GOLDIES 2008 Lifetime Achievement winner: Anything but a vanity press
BY ARI MESSER
Wednesday November 5, 2008
The first book I held close to my heart was Italian poet Antonio
Porta's 1987 Kisses from Another Dream, number 44 in the ongoing City
Lights Pocket Poets Series. I bought it on a trip to the city from
Santa Cruz when I was around 17, and I savored every line, whipping
out the book at coffee shops and other high school hangouts, in
attics late at night, at beach bonfires, and even for a speech at one
friend's funeral. It wasn't just the eerily direct poems that turned
me on, nor the delightful format (which has remained basically
unchanged in the series aside from modernized cover designs), but a
feeling of participation in a tradition that began with the first
City Lights Publications book, founder Lawrence Ferlinghetti's
Pictures of the Gone World in 1955, and that has continued with
wordsmiths and thinkers from Allen Ginsberg and Charles Bukowski to
Tom Hayden, Terry Wolverton, and San Francisco poet laureate Jack Hirschman.
I am biased about City Lights, but isn't that the mark of good
publishers to increase readers' bias toward purveyors of quality
writing and thought? To this end, City Lights has participated in a
type of conscious branding of which Americans can be proud.
The publisher and North Beach bookstore continues to be marked by
fierce, heartfelt works that seem to emanate from their instantly
recognizable Y-with-an-O-on-top logo of a human in a state of
ecstasy, outrage, celebration, and/or soothsaying.
Having worked in numerous positions in the small press world, I
continue to be annoyed by the oddly prevalent idea that putting out
more books including those of low quality which you think will sell
somehow guarantees success. Despite this type of bingeing, the
information age has ushered in a new set of consumers whose
interests, resources, and appetites run so wide that they crave
guidance across the board. From the Slow Food movement to
Bookforum.com's daily online roundups, people are willing to research
and improve most areas of their lives. Publishers have long served
this need, and under the guidance of the current executive director,
Elaine Katzenberger, and others such as editor and Guardian
contributor Garrett Caples, co-owner Nancy Peters, and Open Media
Series acquiring editor Greg Ruggiero, City Lights is increasing the
potential of real and literary democracy.
At a publishing-world dinner a little while back, Katzenberger
impressed me with her eloquent dedication to publishing good writing
without unreasonable marketing goals. Obviously City Lights wants its
books to sell, but there's no reason to expect Oprah's Book Club-type
numbers. Part of the reason the press is still in business is that it
has taken risks on good but unknown writers, not on bad but
marketable mishmash. In his introduction to 1995's City Lights Pocket
Poets Anthology, Ferlinghetti writes: "The function of the
independent press (besides being essentially dissident) is still to
discover to find the new voices and give voice to them and then
let the big publishers have at them." He goes on to remark that
although City Lights initially tapped into the Beat scene, it has
continued to respond to current circumstances: "From the beginning
the aim was to publish across the board, avoiding the provincial and
the academic, and not publishing (that pitfall of the little press)
just our 'gang.' I had in mind rather an international, dissident,
insurgent ferment."
In a recent column for Slate, Emily Yoffe noted that taking offense
especially taking offense at taking offense has become a "political
leitmotif" during the seemingly endless election season. Any actual
discussion disappears into the mist. City Lights' political output,
whether you agree with individual authors or not, has certainly
worked against the reactionary bullshit and political fluff that
plagues politics everywhere. It's been good to see them bringing this
cultural literacy to more art-related titles of late, including
2007's All Over Coffee by Paul Madonna and this year's Shoot an
Iraqi: Art, Life and Resistance Under the Gun by Wafaa Bilal and Kari
Lydersen, a much-needed evaluation of Bilal's controversial project.
One of the poems in that heart-close Porta volume is "You Continue to
Ask What Silence Is." If poetry comes from silence, and politics from
the space between dreams and reality, then City Lights knows what
silence is, and this is why its authors scream so sweetly.
A Lifetime Achievement award is as much a hymn to co-owner
Ferlinghetti's life and early organizational skills as to what City
Lights has become. Though he has technically passed over the
editorial reins, Ferlinghetti remains involved in the press and also,
in terms of his own writing, intentionally uninvolved: he has kept
New Directions, over on the other coast, as the publisher of his own
writing, ensuring that in an age of celebrity and numbness, City
Lights is anything but a vanity press.
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