Readings and Book Release: Latif Harris’ Barter Within the Bark of Trees

Latif Harris’ new poetry collection, Barter Within the Bark of Trees, is newly released by Duende Press.

About Latif Harris

Harris grew up in Los Angeles but relocated to San Francisco in 1958 where he joined the Beat scene in North Beach, where he met his lifelong friend, the painter Robert LaVigne. After studying with Robert Creeley in New Mexico and traveling extensively abroad, Harris returned to Northern California where he collaborated with jazz poet Howard Hart and founded the Bannam Place Reading Series in North Beach in 1983.

During the past 20 years he has continued to perform his work at many literary events in the San Francisco Bay Area and beyond. Most recently, he co-edited and published Beatitude Golden Anniversary 1959 – 2009, a comprehensive volume spanning 50 years of Beat literature and poets of the San Francisco Renaissance, as well as those who were influenced by these movements internationally.

In his forward to the new collection, Jack Hirschman, San Francisco Poet Laureate Emeritus, says: “The poetry of Latif Harris contains his lifelong serious involvement with Buddhism and death as the heart of the art of the transient journey to the beginning, where the end has already been outlived. This makes for a very mortal work, both confessional and consoling. And in measures that are various, but always with a strong feel for structure and, in that sense, faithful to the classics, no matter the surface ease of his ‘californial texturing’. There is hardly a single poem in his work that is not a praise-song received from his wisdom-school studies on the path.”

For the reissue of Harris’ previous book, A Bodhisattva’s Busted Truth (now in its second printing), Beat poet David Meltzer wrote: “The poems herein express an amazing range of spiritual searching, a journey articulated with deep precision and heart. Harris joins a lineage of American poet seekers like Whitman, Thomas Merton, and Gary Snyder.”

If you’re in the Bay Area, check out these events:

May 24, 2015: Book Release Party

The book release party for Barter Within the Bark of Trees will be Sunday, May 24 at 2pm at the Emerald Tablet, 80 Fresno St. in North Beach.

May 31, 2015: Poetry Reading

At 2pm on Sunday, he’ll be reading at Bird & Beckett Books in Glen Park. Get more info here.

June 25, 2015: Poetry Reading

On Thursday, June 25 at 7pm Latif will be reading with a group of poets at the Book Depot at 87 Throckmorton in Mill Valley as part of the Marin Poetry Center Summer Traveling Show.

More events may be scheduled in the future…stay tuned!