For the last fifteen years, performance artist and writer Guillermo Gómez-Peña has led a series of ongoing conversations with cultural luminaries from both North and South America. These dialogues with theorists, curators, activists, and fellow artists—such as Lisa Wolford Wylam, Tim Miller, Felipe Ehrenberg, Orlando Britoo Jinorio, Silvana Straw, and Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, among others—explore the terrain between art and theory. In Conversations Across Borders, Gómez-Peña has gathered the most challenging and captivating of these conversations, revealing their significant contribution to key debates within the international art world.

Both bold and humorous, these conversations address issues of timely concern to artists, including border culture, new technologies, urban hipsterism, and globalization gone wrong. Conversations Across Borders explores dialogue as a performative act, as a radical space for initiating and testing the boundaries of critical culture. Together, these texts propose a distinct set of critical practices that are invigorated by the endangered art of conversation.

“Gómez-Peña’s commitment to force North America to adjust to the South, to acknowledge the hemisphere’s cultural imbalance, places him among the most significant of late-20th-century performance artists.”

—Village Voice Literary Supplement

Conversations Across Borders was published by my padrino Richard Schechner and edited by Canadian theorist Laura Levin. It contains an anthology of very bold (and performative) conversations I’ve had in the last 10 years with rebel curators, pioneering artists, cultural anthropologists, art historians, activist writers—in essence a wide variety of intelligent, engaged and fierce contemporary art practitioners and theorists. It also contains gorgeously provocative never before published photos. My Canadian sister Laura Levin and the amazing team of Seagull books made sure that the book functions both as an accessible (and activist) treatise on theory as well as a beautiful art/ifact.

—Guillermo Gómez-Peña

Guillermo Gomez-Peña is a performance artist, writer, activist, radical pedagogue and director of the performance troupe La Pocha Nostra. Born in Mexico City, he moved to the US in 1978. His performance work and 10 books have contributed to the debates on cultural diversity, border culture and US-Mexico relations. His art work has been presented at over eight hundred venues across the US, Canada, Latin America, Europe, Russia, South Africa and Australia. A MacArthur Fellow, Bessie and American Book Award winner, he is a regular contributor for newspapers and magazines in the US, Mexico, and Europe and a contributing editor to The Drama Review (NYU-MIT). Gómez-Peña is a Senior Fellow of the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics and a Patron for the London-based Live Art Development Agency.

Laura Levin is Associate Professor of Theatre at York University in Toronto. She is the editor of Theatre and Performance in Toronto (Playwrights Canada Press) as well as a number of collections on performance, art and public space (in Theatre Research in Canada, Canadian Theatre Review, and Performance Research). She is Vice President of the Canadian Association for Theatre Research and editor-in-chief of Canadian Theatre Review. A director, dramaturg and performance deviser, she recently has collaborated on several transnational performance projects that investigate the intersections of performance, geography, and digital technologies,

Elaine Katzenberger is the Executive Director of City Lights Booksellers & Publishers, an editor, and past friend and collaborator with Pocha Nostra.

Joshua Mohr's Damascus

On Thursday, October 20, 2011, San Francisco author Joshua Mohr visited City Lights Bookstore to read from his new novel, Damascus (2 Dollar Radio).

About Damascus.

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.

Readings by contributors: Susan Berman, Troy Jollimore, and Jill Storey.

Last month, City Lights celebrated the release of a new issue of ZYZZYVA, hosted by the journal’s Managing Editor Oscar Villalon and Editor Laura Cogan.

ZYZZYVA publishes the best prose, poetry, and visual art produced by West Coast writers and artists—along with the occasional piece from east of California. Since 1985, they’ve published such writers as Sherman Alexie, Raymond Carver, Aimee Bender, Po Bronson, F.X. Toole, Haruki Murakami, Richard Rodriguez, and Daniel Handler; poets such as Kay Ryan, Adrienne Rich, Matthew Zapruder, Czeslaw Milosz, W.S. Di Piero, and Francisco X. Alarcon, and they’ve featured work from such artists as Ed Ruscha, Sandow Birk, Laurie Anderson, Richard Diebenkorn, and Wayne Thiebaud.

This City Lights event includes readings by contributors: Susan Berman, Troy Jollimore, and Jill Storey.

Rebecca Solnit's Infinite City

Rebecca Solnit was joined by Aaron Shurin at City Lights Bookstore on December 2nd, 2010 to discuss her book, Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas (University of California Press).

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

Micha Ballard's Waifs and Strays

Micah Ballard and Norma Cole stopped by City Lights Bookstore on September 29, 2011 to read from Waifs and Strays and Where Shadows Will, the first and sixth publications in the City Lights Spotlight Poetry Series.

Waifs and Strays recombines the allure, fixations, and diction of the Metaphysical poets with the alert and streetwise fracturing and instant amazements in contemporary San Francisco. Elegiac, elusive, evocative, the poems roam an urban landscape of bars, books, and chance encounters, where the ghosts of Congo Square haunt the avenues of the Fillmore. With the wasted elegance of Baudelaire, and the handmade warmth of Semina, Waifs and Strays is a rejection of all that is slick and disposable in 21st-century culture.

Born in Baton Rouge, Micah Ballard studied at New College of California, working with David Meltzer, Joanne Kyger, and Tom Clark. He currently co-directs the MFA in Writing program at the University of San Francisco and co-edits Auguste Press and Lew Gallery Editions.

The first installment of our new Spotlight poetry series, Where Shadows Will selects from twenty years of innovative writing by Bay Area poet, translator, and visual artist Norma Cole. Beginning with her earliest collection, Mace Hill Remap (1988), and taking us up through her recent Natural Light (2008), Where Shadows Will is a comprehensive overview of Cole’s melodic and experimental poetry, whose shadow-haunted landscapes embody a theory-informed exploration of the relationship between language, self, and world. By turns severe and exuberant, Where Shadows Will confirms Cole’s place as a major avant-garde poet and a leading voice among contemporary innovative women writers.

A member of the circle of poets around Robert Duncan in the ’80s, and a fellow traveler of San Francisco’s language poets, Norma Cole is also allied with contemporary French poets like Jacques Roubaud, Claude Royet-Journoud, and Emmanuel Hocquard. Her translations from the French include Hocquard’s This Story Is Mine (Instress, 1999), Crosscut Universe: Writing on Writing from France (Burning Deck, 2000), Danielle Collobert’s Notebooks 1956-1978 (Litmus, 2003), and Fouad Gabriel Naffah’s The Spirit God and the Properties of Nitrogen (Post-Apollo, 2004). She has taught at many schools, including the University of San Francisco and San Francisco State.

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.

This collection of mordant, poignant and playful essays shows Rebecca Brown at the height of her imaginative and intuitive powers. A wry and incisive social and literary critique is couched in a gonzo mix of pop culture, autobiography, fiction, literary history, misremembered movie plots and fantasy that plays with the notion of what it is to be “American.”

-and-

Rebecca Brown, Kevin Killian, Dodie Bellamy, and Robert Gluck celebrate the release of Life As We Show It: Writing On Film, edited by Brian Pera and Masha Tupitsyn and published by City Lights.

Life As We Show It is a dynamic cross-genre collection that uses short stories, essays, and poetry to explore the cinematic experience. In these innovative writings, the movie-viewer relationship is positioned as protagonist, theme and plot, and most importantly, as a new genre in its own right.

Was Huey Newton a gifted leader of his people or a dangerous outlaw? Were the Black Panthers heroes or terrorists? Whether Newton and the Panthers are remembered in a positive or a negative light, no one questions Newton’s status as one of America’s most important revolutionaries. Long an iconic figure for radicals, Huey Newton is now being discovered by those interested in the history of America’s social movements. This new release of a classic collection of his writings and speeches traces the development of Newton’s personal and political thinking, as well as the radical changes that took place in the formative years of the Black Panther Party.

With a rare and persuasive honesty, To Die for the People records the Party’s internal struggles, rivalries and contradictions, and the result is a fascinating look back at a young revolutionary group determined to find ways to deal with the injustice it saw in American society. And, as a new foreword by Elaine Brown makes eminently clear, Newton’s prescience and foresight make these documents strikingly pertinent today.

David Hilliard is a founding member and Chief of Staff of the Black Panther Party, was involved in every major activity of the best recognized African American organization of the 1960s and 70s. Hillard, a vibrant voice on our recent history, speaks eloquently to the racial divisions in America today. Hilliard is author of the book, This Side of Glory.

This podcast was recorded January 14, 2010 at City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco