Live! From City Lights

In this episode, poet Sesshu Foster reads from his eclectic World Ball Notebook, recorded at City Lights on April 29, 2009.

The first team sport in human history was played with a ball made of stone, on courts that have been found from the Mayan ruins of Central America to Arizona. Thus we find a soccer dad walking the sidelines of a scuffed LA field, its goal lines swirling, nets strung loosely between daylight and the spirit world — Foster’s inimitably fierce and powerfully evocative mix of the fantastic and the mundane.

For more, visit Sesshu Foster’s blog, East Los Angeles Dirigible Air Transport Lines.

Lew Welch, advertising copy-writer, taxi cab driver, and one of the principal poets of the Beat Generation in San Francisco, reads from his poetry at a raucous evening at San Francisco’s Glide Memorial Church on June 8, 1968.

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.

 

Former San Francisco Poet Laureate Jack Hirschman and poet Neeli Cherkovski remember life with the inimitable Charles Bukowski. The event took place at City Lights on the occasion of our publishing Portions From a Wine-Stained Notebook, a collection of unpublished essays and stories from the drunken bard, edited by David Calonne.

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.

On the occasion of her becoming San Francisco’s 5th Poet Laureate, we thought we’d celebrate the work of Diane di Prima with a podcast of her reading from her book, Revolutionary Letters in October 2007. Di Prima succeeds Jack Hirschman, who served in the position from 2006 to 2009. Allen Ginsberg described her as “a revolutionary activist of the 1960s Beat literary renaissance.” City Lights was fortunate to have published her Pieces of a Song: Selected Poems in 1990.

 

Join “Live From City Lights” in celebration of the work of Friedrich Hölderlin. Hear translator Nick Hoff introduce his new collection of Hölderlin’s early poetry, Odes and Elegies , with readings by special guests Andrew Joron and Susanne Hoelscher.

Friedrich Hölderlin emerged in the early 20th century as one of the key figures of modern European literature. This comprehensive selection of over 80 of his odes, hexameters, and elegies is taken from the important early period of his mature work—a time in which we encounter the poet open to nature and love with a rare vulnerability. The translations in a new book of translations, Odes and Elegies includes poems never before available in English, rendering forcefully and directly the deep longing and heartbreak of Hölderlin’s poetic world; their open, pathos-filled rhythm and disarming clarity present Hölderlin’s powerful work as distinctive English poems.

Friedrich Hölderlin (1770–1843), whose work has influenced such figures as Rilke, Celan, Heidegger, Adorno, and Benjamin, is considered by many to be one of the most important German lyric poets.

Nick Hoff is a writer and translator who lives in San Francisco. His translations have been published in numerous journals.

Recording for this podcast was provided by Ian Hiebert of Dublit.com

 

For our first episode, we thought it might be fitting to hear from our founder. Lawrence Ferlinghetti read a series of his thoughts from Poetry As Insurgent Art on October 24, 2007. Enjoy!

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