
David Meltzer is a poet and a time traveler. He came here from 1937, and remembers feeling “doomed by the atom bomb” when he was…

City Lights published Elaine Kahn‘s debut full-length collection of poems, Women in Public, as the thirteenth title in the City Lights Spotlight series. The following exchange was conducted by email. STEVEN…

When I walked out of the train station in Barcelona, I was confronted with a machine gun. Someone in the Guardia Civil was interested in…

One has to be a lowbrow, a bit of a murderer, to be a politician, ready and willing to see people sacrificed, slaughtered, for the…

In 2005 I was in a theater in Davis watching a man waving a huge silver-metallic banner back and forth. There was a fork-lift involved,…

I settle into the prism… tone of solemnity… pulse of the window…. – Henri Michaux I was on the second floor of City Lights ,…

“The force that through the green fuse drives the flower / Drives my green age…” — Dylan Thomas When I arrived at the Focus Gallery…

“The finest poetry is not ashamed of the plainest fact.” (William Dean Howells) Back in the ’60’s, there was a war on that was tearing the…

There was a record of Moroccan trance music playing in the poetry room at City Lights. Acoustically it was astute, what with William Burroughs having…