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

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.

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ZYZZYVA readings by contributors Susan Berman, Troy Jollimore, and Jill Storey

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.

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Rebecca Solnit discusses Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas

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).

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New Directions 75th Anniversary Gala Reading at City Lights Bookstore

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

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Spotlight Poetry Series Reading with Micah Ballard and Norma Cole

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.

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Alia Malek and Karen Korematsu discuss Patriot Acts: Narratives of Post 9/11 Injustice

Editor Alia Malek in conversation with Karen Korematsu

On September 20th, 2011, City Lights welcomed Alia Malek and Karen Korematsu to discuss the new book: Patriot Acts: Narratives of Post-9/11 Injustice published by Voices of Witness (a nonprofit division of McSweeney’s Books).

A groundbreaking collection of oral histories, Patriot Acts tells the stories of men and women who have been needlessly swept up in the War on Terror. In their own words, narrators recount personal experiences of the post-9/11 backlash that have deeply altered their lives and communities. The eighth book in the Voice of Witness series, Patriot Acts illuminates these experiences in a compelling collection of eighteen oral histories from men and women who have found themselves subject to a wide range of human and civil rights abuses—from rendition and torture, to workplace discrimination, bullying, FBI surveillance and harassment.

Alia Malek is an author and a civil rights lawyer. Born in Baltimore to Syrian immigrant parents, her reportage has appeared in The New York Times, The Nation, Salon, The Christian Science Monitor, The Columbia Journalism Review, and WashingtonPost.com. Her first book was A Country Called Amreeka.

Karen Korematsu is the founder of the Fred Korematsu Civil Rights Fund, sponsored by ALC. She is the daughter of Fred Korematsu, who challenged the internment orders during WWII. Mrs. Korematsu-Haigh shares her father’s passion for social justice and continues to help support the new Korematsu Institute for Civil Rights and Education at the Asian Law Caucus in development and outreach.

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David Meltzer reads from When I Was a Poet

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.

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Clarence Lusane reads from The Black History of the White House

Clarence Lusane reads from The Black History of the White House

On January 20th, 2011, City Lights welcomed Clarence Lusane reading from and discussing his latest book, The Black History of the White House.

About The Black History of the White House:

Official histories of the United States have ignored the fact that 25 percent of all U.S. presidents were slaveholders, and that black people were held in bondage in the White House itself. And while the nation was born under the banner of “freedom and justice for all,” many colonists risked rebelling against England in order to protect their lucrative slave business from the growing threat of British abolitionism. These historical facts, commonly excluded from schoolbooks and popular versions of American history, have profoundly shaped the course of race relations in the United States.

In this unprecedented work, Lusane presents a comprehensive history of the White House from an African American perspective, illuminating the central role it has played in advancing, thwarting or simply ignoring efforts to achieve equal rights for all. Here are the stories of those who were forced to work on the construction of the mansion at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and the determined leaders who pressured U.S. presidents to outlaw slavery, White House slaves and servants who went on to write books, Secret Service agents harassed by racist peers, Washington insiders who rose to the highest levels of power, the black artists and intellectuals invited to the White House, community leaders who waged presidential campaigns, and many others. Juxtaposing significant events in White House history with the ongoing struggle for civil rights, Clarence Lusane makes plain that the White House has always been a prism through which to view the social struggles and progress of black Americans.

Clarence Lusane is an Associate Professor of Political Science in the School of International Service at American University where he teaches and researches on international human rights, comparative race relations, social movements and electoral politics.

He is also an author, activist, scholar, lecturer, and journalist. For more than 30 years, he has written about and been active in national and international anti-racism politics, globalization, U.S. foreign policy, human rights and social issues such as education and drug policy. He has spent two years living in London conducting research on racism and human rights in Europe, and working with European institutions and NGOs.

His previous books include, Colin Powell and Condoleeza Rice: Foreign Policy, Race, and the New American Century,; Hitler’s Black Victims: The Experiences of Afro-Germans, Africans, Afro-Europeans and African Americans During the Nazi Era; Race in the Global Era: African Americans at the Millennium; No Easy Victories: A History of Black Elected Officials; African Americans at the Crossroads: The Restructuring of Black Leadership and the 1992 Elections; The Struggle for Equal Education; and Pipe Dream Blues: Racism and the War on Drugs.

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John Gibler reads from To Die in Mexico: Dispatches from Inside the Drug War

John Gibler reads from To Die in Mexico: Dispatches from Inside the Drug War

In conjunction with Global Exchange, John Gibler visited City Lights Bookstore on June 15th, 2011 to read and talk about his new book, To Die in Mexico: Dispatches from Inside the Drug War.

Combining on the ground reporting and in-depth discussions with people on the front lines of Mexico’s drug war, To Die in Mexico tells behind-the scenes-stories that address the causes and consequences of Mexico’s multi-billion-dollar drug-trafficking business.

Gibler tells the hair raising stories of a Mexican journalist kidnapped, interrogated and threatened with death by the Gulf Cartel before being miraculously released; family members of people killed in the conflict; survivors of assassination attempts and massacres; along with crime-beat photographers, funeral parlor workers, government officials, convicted traffickers, cab drivers and others who find themselves working against, with, or for the drug cartels.

Gibler sees beyond the cops-and-robbers myths that pervade government and media portrayals of the unprecedented wave of violence and looks to the people of Mexico for solutions to the crisis now pushing Mexico to the breaking point.

John Gibler is a writer based in Mexico and California, the author of Mexico Unconquered: Chronicles of Power and Revolt (City Lights Books, 2009), and a contributor to País de muertos: Crónicas contra la impunidad (Random House Mondadori, 2011). He is a correspondent for KPFA in San Francisco and has published in magazines in the United States and Mexico, including Left Turn, Z Magazine, Earth Island Journal, ColorLines, Race, Poverty, and the Environment, Fifth Estate, New Politics, In These Times, Yes! Magazine, Contralínea, and Milenio Semanal.

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Bukowski scholar David Stephen Calonne reads from More Notes of a Dirty Old Man

More Notes of a Dirty Old Man, edited by Bukowski scholar David Stephen Calonne

David Stephen Calonne stopped by City Lights Bookstore on September 8th to read from the third collection of Charles Bukowski’s writings, More Notes of a Dirty Old Man.

After toiling in obscurity for years, Charles Bukowski found fame in 1967 with his autobiographical newspaper column, “Notes of a Dirty Old Man,” and a book of that name in 1969. He continued writing this column, from its inception in Open City to its conclusion in High Times, through the mid-1980s.

This new collection gathers many uncollected gems from the column’s 20-year run. These stories and essays haven’t been seen in decades, making More a valuable addition to Bukowski’s oeuvre. Filled with his usual obsessions–sex, booze, gambling–More features Bukowski’s offbeat insights into politics and literature, his tortured relationships with women, and his lurid escapades on the poetry circuit. Highlighting his versatility, the book ranges from thinly veiled autobiography to fictional tales of dysfunctional suburbanites, disgraced politicians, and down-and-out sports promoters, climaxing with a long, hilarious adventure among French filmmakers, “My Friend The Gambler,” based on his experiences making the movie, Barfly. From his days at the post office through his later fame, More follows the entire arc of Bukowski’s career.

Edited by Bukowski scholar David Stephen Calonne, More Notes of a Dirty Old Man features an afterword outlining the history of the column and its effect on the author’s creative development.

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