John Kliphan
LOW LEVEL FLYING

US Trade, 148pp, €12, March 2012
ISBN 979-10-90394-31-5
The cover image is by Peter Cunningham.
Published posthumously for John Kliphan’s wake.

John Kliphan (b.1933, Boston – d. 2012, Paris) was a passionate and compassionate poet, teacher and lawyer. His poems are direct in approach, accessible yet incisive, lyrical by nature and often humorous. First published in Boston, then San Francisco, where he lived for many years, he befriended the Beats and was counsel for the North Beach art community. In the 1980’s Kliphan moved to Paris, where he founded and directed the Live Poets Society, an internationally recognized series of readings celebrating the oral tradition of poetry while providing a venue for new voices and verse in Paris, the city’s longest–running series of its kind. Invited to perform his work at poetry readings around the world, Kliphan was author of three books of poetry as well as individual poems and various articles published in the United States and Europe. Jennifer Pinard