april 9, 1996
thought i'd try to scribble out some impressions of the poetry reading
this morning--it's going to be quick and probably unspellchecked but i
wanted you to be able to experience the gist of the evening...
april is ... the coolest month
this is the first poetry event in which poets without tickets were
standing outside the theater with signs ("waiting for a miracle" it's
called at Dead Shows)...Herbst was packed and our seats were in the rafters
to the far right--"suicide seats" i said jokingly as we wiggled our way
past those already seated--because we were positioned at the railing that
overlooks the stairs down to the lobby.
x: just called "miracle tickets" or "i need a miracle" but essentially
right. by the way, this was part of national poetry month, and related
to the watershed event of the past
saturday.
the stage was furnished with obligatory turkey rug, podium, and sidetable
with a vase of roses..six chairs lined either side of the stage..
x: turkey rug? = oriental rug, persian rug, sex an d rugs
bob hass came out to the podium to master the ceremonies and asked that
everyone hold their applause until all the poets had read...and told us
x: this worked for the first five but strangely not for the last
three of the last four (5 sat at left and .
that all the profits from that evening were being donated to poetry flash
...and that six children, winners of the art and poetry contests sponsored
by the international rivers network would be going to washington d.c. to read their poetry
and show their art at the national gallery...
then the poets filed onto the stage--june jordan leading the lot in long
flowy dress and backpack-bag and bottle of water, then brenda hillman in
black, then thom gunn in slacks and plaid shirt and leather jacket, then
marilyn chin in black, and francisco alarcon in his largeness--and to the
other side of the stage walked
gary snyder
so zenly inconspicuous, michael
palmer in slacks and plaid shirt and leather jacket, and adrienne rich in
black, and czeslaw milosz in lone suit jacket and tie...
and the poets proceeded to read--in alphabetical order...
francisco alarcon walked to the podium to big applause and somebody
yelling out something from the rafter seats (the rowdy rows) and he called
to the four directions--in nahuatal--to hear his poems before reading in
english with a lisping , burred accent and again in nahuatal and also in
spanish...and the one i liked best i think was about moving to the mission
district after coming from mexico to study at stanford university and
finding that he liked the mission district it was "so real" everything so
real, "the air so airlike.." the chair in his apartment "so chairlike" and
everything so like it self...and he concluded his first poem to wild
applause and each poem thereafter to wild applause and continuing applause
as he left the podium and
marilyn chin came to the podium and told us a little story about her name
which is fully marilyn mayling chin and why mayling became marilyn because
of her crafty rasty gamblin and ramblin father and the lust which is what
makes men what they are so say the old women who married them which is why
he named her for a tin-haired blonde movie star and her mother, in her
old-country ignorance not knowing this name and unable to say the r ,
called her instead "number 1 daughter of some usefulness"... she read her
poems that entwined images and icons of two cultures, slyly invoking the
poetic icons of one ("...this is not the glazed wheelbarrow.." )
with
images of another ("...the old village princess without a crown on her head
in her flowered apron put her cleaver to the squid and split it in half but
the blade caught a corner of the sac of inky blood...) and
x: number one female offshoot, is what i think her mother, who couldn't
pronounce the letter r called her. geez, i can hardly add anything to
what you've written here briggs. you've captured her tone. she rocked
and she was very funny.
then thom gunn read and, strangely, i remember none of his poems..
x: oh, but i do. remember the softened englis haccent? remember the
poem in which he imagined his four friends who died (of AIDS) within 5
weeks of each other but who did not know each other watching tv on a
couch in the afterexistence, arms around each other at first, watching
him?
then brenda hillman stepped to the podium, a hillock of frizzly hair
peeking above the rim, and spoke in her elmer fuddy voice and read...and
christian said he liked her best because h was able to inhabit her poetry
most and i liked her hillock of hair and her glasses and the slump of her
shoulders in her black frock...
x: her way with words is what i aspire to. the way she invoked the
insight that the flower of hell is not hell but is a flower into that
poem of the beginning of the universe and sexual awakening,
i'm not mixing up two poems here am i? i want to find her books and
read her words for myself. it's like wanting to go buy the record after
hearing the song on the radio.
here's one line of hers i had to write down:
could the garden have said to the gardener "i made you grow"?
and then june jordan loped to the box and back to her chair where her
poems were forgot and back again to us to read--no--to exult and thrash and
sing and rap in voices of women of color of colorful women and dastardly
men...
x: she was the showstopper. she did for this reading what pigpen used to
do for the dead. she got down and dirty, pulled no punches, ragged on
god, using his own words, spoke her name, made it all sing, sometimes
--as she said about the character in the first poem she read--she get
so crazy. wow. she was great.
there was supposed to be a brief stretch between the first 5 and the
last 4, but hass spoke, read part of a haiku. i forget it, but it was
funny. there was a lot of humor all night.
and then the eminence gris rose and wobbled slightly toward the prow of
the rolling deck to stand, a captain of the seas of ancient history where
he comes from and the words ululated from his mouth in burbled polengl ish
but as he spoke i drifted back to the memory of the issa valley where the
poet was a boy before the war before the wagons carried corpses over the
frozen plains before he left that land and came to be a poet of another
place another tongue...
x: spellbinder. and what sumptuous language. a treat to hear a poem
first in english then in polish, as alarcon had read in his several
languages.
so michael palmer took the stand to tell us somewhat sheepishly it seemed
that he had promised to read these poems for his daughter who's words "i
have stolen" he said and read...
x: the poems were songs, eight in all but he read three of them (2,
3, and 8). i liked them. he read others as well. his voice was soft.
and adrienne rich, an overgrown elf in black, peeked over the podium to
read in sonorous voice and somewhere in that congestion of words i saw a
narrow victorian room overlooking the street and the corner grocery and the
aroma of coffee and exhaust and the labours of love and loss...
x: who evoked rukeyser and the titanic, who discovered the west coast
before any of us were born and described the fog.
and finally, or so we thought, the zen meister paul bunyan of poetry
raised his left hand to tell us coyote stories as i reminisced about a
tinytinroofed shack in a small meadow below saddleback lakes where a
woodstove sizzled and 9 people sat around the table and cheered as i heaved
the #12 cast iron frying pan with both hands and all my strength and a
footwide inch thick wholewheat pancake summersaulted up to the rafter where
it flopped and sat perhaps until the next spring when they would shovel the
snow to the door again and the poet sitting beside his oldest son and
grinning in his head bandana and grizzled ponytail behind me...
x: how modest was snyder. how fine-hewn his words. we were in good
hands, dozing off around the fire.
"we have a surprise for you" he said after all the poems were read, and
bob hass peered behind the black curtain at the back of the stage as if he
x: he hinted about a reunion, about someone flying from prague to
detroit to san francisco.
had lost something..."who do you think it is?'' gary snyder teased us and
we rustled in our seats and murmured mmmmm cluuu rnnsss berrrr...and then
"allen ginsberg!"...
and allen ginsberg emerged from behind the drapes to a din of applause, in
black rimmed pate and glasses and goatee and proceeded to shout a nursery
rhyme about skeletons and there were hundreds of them!
x: the ballad of the skeletons, i think. didn't we read it in some new
york publication, maybe censored some? reminded me of dr. seuss. also
funny, political, and light.
i forget his second poem, but his third and last was sung to the tune
of amazing grace and was about being homeless and being denied even a
smile, a meeting of the eyes, recognition, being looked through like
empty space.
then we all shuffled out. briggs and i led the way to max's opera
café, which just minutes or seconds earlier, at ten o'clock on monday
night, had closed for the evening. locking us out and the smug patrons
still filling the place in.
hundreds of them! and i
remembered--another remembering of poets--when Mrs. Leslie in her flaming
hair and her leather miniskirt hugging her big square hips drew the
curtains across the windows and locked the door of our high school english
class and swore us all not to tell anyone especially mr. macgregor that
mole what she was about to show, and the big steel reel clicked and the
pulldown screen flicked grainy grays of a large black spectacled goateed
poet in a top hat standing before a crowd of crosslegged people and
shouting, arms outstretched... and now he stood below the funnel of dark
heads who listened respectfully to this older poet describe the room where
he reminds himself to practice those immortal rhymes his ticket through the
subterranean gates where the beckoning spirits wait but there are too many
ways to forget that dark departure time to laze in light in the afternoon
chair too tired to pose to breathe and recite but it won't be funny if you
forget and no words come to mind when its bardo time...
briggs nisbet