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…
“Before Enlightenment, chop wood and carry water. After Enlightenment, chop wood and carry water.” – old Buddhist proverb City Lights was so packed that people…