Patrick James Dunagan holds an MA/MFA in Poetics from the now defunct New College of California, where he studied with David Meltzer, Tom Clark, and Joanne Kyger. He's author of many poetry collections, including Drops of Rain/Drops of Wine (Spuyten Duyvil, 2016), Sketch of the Artist (FMSBW, 2018), and After the Banished (Empty Bowl, 2022), as well as a book of criticism, The Duncan Era (Spuyten Duyvil, 2016). Additionally, he has served as editor for David Meltzer's Rock Tao (Lithic, 2022), among other titles. He reviews regularly for Rain Taxi, and works as a library assistant at Gleeson Library for the University of San Francisco. He has lived in San Francisco for over 20 years.
"Praise for City Bird: ""Patrick James Dunagan's City Bird & Other Poems grasps at the house of mirrors that are the thoughts and images which alternately batter and balm us daily. He's not especially looking to make any ultimate sense or find any golden order but simply to catalog and observe—Zen-like—the myriad flashes on his mindscreen.""—Lee Ranaldo, artist, founding member of Sonic Youth ""Nothing is left unseen, including present memories years before with friends, or a dramatic monologue through recent readership, receiving everyone's voices into a huge collage . . . City Bird is all this and more. A meditation and intense easy stroll through a poet's city and all the things that make up a gorgeous life within it, listening and living.""—Micah Ballard, author of Waifs and Strays ""Patrick James Dunagan is a champion of San Francisco poetics, both as an editor and a poet, and City Bird and Other Poems is a certain cause for celebration. Poems become embodied conversation with the city's literary cosmos: resurrected voices of poets, aerials of city streets and landscapes. Irreverent and real City Bird is a book where the poems are life, and the maps are terrain.""— Mary Catherine Kinniburgh, author of Wild Intelligence: The Politics of Knowledge and Postwar American Poets' Libraries “I do notice that Hugh’s sandwich [aka City Bird] comes exactly 100 years after ‘Hugh Selwyn Mauberley,’ that it is exactly the same page-length as Pound’s poem, and comes also exactly 100 years after the Spanish flu pandemic. If all that is coincidence, then I am going to open a bottle of Oban and drink it all tonight. In fact, I think you are fucking with us, Patrick, and you were aware of the clear connections when you wrote it. Otherwise, there ARE Martians and Yeatsian spooks. The ghost of Helen Adam is there at the foot of your bed, holding up the screaming, severed head of Ezra Pound.”—Kent Johnson, author of Because of Poetry I Have a Really Big House"