Friday, December 5, 2025
Inspired by Jack Spicer to join the Berkeley Renaissance in the early 1950s, Bruce Boyd pivoted to align himself with the nice West scene in Los Angeles in the mid-1950s, only to return to Berkeley and San Francisco in the late 1950s, and then look back to Venice in the early 1960s. As a friend of both Gary Snyder and Robin Blaser, Boyd was the quintessential maverick poet on the West Coast. He is also the ONLY contributor to Donald Allen’s canonical anthology THE NEW AMERICAN POETRY (Grove Press, 1960) never to have had a collection of his writing — not even a chapbook — published. TOWARD MORNING is Bruce Boyd’s first book of poems.
Boyd was born in San Francisco in 1928 and graduated from the University of California, Berkeley with a B.A. in philosophy. None of the letters written by Snyder, Blaser, or Spicer to Boyd have survived, but Boyd’s letters to those poets can be found in their archives. In addition, a considerable number of copies of letters by Donald Allen to Boyd can be found in Donald Allen’s archive at the University of California, San Diego’s Archive for New Poetry.
Boyd’s poems appeared in such magazines as Evergreen Review, Yugen, The Floating Bear, and J: A Magazine of Poetry.
Bill Mohr will read with Dennis Phillips and Jessie McCarty at Beyond Baroque, on Saturday, December 6, 2025, at 2:00 p.m. to celebrate the launch of Paul Vangelisti’s Magra Books.
Dennis Phillips / The Cartographer’s Lament
Bill Mohr (editor) / TOWARD MORNING: Selected Poems by Bruce Body
Jessie McCarty / Pretty Punks (forthcoming in the spring 2026)
Many thanks go out to Sean Pessin and Mckensi Bond for their assistance in bringing Bruce Boyd’s book into circulation.
Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Center
681 Venice Blvd.
Venice, California
90291
(310) 822-3006
About Bill Mohr