LIVE! From City Lights

Catherine Wagner performing at City Lights. Editor of the City Lights/Spotlight Poetry series Garrett Caples interviewed poet Catherine Wagner before her reading at City Lights at the end of October. She finishes her tour in New York on Dec. 12th at the Poetry Project. They discussed performance and poetry, connecting with an audience, and the theory of William Blake’s “the bounding line,” which Wagner cites as the inspiration for her newest poetry collection Nervous Device. “Wagner’s fourth collection contains poems of memory and dark artifice. She writes with an obscure, magnetic lens… the linguistic tightness of these poems are highlights of Wagner’s collection.”—Publisher’s Weekly “Nervous Device is such a smart book. You never know where the poems are going to take you, or when some startling, often cringe-making image or thought will intrude. Unable to settle into a comfortable rhetorical space, these poems reject simple claims to knowing something or doing right or changing the world. Rather, they move like an erratic insect stuck in a language bell jar. Brilliant, and disturbing.”—Jennifer Moxley “Nervous device, the human machine, palpitating inside its own little bounding lines. These poems do everything the human device does, vibrating like an electrified tornado inside a glass jar, and make this reader profoundly alive to huge swathes of being. There is no machine for mastering the self (yet), but there are Cathy Wagner’s poems.”—Eleni Sikelianos “The poems in Nervous Device resonate with a knowing nod to time and the difficulty and struggle of being sentient and intimate—of loving while being human. This is poetry connectivity: sexy, poignant, knowing. And the poems here make me feel possible.”—Hoa Nguyen 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.

Lisbeth Haas discussed the life and work of Pablo Tac, July 15, 2012, at City Lights Bookstore, in celebration of the release of her book, Pablo Tac, Indigenous Scholar: Writing on Luiseño Language & Colonial History, C. 1840 (University of California Press), illustrated by James Luna. Noted California historian Lisbeth Haas presents the writing of Pablo Tac, a Luiseño Indian born at Mission San Luis Rey in l820, with his biography and an analysis of the unique perspectives he offered on Luiseño language and history during Spanish colonialism. This volume on Luiseño language and culture makes available a remarkable body of writings, the only indigenous account of early nineteenth-century California. It offers a new approach to understanding California’s colonial history.The grammatical examples Tac uses to explain the Luiseño language are important linguistically and culturally because they reveal the social relationships, material practices, and ideas common among Luiseños. His dictionary leaves a record of the translations that he and his elders made of Luiseño words into Spanish and vice versa. When read together, the distinct part of the manuscript make clear how Luiseños’ maintained their access to power despite their political defeat by the Spaniards. Pablo Tac also expresses Luiseño equality with the Spanish despite the harsh conditions they faced during the mission era. The unique linguistic, cultural, and historical records presented in this book reveal indigenous life and thought under Spanish colonialism in California, and provide a means to compare colonial-era Luiseño and the language as it is written and being taught today. James Luna reflects on Pablo Tac’s contemporary significance, and Luna’s art increases the book’s visual beauty. Lisbeth Haas (pictured to the left) is Professor of History and Chair of Feminist Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is the author of Conquests and Historical Identities in California, 1769–1936 (UC Press). James Luna is an internationally known American Indian contemporary artist of Payomkowishum descent. He is a member of the La Jolla Band of Luiseño Indians.

Phil Cousineau discusses his hew book, The Painted Word: A Treasure Chest of Remarkable Words and Their Origins (Cleis Press’ Viva Editions) at City Lights, September 13, 2012. Cousineau, linguistic detective and dictionary delver, is back with a priceless treasury of word stories and literary obscura that will enchant any lover of language. The words themselves range from the commonplace, such as biscuit, a twice-baked cake for Roman soldiers, to loanwords like chaparral, courtesy of Basque shepards who came to the American West; from word-reversals such as silly, which evolved from “holy” to “goofy” in a mere thousand years, and to words well worthy of revival, such as carrytale, a wandering storyteller. Cousineau’s journey through the history and mystery of words will enlighten as it delights. Phil Cousineau is an award-winning writer and filmmaker, teacher and editor, independent scholar and travel leader, storyteller and TV host. He is the author of numerous books including Wordcatcher An Odyssey into the World of Weird and Wonderful Words. He lives in San Francisco.  

The riveting Jim Nisbet visited City Lights Bookstore, Wednesday, July 18, 2012, to read from Old and Cold (Overlook Press), his new noir tour de force. What’s a guy to do, when he lives under a bridge and has an unshakeable thirst for martinis? Kill for cash. So goes the logic at the heart of Old and Cold, leading to a spree of hits that are sometimes perfectly executed, sometimes messy, set against the backdrop of San Francisco’s beaches, bars, and murky darkened streets. Told at breakneck speed in a bravura voice, this novel is Jim Nisbet’s finest work yet, reminiscent of Jim Thompson at his best and Tarantino at his most irreverent. A tough and tender love letter to a city’s underbelly, this is a shockingly funny tale of suspense that won’t let you go.     Praise for the work of Jim Nisbet: “An unheralded masterpiece of the noir genre. Everyone who loves Noir should read this brilliant book.” –James Ellroy “Nobody has Nisbet’s distinctive style, humor, and sheer craft … one of the finest masters of noir.” –Ken Bruen “Truly, hellishly gritty.” –Los Angeles Times Jim Nisbet is the author of twelve novels and five books of poetry. He has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize three times, shortlisted for the Hammett Prize, and published in ten languages. He resides in San Francisco. Also visit: http://noirconeville.com/

On Tuesday, July 10, 2012, City Lights Bookstore held a 2 Dollar Radio Party, celebrating the release of Radio Iris by Anne-Marie Kinney and How To Get Into the Twin Palms by Karolina Waclawiak (both published by Two Dollar Radio). Radio Iris is the story of Iris Finch, a socially awkward daydreamer with a job as the receptionist/personal assistant to an eccentric and increasingly absent businessman. When Iris is not sitting behind her desk waiting for the phone to ring, she makes occasional stabs at connection with the earth and the people around her through careful observation and insomniac daydreams, always more watcher than participant as she shuttles between her one-bedroom apartment and the office she inhabits so completely, yet has never quite understood. Her world cracks open with the discovery of “the man next door.” Over the next few weeks or months (the passage of time is iffy for Iris), she takes it upon herself to learn everything she can about this stranger. But the closer she gets to him, the more troubling questions at the heart of her own life rise to the surface, questions like – Why does she keep having the same dream? Why is it that she and her brother don’t seem to have a single shared memory of their childhood? What is it her boss actually does? In the end, Iris is faced with a choice she never imagined, and a reality she never knew enough to dread. How To Get Into the Twin Palms is the story of Anya, a young woman living in a Russian neighborhood in Los Angeles, who struggles between retaining her parents’ Polish culture and trying to assimilate into her adopted community. She lusts after Lev, a Russian man who frequents the Twin Palms nightclub down the block from Anya’s apartment. It is Anya’s wish to gain entrance to this seeminly exclusive club. How To Get Into the Twin Palms is a really funny and often moving book that provides a unique twist on the immigrant story, and provides a credible portrait of the city of Los Angeles, literally burning to the ground. “It was a strange choice to decide to pass as a Russian. But it was a question of proximity and level of allure. Russians were everywhere in Los Angeles, especially in my neighborhood and held a certain sense of mystery. I had long attempted to inhabit my Polish skin and was happy to finally crawl out of it. I would never tell my mother. She only thought of them as crooks and beneath us. They felt the same about us, we were beneath them. It had always been a question of who was under whom.” Anne-Marie Kinney is a graduate of the MFA Writing Program at California Institute of the Arts, and a former Associate Editor of the literary journal, Black Clock. She was awarded first prize in USC’s Edward W. Moses Creative Writing Competition for the story Two Mornings. Her short fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Indiana Review, Black Clock, Keyhole and Satellite Fiction. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband. Karolina Waclawiak received her MFA in fiction from Columbia University. She is the Deputy Editor of The Believer and lives and writes in Brooklyn.  

Chris Hedges stopped by City Lights to discuss his new book Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt on Wednesday, June 27, 2012. Camden, New Jersey, with a population of 70,390, is per capita the poorest city in the nation. It is also the most dangerous. The city’s real unemployment — hard to estimate, since many residents have been severed from the formal economy for generations — is probably 30 to 40 percent. The median household income is $24,600. There is a 70 percent high school dropout rate, with only 13 percent of students managing to pass the state’s proficiency exams in math. The city is planning $28 million in draconian budget cuts, with officials talking about cutting 25 percent from every department, including layoffs of nearly half the police force. The proposed slashing of the public library budget by almost two-thirds has left the viability of the library system in doubt. There are perhaps a hundred open-air drug markets, most run by gangs like the Bloods, the Latin Kings, and MS-13. Camden is awash in guns, easily purchased across the river in Pennsylvania, where gun laws are lax. Camden, like America, was once an industrial giant. It employed some 36,000 workers in its shipyards during World War II and built some of the nation’s largest warships. It was the home to major industries, from RCA Victor to Campbell’s Soup. It was a destination for immigrants and upwardly mobile lower middle class families. Camden now resembles a penal colony. In Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Chris Hedges and American Book Award winning cartoonist Joe Sacco show how places like Camden, a poster child of postindustrial decay, stand as a warning of what huge pockets of the United States will turn into if we cement in place a permanent underclass. In addition to Camden, Hedges and Sacco report from the coal fields of West Virginia, Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota and undocumented farm worker colonies in California. With unemployment and underemployment combined at far over ten percent, as Congress proposes to slash Medicare and Medicaid, Food Stamps, Pell Grants, Social Security, and other social services, Hedges and Sacco warn of a bleak near future—where cities and states fall easily into bankruptcy, neofeudalism reigns, and the nation’s working and middle classes are decimated. A shocking report from the frontlines of poverty in America, Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt is a clarion call for reform. Chris Hedges, a Senior Fellow at The Nation Institute, spent nearly two decades as a foreign correspondent in Central America, the Middle East, Africa, and the Balkans, with fifteen years at the New York Times. He is the author of the bestsellers War is Force That Gives Us Meaning, American Fascists, Empire of Illusion and Death of the Liberal Class. He currently writes for numerous publications, including Harper’s, the New York Review of Books, Granta, and Mother Jones. A columnist for Truthdig, he lives in Princeton, New Jersey.

On June 20th, 2012, Carlos Aldama and Umi Vaughan came together at City Lights Bookstore to celebrate the release of Carlos Aldama’s Life in Batá: Cuba, Diaspora, and the Drum. Batá identifies both the two-headed, hourglass-shaped drum of the Yoruba people and the culture and style of drumming, singing, and dancing associated with it. This book recounts the life story of Carlos Aldama, one of the masters of the batá drum, and through that story traces the history of batá culture as it traveled from Africa to Cuba and then to the United States. For the enslaved Yoruba, batá rhythms helped sustain the religious and cultural practices of a people that had been torn from its roots. Aldama, as guardian of Afro-Cuban music and as a Santería priest, maintains the link with this tradition forged through his mentor Jesus Pérez (Oba Ilu), who was himself the connection to the preserved oral heritage of the older generation. By sharing his stories, Aldama and his student Umi Vaughan bring to light the techniques and principles of batá in all its aspects and document the tensions of maintaining a tradition between generations and worlds, old and new. The book includes rare photographs and access to downloadable audio tracks. “A solid ethnography, grounded in a rich and dramatic biography, reveals the creative power of the Yoruba drum to communicate sounds and words that are invested with rich secular and religious meanings about people and culture, identity and history, life and after-life. Only a scholar-performer with an uncommon imaginative talent could have written this extraordinary book.” – Toyin Falola, Distinguished Teaching Professor, The University of Texas at Austin “Everything you need to know about batá and batá-playing is in this text, expertly taught and philosophically interpreted by Carlos Aldama and his star yamboki (apprentice), Umi Vaughan….I am proud to have read this Afro-Cuban classic.” – Robert Farris Thompson, author of Tango: The Art History of Love and Aesthetic of the Cool: Afro-Atlantic Art and Music “What a beautiful duet and deep dialogue between anthropologist Umi Vaughan and his batá teacher Carlos Aldama we find in these pages. We are so fortunate their paths crossed and that we now have the gift of their interwoven story, which makes the meaning of the drum in Cuban history, religion, and culture come alive. . . . This is anthropology carried out with dedication, passion, and trust, and most of all with illuminating grace.” —Ruth Behar, Professor of Anthropology, University of Michigan, and author of An Island Called Home: Returning to Jewish Cuba Carlos Aldama has made significant contribution to the richness and livelihood of Afro-Cuban music and spiritual traditions. Carlos Aldama is omo Añá (sworn to the drum) and a priest of Changó in the Santería religion. Born in Havana, he was a founding member of Conjunto Folklórico Nacional de Cuba, studying under its original musical director, Jesus Pérez (Oba Ilu), and later serving as musical director himself. He has worked with the National Symphony of Cuba, playwright Roberto Blanco, and Karl Marx Theatre director Alex Valdez, and has performed with Adalberto Alvarez y su Son, Lazaro Ros and Olorún, and Gonzalo Rubalcaba. Visit his website: http://www.carlosaldama.com/ Umi Vaughan is an artist and anthropologist who explores dance, creates photographs and performances, and publishes about African Diaspora culture. He is also omo Añá and is a priest of Ochun in the Santería religion. He is Assistant Professor of Africana Studies at California State University, Monterey Bay, and author of Rebel Dance, Renegade Stance: Timba Music and Black Identity in Cuba. Visit his website: http://umiart.com/

On Tuesday, May 8, 2012, at City Lights Bookstore, translator Damion Searls and author Peter Orner discussed and read from the work of Nescio (Jan Hendrik Frederik Grönloh) to celebrate the release of Amsterdam Stories (introduction by Joseph O’Neill, translated from the Dutch by Damion Searls, published by NYRB Books). Jan Hendrik Frederik Grönloh was a successful Dutch businessman, executive of the Holland-Bombay Trading Company and father of four, with a secret life: under the pseudonym Nescio (Latin for “I don’t know”), he wrote a series of short stories that went unrecognized at the time but that are now widely considered the best prose ever written in Dutch. Nescio’s stories look back on the enthusiasms of youth with an achingly beautiful melancholy comparable to the work of Alain-Fournier and F. Scott Fitzgerald. He writes of young dreams from the perspective of adult resignation, but re-inhabits youthful ambition and adventure so fully that the later perspective is the one thrown into doubt—and with language as fresh as when it was written a century ago. His last long story, written and set during World War II, is a remarkable evocation of the Netherlands in wartime and a hymn to our capacity to take refuge in memory and imagination. This is great literature—capturing the Dutch landscape and scenes of Amsterdam with a remarkable poetry, and expressing the spirit of the country of businessmen and van Gogh, merchants and visionaries. This first translation of Nescio into English—all the major works and a broad selection of his shorter stories—is a literary event. About the authors: Nescio (1882–1961) was the pseudonym of Jan Hendrik Frederik Grönloh. His reputation as one of the most important modern Dutch writers was only established after his death. Joseph O’Neill was born in Cork, Ireland. He writes regularly for The Atlantic Monthly and his works include the novels This Is the Life, The Breezes and Netherland, winner of the PEN/Faukner Award for Fiction, and the nonfiction book Blood-Dark Track: A Family History. He lives with his family in New York City. Damion Searls is the author of What We Were Doing and Where We Were Going and an award-winning translator, most recently of Rainer Maria Rilke’s The Inner Sky: Poems, Notes, Dreams, Jon Fosse’s Aliss at the Fire, and Hans Keilson’s Comedy in a Minor Key. NYRB Classics has published his abridged edition of Henry David Thoreau’s Journal and will publish his translations of André Gide’s Marshlands. Peter Orner is the author of of the novels Love and Shame and Love and The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo and the short story collection Esther Stories. His short fiction has been published in the Atlantic Monthly, The Paris Review, as well as the Pushcart Prize Anthology. He has co-edited Hope Deferred: Narratives of Zimbabwean Lives and edited Underground America: Narratives of Undocumented Lives a collection of true stories about undocumented workers in America, which are both part of the Voice of Witness series from McSweeney’s.

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.

David Talbot stopped by City Lights Bookstore on Thursday, May 10, 2012, to read and discuss his new book Season of the Witch: Enchantment, Terror and Deliverance in the City of Love (Simon & Schuster). In a kaleidoscopic narrative, the New York Times bestselling author of Brothers recounts the gripping story of the civil strife and tragedies that beset San Francisco between 1967 and 1982—and led to the city’s ultimate rebirth and triumph. San Francisco was the cradle of the 1960s, but also its coffin, giving rise to the Zebra and Zodiac killers, Altamont, Jonestown, the assassination of Harvey Milk, and the AIDS epidemic. And yet San Francisco not only rose from the wreckage of the 1970s, but developed a live-and-let-live tolerance that influenced the entire country. David Talbot, founder of the San Francisco based web magazine Salon, is uniquely poised to tell his iconic city’s story in all its terrible glory. Season of the Witch comes to life with jaw-dropping scenes and a cast of characters that includes the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane, Charles Manson, Patty Hearst, the Cockettes, the Hells Angels, Harvey Milk, and the mercurial 49ers coach Bill Walsh. As Talbot writes, “San Francisco values did not come into the world with flowers in their hair—they were born howling, in blood and strife.” This is the wild story of the people and events that shaped the city that continues to shape the nation. What has been said about Season of the Witch: “A fresh, fun, vigorous look at a strange American city David Talbot knows well and loves with irony.” – Oliver Stone “As a phenomenally intuitive journalist, editor, and culture critic, David Talbot has not only channeled the Zeitgeist but helped make it.” – Camille Paglia, best-selling author, and culture critic “David Talbot is a great story-teller. He writes like an angel and has a reporter’s passion for the truth. Describing people I knew, I can say that Talbot has perfect pitch, but he has also introduced me to others, as thrilling as sin. He got it all just right and gets closer to describing the lusty, languorous, glamorous, and sometimes lethal Saint named Francisco than anyone I know. The book overflows with gifts. I’m in awe of it.” – Peter Coyote, author of Sleeping Where I Fall David Talbot, author of the New York Times bestseller Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years, has been hailed as a “pioneer of online journalism” by The New York Times, is the founder and former editor-in-chief of Salon. He has worked as a senior editor for Mother Jones magazine and as a features editor for the San Francisco Examiner. Talbot has written for The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, Time and other publications. He lives with his family in San Francisco.

Poets Brian Lucas, author of Circles Matter, and Bill Luoma author of Some Math, read at City Lights Bookstore on Thursday, May 17, 2012 during an evening of exquisite surrealistic murmurings and associated sounds, featuring ethereal noisemakers Cloud Shepherd. One of the finest poets in the Bay Area’s surrealist underground, Brian Lucas is also a musician and visual artist (his work appears on the cover of the City Lights book Trance Archive: New and Selected Poems by Andrew Joron). Circles Matter is Lucas’ second full-length collection, much of it composed during a six-year stay in Thailand. Recalling René Char in his use of aphoristic prose, combined with the wild irrationality of, say, Benjamin Péret or Aimé Césaire, Circles Matter is state-of-the-art American poetry, veering between the poles of meditation and explosivity. —Recommended by Garrett, City Lights Books “A triple play. Brian Lucas—painter, poet, musician—eye, heart, mind. Written with a sense of unfolding mystery, his voice on the page is sure in its tone, the ongoing quest and questioning is awake with profound and restless detail. Out of the ballpark. I await more.”—David Meltzer “Shock is the awe of reading—’a fable folded into sea.’ The elemental act of reading is physical as well as chemical, a catalyst transforming the coastline of clouds into the graceful synaesthetic prosody of Circles Matter. The circles that matter are lines of approach, the ‘Contents’ describing 25 poems and 3 drawings, from ‘Awe’ to ‘Sketch of an Eclipse.’ Brian Lucas’s elegant Circles Matter moves time, in time, ‘Never resting as ideal state.’”—Norma Cole Brian Lucas was born in Visalia, California in 1970. He is the author of many books, including Telepathic Bones (Berkeley Neo-Baroque, 2010), Light House (Meeting Eyes Bindery, 2006), The Trustees in Spite of Themselves (Neko Buildings, 1999) and Circles Matter (BlazeVOX [books], 2012). He contributed drawings to Force Fields (Hooke Press, 2010), a collaboration with Andrew Joron. After several years living in Thailand, he now resides in Oakland, California, where he plays in the spontaneous music ensemble Chamber Cloud.     In Some Math, the syncopations of poetry meet the (ir)regularity of mathematical equations. Consider the “story problems” of high school math class. When encountering the word “and,” replace it with the addition symbol “+.” When encountering the word “of,” replace it with the multiplication symbol “x.” Now reverse the process. The result is a series of sound poems that both employ and interrogate the global language of systems and networks. Astrophysics. Computer science. Short tetrameters. Long dactyls. 9/11. US military strategy. The energy pathways of acupuncture. The fish ladders of Gmail. The wires and electrodes of torture. The swirling products of global capital. Mathematician Benjamin Pierce called his field “the science that draws necessary conclusions.” You do the math.     Bill Luoma is the author of Some Math, Works & Days, Dear Dad, Swoon Rocket, and Western Love.        

On Thursday, May 24, 2012, at City Lights Bookstore, Eileen Myles read from Snowflake / different streets (Wave Books) and Anna Joy Springer read from The Vicious Red Relic, Love: A Fabulist Memoir (Jaded Ibis Productions). this is the most important thing in the world I say aloud to everything In her first book of poetry since 2007, legendary poet, critic, and novelist Eileen Myles creates poet and poem anew as she pushes the boundaries of her craft ever closer to the enigmatic core. Snowflake finds the poet awash in an extended and distressed landscape mediated by technology and its distortion of time and space. In different streets, the poet returns home, to the familiar world of human connection. Two books meet as one: more Eileen Myles, more indelible connection, more fleeting ecstasy. Eileen Myles was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1949, was educated in Catholic schools in Arlington, graduated from UMass Boston in 1971 and moved to New York City in 1974 to be a poet. She quickly became part of the reading, publishing and performance scene in the East Village, editing dodgems in the late 70s and becoming part of the community of St. Mark’s Poetry Project where she studied and was friends with Ted Berrigan, Alice Notley, Paul Violi and Bill Zavatsky. In 1979 she was assistant to poet James Schuyler. She was Artistic Director of the Poetry Project in 1984-86. Myles is a vivid interpreter of her own work and travels widely in the US and Canada and internationally giving readings and performances. In 2007, she published Sorry, Tree (Wave Books, 2007), the latest of more than a dozen volumes of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction including Not Me (Semiotext(e), 1991), Chelsea Girls (Black Sparrow Books, 1994), The New Fuck You/adventures in lesbian reading (Semiotext(e), 1995), Cool for You (Soft Skull Press, 2000), Skies (Black Sparrow Books, 2001), The Importance of Being Iceland: Travel Essays in Art (Semiotext(e), 2009) and Inferno: A Poet’s Novel (OR Press, 2010). Her most recent book is Snowflake / different streets (Wave Books, 2012). She wrote the libretto for Hell, an opera with music composed by Michael Webster which was performed on both coasts, 2004-2006. In 2007 she received The Warhol/Creative Capital art writers’ grant. In 2010 the Poetry Society of America gave her the Shelley Memorial Award and in 2011 she received the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction for her novel Inferno. She contributes to a wide number of publications including ArtForum, Bookforum, Parkett, and The Believer. She is a Professor Emeritus at UC San Diego, where she taught for five years. She lives in New York.   Anna Joy Springer is a prose writer and visual artist who makes grotesques – creating hybrid texts that combine sacred and profane elements to evoke intensely embodied conceptual-emotional experiences in readers. Formerly a singer in the Bay Area bands, Blatz, The Gr’ups, and Cypher in the Snow, Anna Joy has toured the United States and Europe being a wild feminist punk performer, and she has also toured with the all-women spoken word extravaganza, Sister Spit. She is author of the illustrated novella The Birdwisher (Birds of Lace) and a graphic narrative, In An Egg, forthcoming. She received her MFA in Literary Arts from Brown University in 2002, and she is an Assistant Professor of Literature at University of California, San Diego where she truly loves teaching courses in Experimental Writing, Graphic Texts, and Postmodern Feminist Literatures.        

On Wednesday, May 30, 2012, Jerry Mander stopped by City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco to discuss The Capitalism Papers: Six Fatal Flaws of an Obsolete System (Counterpoint Press). In the vein of his bestseller, Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television, nationally recognized social critic Jerry Mander researches, discusses, and exposes the momentous and unsolvable environmental and social problem of capitalism. Mander argues that capitalism is no longer a viable system: “What may have worked in 1900 is calamitous in 2010.” Capitalism, utterly dependent on never-ending economic growth, is an impossible absurdity on a finite planet with limited resources. Climate change, together with global food, water, and resource shortages, are only the start. Mander draws attention to capitalism’s obsessive need to dominate and undermine democracy, as well as to diminish social and economic equity. Designed to operate free of “morality,” the system promotes “permanent war” as a key economic strategy. Worst of all, the problems of capitalism are intrinsic to the form. Many organizations are already anticipating the breakdown of the system and are working to define new hierarchies of democratic values that respect the carrying capacities of the planet. Jerry Mander is the founder and director of the International Forum on Globalization (IFG), a groundbreaking international think tank and activist community, focused on exposing the negative impacts of economic globalization. Mander founded the U.S.’s first non-profit ad agency in 1971, Public Media Center, which ran campaigns for the Sierra Club, Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth and various anti-war groups. Mander is also a renowned critic of mass media and the author of such classics as: Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television; In the Absence of the Sacred: The Failure of Technology and the Survival of the Indian Nations; and, more recently, co-edited Alternatives to Globalization, Paradigm Wars: Indigenous Peoples’ Resistance to Globalization and The Super Ferry Chronicles.

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