Michael McClure reads from Of Indigo and Saffron: New and Selected Poems

SF Bay Area favorite Michael McClure stopped by City Lights Bookstore on January 26th, 2011 to read from Of Indigo and Saffron: New and Selected Poems.

This essential collection of Michael McClure’s poetry contains the most original, radical, and visionary work of a major poet who has been garnering acclaim and generating controversy for more than fifty years. Ranging from A Fist Full, published in 1957, through Swirls in Asphalt, a new poem sequence, Of Indigo and Saffron is both an excellent introduction to this unique American voice and an impressive selection from McClure’s landmark volumes for those already familiar with his boldly inventive work. One of the five poets who heralded the Beat movement in the 1955 Six Gallery reading in San Francisco, McClure reveals in his poetry a close kinship to Romanticism, Modernism, Surrealism, and Japanese haiku. These poems–grounded in imagination and a profound regard for the natural world–chart a poetic landscape of utter originality.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti reading at the New Directions 75th Anniversary Celebration at City Lights Bookstore. Photo courtesy of Julie Michelle.

On Tuesday, October 11, 2011, City Lights and Litquake hosted a Gala Celebration of a quintessential American publisher with appearances by: Willis Barnstone, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Michael McClure, Denise Newman, Michael Palmer, Katy Silver, Declan Spring, Nathaniel Tarn, and special guests.

New Directions was founded in 1936, when James Laughlin (1914 – 1997), then a twenty-two-year-old Harvard sophomore, issued the first of the New Directions anthologies. “I asked Ezra Pound for ‘career advice,’” James Laughlin recalled. “He had been seeing my poems for months and had ruled them hopeless. He urged me to finish Harvard and then do ‘something’ useful.” Intended “as a place where experimentalists could test their inventions by publication,” the ND anthologies first introduced readers to the early work of such writers as William Saroyan, Louis Zukofsky, Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, Kay Boyle, Delmore Schwartz, Dylan Thomas, Thomas Merton, John Hawkes, Denise Levertov, James Agee, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Soon after issuing the first of the anthologies, New Directions began publishing novels, plays, and collections of poems. Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams, who once had difficulty finding publishers, were early New Directions authors and have remained at the core of ND’s backlist of modernist writers. Publishing influential foreign writers in translation, (often in bilingual editions), New Directions has been largely responsible for America’s interest in Céline, André Gide, Apollinaire, Yukio Mishima, Italo Svevo, Tommaso Landolfi, Rainer Maria Rilke, Kafka, Octavio Paz, Eugenio Montale, Lorca, Nabokov, and most recently W.G. Sebald, Javier Marías, Roberto Bolaño, Inger Christensen, Uwe Timm, Yoko Tawada, Antonio Tabucchi, Bei Dao, and Victor Pelevin. And from Britain — E.M. Forster, B. S. Johnson, and H. E. Bates. New Directions now publishes about 30 books annually in hardcover and paperback. It remains a vital force in the world of American letters. visit: www.ndpublishing.com

Willis Barnstone is a poet, translator, and memoirist. He has translated poets from the the Ancient Greek and is also a New Testament and Gnostic scholar.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti is a poet, painter, den-mother to the Beat Generation, and co-founder of City Lights Booksellers & Publishers. He has authored poetry, translation, fiction, theatre, art criticism, and film narration. He is best known for his bestseller A Coney Island of the Mind and for publishing the legendary Beat classic HOWL, by Allen Ginsberg.

Michael McClure is one of the movers and shakers of the Beat Generation. He is a  poet, playwright, songwriter, and novelist. He read at the famous San Francisco Six Gallery reading in 1955. He is the author of numerous books of poetry and has collaborated on music projects with the likes of Terry Reilly and Ray Manzarek of The Doors.

Denise Newman is a poet and translator. She is the author of three collections of poems. She translated The Painted Room by the Danish poet Inger Christensen, and her translation of Azorno, also by Christensen, was published by New Directions in 2009. Her work has  appeared in Denver Quarterly, Volt, Fence, New American Writing, ZYZZYVA, and elsewhere.

Michael Palmer is a poet and translator. He has worked extensively within contemporary dance and has collaborated with numerous composers and visual artists. Palmer is the author of ten books of poetry, including Company of Moths, Codes Appearing: Poems 1979-1988, The Promises of Glass, and several others. He has published translations from the French, Russian and Brazilian Portuguese.

Katherine Silver is an award-winning translator of Spanish and Latin American literature. She has translated plays, screenplays—some for major motion pictures—and a wide assortment of academic and other non-fiction books. She also works as an editor and publishing consultant for trade, academic, and literary presses. Her most recent and forthcoming translations include works by Daniel Sada, Horacio Castellanos Moya, César Aira, and Carla Guelfenbein.

Declan Spring is Vice President and Senior Editor at New Directions Publishing.

Nathaniel Tarn is poet, translator, essayist, and anthropologist. He has translated the work of Neruda and Segalen and is the author of numerous books of poetry, criticism, and anthropology. His published works include Ins and Outs of the Forest Rivers, Recollections of Being, Selected Poems: 1950-2000, and many, many others

David Meltzer reads from When I Was a Poet

Accompanied by a reading from his creative partner, Julie Rogers, David Meltzer read at City Lights on June 24th, 2011 from his new collection of poetry, When I Was A Poet. A dual milestone in City Lights history, When I Was a Poet is volume 60 of the Pocket Poets Series as well as our first book of poems by this renowned Beat author.

The title piece is an ambitious work by a master at the height of his powers, a spiritual assessment of the meaning of a lifetime spent writing poetry. Also included are portraits of key figures in the poet’s life, including Semina artist Wallace Berman, as well as “California Dreamin’,” a reminiscence of Beat-era bohemian life. Among its other highlights are the vintage, previously uncollected series, “French Broom,” a nutty homage to “Mr. Peanut,” a section of mystical “amulets,” and complete versions of “Night Reals” and “Dogma,” which appear here for the first time. With its profound meditations on love, loss, aging, and death, When I Was a Poet is a substantial contribution to American poetry by one of its foremost living practitioners.

David Meltzer is a poet associated with both the Beat Generation and the San Francisco Renaissance. A pioneer of jazz poetry readings, Meltzer also formed a psychedelic folk-rock group. He continues to perform with the music and poetry review, “Rockpile.” He has edited many anthologies, including San Francisco Beat: Talking with the Poets (City Lights, 2001), and has published 11 erotic novels. He also taught for many years in the poetics program at New College of California. In 2005, Penguin Books published David’s Copy: The Selected Poems of David Meltzer.

John Dolphin Allen discusses his new book, Me and the Biospheres: A Memoir, published by Synergetic Press

Anyone suffering from the Global Warming Blues will cherish this uplifting account of the most ambitious environmental experiment of our time: Biosphere 2, a miniature Earth under glass, the world’s largest laboratory for global ecology. John Allen’s memoir, Me and the Biospheres is a rich and complex narrative, filled with rollicking adventure, exceptional camaraderie and mind-bending science.

Covering three acres of Arizona desert, Biosphere 2 contained five biomes: a 900,000-gallon ocean with coral reef, a rainforest, a savannah, a desert, a farm and a micro-city, all housed within an air-tight, sealed glass and steel frame structure. Eight people lived inside for two years (1991-1993) setting world records in human life-support, monitoring their impact on the environment, while providing crucial data for future manned missions into outer space.

Almost as astonishing as the structure is the story of how it came to be. Back in 1969, Biosphere 2 was a mere seed in the luminous mind of writer, actor, philosopher, inventor, and scientist John Allen. He prepared for the manifestation of Biosphere 2 by assembling smaller projects: the creation of a ship to study ocean and river ecologies and cultures; a rainforest enrichment project; a theater group; a world-class art gallery and more. As awe-inspiring as the great cathedrals, Biosphere 2′s building and operation demanded the efforts of the most diverse team of scientists, engineers, artists and thinkers from around the world with whom John Allen worked closely for decades.

Me and the Biospheres is also an account of the singular life John Allen has led: his travels to Egypt, Vietnam, Nepal, Tibet and India, his meetings with people like Buckminster Fuller, William Burroughs, Charles Mingus, and Ornette Coleman. From building developments in Iran to adobe houses in New Mexico, from Harvard Business School to cafés in Tangiers, from board meetings in Fort Worth to mystical moments with Sufi sages, John Allen has impacted millions of people with manifest integrity. His humorous and Whitmanesque memoir is a tribute to the ingenuity and dauntlessness of the human mind. Me and the Biospheres is a passionate call to reawaken to the beauty of our peerless home, Biosphere 1, the Earth.

Synergetic Press was founded in 1969 in Santa Fe, New Mexico. After 39 years of publishing, they are still fiercely independent and continue to follow their mission of advancing the most relevant and far-reaching work they can find in the fields of biosphere science, ethnobotany, and world cultures.

Elaine Elinson

Wherever There’s a Fight captures the sweeping story of how freedom and equality have grown in California, from the gold rush right up to the precarious post-9/11 era. The book tells the stories of the brave individuals who have stood up for their rights in the face of social hostility, physical violence, economic hardship, and political stonewalling.

Yippie co-founder. merry prankster and satirical provocateur Paul Krassner reads from Who’s to Say What’s Obscene?: Politics, Culture and Comedy in America Today, published by City Lights Books, July 15, 2009.

Fans of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and The Onion will appreciate this timely collection of satirical essays by counterculture icon Paul Krassner. With irreverence and an often X-rated wit, Krassner explores contemporary comedy, and obscenity in politics and culture from “Bong Hits 4 Jesus” banners to scenes cut out of recent movies, including Borat.

In his essay “Don Imus Meets Michael Richards” Krassner examines racism in comedy from Lenny Bruce to Dave Chapelle, on The Sarah Silverman Show and Curb Your Enthusiasm, and in controversial comic strips like The Boondocks.

“These are times of repression,” says Krassner, “and the more repression there is, the more need there is for irreverence toward those in authority.”

Praise for Paul Krassner:

“He is an expert at ferreting out hypocrisy and absurdism from the more solemn crannies of American culture.” — New York Times

“To classify Krassner as a social rebel is far too cute. He’s a nut, a raving, unconfined nut.” — Federal Bureau of Investigation

“The FBI was right. This man is dangerous—and funny; and necessary.” — George Carlin

Read more about Ring of Bone, the collected poems of Lew Welch. A new edition will by published by City Lights in June 2012.

This podcast was made possible by the generous folks at the Pacifica Radio Archives.

Charles Bukowski (1920-1994), one of the most outrageous and controversial figures of 20th-century American literature, was so prolific that many important pieces were never collected during his lifetime. Portions is a substantial selection of these wide-ranging works, most of which have been unavailable since their original appearance in underground newspapers, literary journals, even porno mags. Among the highlights are his first published short story, “Aftermath of a Lengthy Rejection Slip”; his last short story, “The Other”; his first and last essays; and the first installment of his famous “Notes of a Dirty Old Man” column. The book contains meditations on his familiar themes (drinking, horse-racing, etc.) as well as singular discussions of such figures as Artaud, Pound, and the Rolling Stones. Other significant works include the experimental title piece; a fictionalized account of meeting his hero, John Fante (“I Meet the Master”); an unflinching review of Hemingway (“An Old Drunk Who Ran Out of Luck”); the intense, autobiographical “Dirty Old Man Confesses”; and several discussions of his aesthetics (“A Rambling Essay on Poetics and the Bleeding Life Written While Drinking a Six-Pack (Tall),” “In Defense of a Certain Type of Poetry, a Certain Type of Life, a Certain Type of Blood-Filled Creature Who Will Someday Die,” and “Upon the Mathematics of the Breath and the Way”, revealing an unexpectedly learned mind behind his seemingly offhand productions.