Richard Denner (born November 21, 1941) is an American

poet A poet is a person who studies and creates poetry. Poets may describe themselves as such or be described as such by others. A poet may simply be the creator (thought, thinker, songwriter, writer, or author) who creates (composes) poems (oral t ...

associated with the Berkeley Street Poets and the Poets of the Pacific Northwest. He is the founder and operator of dPress, which has published over two hundred titles, mostly of poetry and most in

chapbook A chapbook is a type of small printed booklet that was a popular medium for street literature throughout early modern Europe. Chapbooks were usually produced cheaply, illustrated with crude woodcuts and printed on a single sheet folded into 8, 1 ...

format.

Biography

Denner was born in

Santa Clara, California Santa Clara ( ; Spanish language, Spanish for "Clare of Assisi, Saint Clare") is a city in Santa Clara County, California. The city's population was 127,647 at the 2020 United States census, 2020 census, making it the List of cities and towns i ...

and raised in the Oakland Hills. In 1959, he enrolled in the

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California), is a Public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Berkeley, California, United States. Founded in 1868 and named after t ...

but dropped out the following year, initially working in ''Moe's Books'' and for ''The Berkeley Barb''. "I was trying to be like a street poet," he recalled later, "using magic markers to write on napkins at Cafe Med for espressos, on girls’ arms and feet." Soon after, he founded the one-man printing operation, dPress, the backlists of which now contain some two hundred titles. In 1965, he attended the Berkeley Poetry Conference, what John Bennett, in 'Air Guitar' (an Ellensburg Daily Record column), has called, “an event creating white light intensity that rivaled any drug high and had more staying power.” This convergence of the Black Mountain,

San Francisco Renaissance The term San Francisco Renaissance is used as a global designation for a range of poetic activity centered on San Francisco, which brought it to prominence as a hub of the American poetry avant-garde in the 1950s. However, others (e.g., Alan Watt ...

Beat Beat, beats, or beating may refer to: Common uses * Assault, inflicting physical harm or unwanted physical contact * Battery (crime), a criminal offense involving unlawful physical contact * Battery (tort), a civil wrong in common law of inte ...

and Northwest Schools gave Denner the pivotal opportunity to study under such avant-garde poets as

Charles Olson Charles John Olson (27 December 1910 – 10 January 1970) was a second generation modernist United States poetry, American poet who was a link between earlier Literary modernism, modernist figures such as Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams an ...

Ed Dorn Edward Merton Dorn (April 2, 1929 – December 10, 1999) was an American poet and teacher often associated with the Black Mountain poets. His most famous work is ''Gunslinger''. Overview Dorn was born in Villa Grove, Illinois. He grew up in ru ...

Robert Creeley Robert White Creeley (May 21, 1926 – March 30, 2005) was an American poet and author of more than 60 books. He is associated with the Black Mountain poets, although his verse aesthetic diverged from that school. Creeley was close with Charle ...

Allen Ginsberg Irwin Allen Ginsberg (; June 3, 1926 – April 5, 1997) was an American poet and writer. As a student at Columbia University in the 1940s, he began friendships with Lucien Carr, William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac, forming the core of th ...

Joanne Kyger Joanne Kyger (November 19, 1934 – March 22, 2017) was an American poet. The author of over 30 books of poetry and prose, Kyger was associated with the poets of the San Francisco Renaissance, the Beat Generation, Black Mountain, and the New Y ...

Lew Welch Lewis Barrett Welch Jr. (August 16, 1926 – May 23, 1971) was an American poet associated with the Beat generation literary movement. Welch published and performed widely during the 1960s. He taught a poetry workshop as part of the University o ...

, and

Jack Spicer Jack Spicer (January 30, 1925 – August 17, 1965) was an American poet often identified with the San Francisco Renaissance. In 2009, ''My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer'' won the American Book Award for poetry. ...

. Later he would study with

Robert Bly Robert Elwood Bly (December 23, 1926 – November 21, 2021) was an American poet, essayist, activist and leader of the mythopoetic men's movement. His best-known prose book is '' Iron John: A Book About Men'' (1990), which spent 62 weeks on ...

Gary Snyder Gary Snyder (born May 8, 1930) is an American poet, essayist, lecturer, and environmental activist. His early poetry has been associated with the Beat Generation and the San Francisco Renaissance and he has been described as the "poet laureate ...

Philip Whalen Philip Glenn Whalen (October 20, 1923 – June 26, 2002) was an American poet, Zen Buddhist, and a key figure in the San Francisco Renaissance and close to the Beat generation. Biography Born in Portland, Oregon, Whalen grew up in The Dalles f ...

Denise Levertov Priscilla Denise Levertov (24 October 1923 – 20 December 1997) was a British-born naturalised American poet. She was heavily influenced by the Black Mountain poets and by the political context of the Vietnam War, which she explored in her p ...

and

Carolyn Kizer Carolyn Ashley Kizer (December 10, 1925 – October 9, 2014) was an American poet of the Pacific Northwest whose works reflect her feminism. She won the Pulitzer Prize in 1985. According to an article at the Center for the Study of the Pacific N ...

at Fort Worden Center for the Arts in

Port Townsend, Washington Port Townsend is a city on the Quimper Peninsula in Jefferson County, Washington, United States. The population was 10,148 at the 2020 United States Census. It is the county seat and only incorporated city of Jefferson County. In addition ...

. But it was Jack Spicer’s molding of poetry series into little books that had the most singular effect. In 1972, he went back to college and received a BA in English and Philosophy from the

University of Alaska The University of Alaska Fairbanks (UAF or Alaska) is a public land-, sea-, and space-grant research university in College, Alaska, United States, a suburb of Fairbanks. It is the flagship campus of the University of Alaska system. UAF was e ...

in Fairbanks. The former proprietor of the ''Four Winds Bookstore'' in Ellensburg, Washington, Denner took up the practice of

Vajrayana ''Vajrayāna'' (; 'vajra vehicle'), also known as Mantrayāna ('mantra vehicle'), Guhyamantrayāna ('secret mantra vehicle'), Tantrayāna ('tantra vehicle'), Tantric Buddhism, and Esoteric Buddhism, is a Mahāyāna Buddhism, Mahāyāna Buddhis ...

Buddhism. His most recent major work is a long series of

canto The canto () is a principal form of division in medieval and modern long poetry. Etymology and equivalent terms The word ''canto'' is derived from the Italian word for "song" or "singing", which comes from the Latin ''cantus'', "song", from th ...

s in collaboration with

David Bromige David Mansfield Bromige (October 22, 1933 – June 3, 2009) was a Canadian-American poet who resided in northern California from 1962 onward. Bromige published thirty books, many so different from one another as to appear to be the work of ...

.David Bromige at the Electronic Poetry Center SUNY Buffalo
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Works

*''On Borgo Pass: Poems by Richard Denner'' was published in 1998 by D Press Sebastopol *''Chain Clankers & Linoleum Nudes: The Poemebooks of Rychard Denner'' was published in 1998 by D Press Sebastopol *''Collected Poems:1961-2000'' was published by Comrades Press in 2001. *''The Collected Books of Richard Denner: Volumes 1-12'' are published by dPress. *''Berkeley Daze: Profiles of Berkeley Poets of the 60s'' edited by Richard Denner, published by dPress, 2008.

References

External links

Official site for dPressProfile at the Electronic Poetry Center SUNY Buffalo''Berkeley Daze'' at Big Bridge
{{DEFAULTSORT:Denner, Richard American male poets American poets 1941 births Living people People from Santa Clara, California Writers from the San Francisco Bay Area Chapbook writers