Live! From City Lights

Graywolf Press was founded in Port Townsend, Washington, in 1974 by Scott Walker. Graywolf’s first publications were limited-edition chapbooks of poetry, which were printed on a letterpress and hand sewn by Walker and his colleagues. Over the years Graywolf has expanded its list to include novels, short stories, memoirs, essays, as well as poetry. The Press has discovered and/or promoted such writers as Elizabeth Alexander, Mary Jo Bang, Charles Baxter, Sven Birkerts, Robert Boswell, John D’Agata, Percival Everett, Nuruddin Farah, Tess Gallagher, Albert Goldbarth, Linda Gregg, Eamon Grennan, Tony Hoagland, Jane Kenyon, William Kittredge, Don Paterson, Per Petterson, Carl Phillips, Salvatore Scibona, Vijay Seshadri, William Stafford, David Treuer, and Brenda Ueland. Today, Graywolf is considered one of the nation’s leading nonprofit literary publishers.

Dobby Gibson is the author of Skirmish and Polar, both of which were finalists for the Minnesota Book Award. Polar also won Alice James Books’ Beatrice Hawley Award. Gibson has recieved fellowships from the McKnight Foundation, the Jerome Foundation, and two Pushcart Prize nominations.

D. A. Powell is the author of Useless Landscape, or A Guide for Boys, Tea, Lunch, and Cocktails, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry. He teaches at the University of San Francisco and lives in the Bay Area.

 

Mary Szybist is the author of the poetry collection, Granted.  She was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and in 2009, she won a Witter Bynner Fellowship. She is the recipient of an Academy of American Poets Prize, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Her work has appeared in the Iowa Review and Denver Quarterly and was featured in Best American Poetry (2008). She is an associate professor of English at Lewis & Clark in Portland, Oregon.

 Join David Brinks as he reads from his new release, The Secret Brain: Selected Poems 1955-2012 (Black Widow Press), at City Lights Books, Wednesday, October 17, 2012.About The Secret Brain:David Brinks celebrates the release of this extensive collection of poetry spanning the years 1995 through 2012. In this dense and thoughtfully edited collection, the reader experiences the broad spectrum of Brink's work, revealing his genius, firsthand.David Brinks is a stalwart of the American poetry community, founder of New Orleans School for the Imagination, Trembling Pillow Press, 17 Poets! Literary & Performance Series, publisher of Entrepôt and editor of YAWP, a Journal of Poetry & Art. . His poetry and essays have appeared in magazines, newspapers, journals and anthologies throughout the United States, Canada, and overseas including The Nation, Exquisite Corpse, Shambhala Sun, Scrisul Românesc, Metaphora, Vlak, National Geographic Explorer, Louisiana Cultural Vistas and Gathering of the Tribes. His works also have been featured on National Public Radio's Hearing Voices and PBS' News Hour with Jim Lehrer. Brinks is the author of six published collections of poetry including the critically acclaimed The Caveat Onus (Black Widow Press 2009). Currently Brinks is at work on a biography of early jazz pioneer Emile Barnes; as well a new collection of poetry titled The Geometry of Sound?an experimental, cross-disciplinary study which explores the origins of alphabets, ideograms and pictographs, with specific locus to phoneme-based patterns and linguistic genomes found naturally occurring in the environment through hexagonal structures and frequencies derived from the I Ching.Black Widow Press is an independent press that publishes authors who have had an impact on the cultural, literary and/or artistic thought of the 20th (and 21st) century. There is a focus on dada and surrealism, 20th century avante garde, and contemporary poets on the literary edge. They have published the works of Clayton Eshleman, Jerome Rothenberg, Andrei Codrescu, Robert Kelly, Benjamin Péret, Paul Eluard, Tristan Tzara, Rene Char, and many others.

Catherine Wagner comes to City Lights Bookstore on Tuesday, October 30, 2012, to celebrate the latest release in the Spotlight Poetry Series, Nervous Device (City Lights Books).In Nervous Device, Catherine Wagner takes inspiration from William Blake’s “bounding line” to explore the poem as a body at the intersection between poet and audience. Using this figure as a model for various sexual, political, and economic interactions, Wagner’s poems shift between seductive lyricism and brash fragmentation as they negotiate the failure of human connection in the twilight of American empire. Intellectually informed, yet stubbornly insistent on their own objecthood, and taking a bewildering variety of forms, the poems of Nervous Device express a self-conscious skepticism about the potential for human connection even as they maintain an optimistically charged eroticism.The author of three previous full-length collections, Catherine Wagner was born in Burma during the Vietnam War to American military parents, afterwards living in the Philippines, Indonesia, Yemen, and India before moving to the U.S. She received her MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop (where she studied with Jorie Graham and Donald Revell) and a PhD from the University of Utah. She has written criticism on Barbara Guest, Leslie Scalapino and Harryette Mullen, among others, and has published chapbooks with the Dusie collective and other small presses. Her poems appear in the Norton Anthology of Postmodern American Poetry and Out of Ev­erywhere: Linguistically Innovative Poetry by Women in North America and the UK, among other anthologies. She’s currently an Associate Professor of English at Miami University in Ohio.

Future Spotlight Series poet Alli Warren also read.

On Wednesday, May 16, 2012, City Lights Bookstore celebrated the release of Inside/Out: Selected Poems (City Lights Books) by Marilyn Buck with David Meltzer and friends joining to pay tribute to an important activist and woman of letters.

Inside/Out is the first-ever collection of Marilyn Buck’s poetry. It is a searing, soaring, living tribute to her indomitable spirit, revolutionary intelligence, and poet’s vision.

Marilyn Buck was a committed political radical, imprisoned for over thirty years for her revolutionary activities. She was also a prolific writer and poet, publishing her work in a prize-winning chapbook, an audio CD, and in various journals and anthologies. She received a PEN American Center prize for poetry in 2001. Buck was released from prison less than a month before her death at age sixty-two from uterine cancer. This selection of her finest poetry is a living testament to the fierce intelligence and huge compassion that inspired and informed her life, and to the transcendence of her poetic vision.

“Marilyn, of course references her situation in prison in many poems, but the overwhelming sense one has after reading Inside/Out is that one has just experienced a woman who, though imprisoned, is utterly free. What we have in Marilyn Buck is a poet who is unafraid to confront the deepest parts of herself with an honesty consistent with the consciousness of a revolutionary. It is the uncovering and revealing of hope that many of her works manifest.” — Jack Hirschman, poet laureate of San Francisco

David Meltzer began his literary career during the Beat heyday in San Francisco and early on took his poetry to jazz for improv wonders, which he continues to astound listeners with today. City Lights published his most recent book, When I Was A Poet, as # 60 in the Pocket Poet’s Series. In 2011 he received the SF Bay Guardian’s Lifetime Achievement Award.

 

On Tuesday, May 15, 2012, editor Kim Stanley Robinson, joined by Tom Killion, Carter Scholz, and Ken Knabb visited City Lights Bookstore to celebrate the release of In The Sierra: Mountain Writings Anthology, Memoir, Essay, Correspondence, Nonfiction, Nonfiction, Poetry (New Directions) by Kenneth Rexroth.

Over the course of his life, Kenneth Rexroth wrote about the Sierra Nevada better than anyone. Progressive in terms of environmental ethics and comparable to the writings of Emerson, Thoreau, Aldo Leopard, Annie Dillard, and Gary Snyder, Rexroth’s poetry and prose described the way Californians have always experienced and loved the High Sierra. Contained in this marvelous collection are transcendent nature poems, as well as prose selections from his memoir, An Autobiographical Novel, newspaper columns, published and unpublished WPA guidebooks, and correspondence. Famed science-fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson has compiled a gift for lovers of mountains and poetry both. This volume also contains Robinson’s introduction and notes, photographs of Rexroth, a map of Rexroth’s travels, and an amazing astronomical analysis of Rexroth’s poems by the fiction writer Carter Scholz.

 

Kenneth Rexroth (1905-1982) was an American poet, translator, essayist and social critic who played a key role in the San Francisco Renaissance of the 1950s and 1960s. His poems are characterized by such an unusual range of concerns that he often began his poetry readings by wryly asking the audience: “Well, what would you like tonight: sex, mysticism or revolution?” Though almost entirely self-educated, his erudition was astonishingly broad-ranging, as reflected in essays on topics as diverse as ancient Chinese science, modern jazz, American Indian songs, California mountaineering, medieval mysticism, avant-garde art and utopian communities. He connected with New Directions from the very beginning, and was both friend and adviser to James Laughlin for the rest of his life. New Directions published most of his books of poetry, including Collected Shorter Poems (1966), Collected Longer Poems (1968), and Selected Poems (1984); his plays, Beyond the Mountains (1951); his Autobiographical Novel (1964; expanded edition, 1991); several collections of essays (Bird in the Bush, 1959; Assays, 1961; World Outside the Window: Selected Essays, 1987; Classics Revisited, 1986; More Classics Revisited, 1989); and numerous volumes of translations, including 100 Poems from the Chinese, 100 Poems from the Japanese, Women Poets of China, Women Poets of Japan, and Selected Poems of Pierre Reverdy.

Barry Gifford and Willy Vlautin met for an evening to celebrate the release of Gifford’s Imagining Paradise: New and Selected Poems (Seven Stories Press) at City Lights Bookstore on May 31st, 2012. Published in The New Yorker, La Nouvelle Revue Française, and in nearly a hundred magazines and poetry journals from Los Angeles to Tokyo; from Lawrence, Kansas to Rome; Madrid; Paris; London; Beijing and Bucharest, poems by Barry Gifford have been describing and changing our world for nearly half a century. Here in one volume for the first time is the poet’s own choices from his nine previous collections, as well as a rich selection of new poems. Altogether, Imagining Paradise represents the tremendous achievement of an underground poet who lasted.

 

These poems describe a universe that is as populous and diverse as it is ephemeral and evanescent. They are born of the world and of books and art in equal measure, and tell of the unyielding granite truths of people’s roller-coaster lives. And always there is the poet looking back, facing life and death and everything in between with equanimity, holding a steady hand to the quivering breast wherever there is breath.

The author of more than forty published works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, which have been translated into twenty-eight languages, Barry Gifford writes distinctly American stories for millions of readers around the globe. He is literary heir of Conrad, of Hemingway, of Algren and Camus, exposing the underbelly of the American Dream in ever surprising twists and turns. His novel Wild at Heart was made into a film by David Lynch, which won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, and his novel Perdita Durango was made into a feature film by Alex de la Iglesia. He cowrote, with David Lynch, the film Lost Highway, and with Matt Dillon, the film City of Ghosts. Gifford has received awards from PEN, the National Endowment for the Arts, the American Library Association, the Writers Guild of America, and the Premio Brancati in Italy.

For more information, visit www.barrygifford.com.

Born and raised in Reno, Nevada, Willy Vlautin started playing guitar and writing songs as a teenager and quickly became immersed in music. It was a Paul Kelly song, based on Raymond Carver’s Too Much Water So Close to Home that inspired him to start writing stories. Vlautin has published three novels, The Motel Life, Northline, and Lean on Pete.

Vlautin founded the band Richmond Fontaine in 1994. The band has produced nine studio albums to date, plus a handful of live recordings and EP’s. Driven by Vlautin’s dark, story-like songwriting, the band has achieved critical acclaim at home and across Europe.

Vlautin currently resides in Scappoose, Oregon. An avid fan of horseracing, Vlautin can often be found writing behind a closed circuit monitor at Portland Meadows racetrack.

visit: www.willyvlautin.com

Kevin Young and Arisa White stopped by City Lights Bookstore on Thursday, April 19. Kevin Young read from his new book The Grey Album: On The Blackness Of Blackness, winner of the Graywolf Nonfiction Prize, and Arisa White read from Hurrah’s Nest.

Taking its title from Danger Mouse’s pioneering mashup of Jay-Z’s The Black Album and the Beatles’ The White Album, Kevin Young’s encyclopedic book The Grey Album combines essay, cultural criticism, and lyrical chorus to illustrate the African American tradition of lying—storytelling, telling tales, fibbing, improvising, “jazzing.” What emerges is a persuasive argument for the many ways that African American culture is American culture, and the centrality of art—and artfulness—to our daily life. Moving from gospel to soul, funk to freestyle, Young sifts through the shadows, the bootleg, the remix, the grey areas of our history, literature, and music.

praise for The Grey Album:

“This work is significant for smart readers.”
—Barbara Hoffert, Prepub Alert, Library Journal 

“Kevin Young’s The Grey Album: Music, Shadows, Lies is a page-turning dynamo. Here’s a surge that nudges the reader into a bluesy terrain; its panoramic wit and critical certainty cut through the hokum and reveal a timbre of endurance. The Grey Album resonates like a spasm band, generating waves of intimate discourse on black music, literature, entertainment, culture, folklore, and American history. The collection of essays is propelled by a kinetic passion that’s heroic, tessellating on the page into its postmodern shape. This poet-critic has created an unforgettable, robust trove of insights and lyrical gestures for us to query and embrace.”
—Yusef Komunyakaa

“This is a narrative of surprises—a book of secrets, too, though many of those secrets, as we discover, are cunningly hidden in plain sight (or in plain speech). The Grey Album investigates, even as it also performs, an American covert history—the stories behind any official or familiar story—as well as some emblematic escapes from and into American history. Veering across many vernaculars, from literature into music, theory into autobiography, Kevin Young writes cultural criticism of the most audacious, skillful, and ultimately touching sort.”
—Robert Polito, judge’s statement for the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize

Hurrah’s Nest is a vivid and varied collection that addresses family loyalties, dysfunction, violence, and differences, Hurrah’s Nest is White’s imaginative and emotionally honest exploration of growing up the second oldest, first daughter of seven siblings. Childhood experiences are looked at with rawness, sensitivity, and crafted with precision: be it the cutting of her dreadlocks, mother’s abortion, drug trafficking, or her sister’s developmental disability, the language is tender and startling. Hurrah’s Nest—from the confusion of our lives—asks us to make meaning and good from what we’ve bargained and haven’t bargained for.

 

 

 

Kevin Young is the author of seven collections of poetry, including Ardency: A Chronicle of the Amistad Rebels and Jelly Roll: A Blues, a finalist for the National Book Award. He is a curator and Atticus Haygood Professor at Emory University.

 

 

 

 

 

Arisa White is a Cave Canem fellow, an MFA graduate from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and author of the poetry chapbooksDisposition for Shininess and Post Pardon. Her poetry has been published widely and is featured on the recording WORD with the Jessica Jones Quartet. A blog editor for HER KIND, and the editorial assistant at Dance Studio Life magazine, Arisa is a native New Yorker, living in Oakland, CA, with her partner.