John Hart

John Hart is the author of 15 books, mostly in the environmental field, but he comes to us today as a poet and as an exponent of an alternative Bay Area poetry tradition, the so-called Activist group mentored by his father Lawrence Hart. Hart and his students were nationally noted in the decade preceding the Beat Generation and had a very different approach, taking with utmost seriousness the Modernist demand that poetry show high originality and technical finesse in almost every line. John has worked to document this history and to continue his father’s teaching methods on a research basis, as well as pursuing Activist strategies in his own work. His credits include a James D. Phelan Award, a book in the Pitt Poetry Series (The Climbers, 1978), a belated successor, Storm Camp (Sugartown Publishing, 2017), and periodical publication including Literary Imagination, Midwest Quarterly, Orbis, Southern Poetry Review, and Talisman: A Journal of Poetry and Poetics. He edits the venerable (since 1977) all-poetry magazine Blue Unicorn.