book, as well as a full listing of the archive’s contents (which are now being offered for sale individually on the Third Mind Books site). Trade-format softcover original: First Edition, though not explicated as such on copyright page. In strong fine condition with mild-to-moderate shelf-wear to fine-edges & & corners of front, back covers & spine-edge; a few scattered, low-visibility nicks/scuffs & some light rubbing to front, back covers at select locales, & light-to-moderate age-toning throughout; we have found & retained a suite of scattered, small sticky notes pasted to select pages by TRC during his contemporaneous reading & valuation of the book. These makeshift “bookmarks” are of great value to scholars interested in the SSFR or the learning styles/methods that enable literary movements to flourish. Fine. [Item #7223]