San Francisco poets and artists gathering for a special poetry reading to celebrate Diane di Prima, San Francisco new Poet Laureate.
Roberto Vargas and Nina Serrano were the main organizers of this very successful community event that included the participation of three former San Francisco Poets Laureates: Jack Hirschman, Janice Mirikitani, and Devorah Major. It also featured poets Lorna Dee Cervantes, Jorge Tetl Argueta, Avotcja, Adrián Arias, and Mamacoatl.
"SOME WORDS ABOUT THE POEM"—Text read by Diane di Prima at the Mission Cultural Center of San Francisco on February 19, 2010:
Poetry can bring joy, it can ease grief. It bridges different worlds & myriad cultures.
Poetry can bring rain & make the crops grow. It smoothes the path for the traveler and brings sleep to the feverish child.
Poetry is our heart's cry and our heart's ease.
It constantly renews our seeing: so we can speak the constantly changing Truth.
Poets speak truth when no one else can or will. That's why the hunger for poetry grows when the world grows dark. When repression grows, when people speak in whispers or not at all, they turn to poetry to find out what's going on.
Poetry can hold the tale of the tribe—of each and every tribe, so when we hear it, we can hear each other, begin to know where we came from.
We write poetry to remember, and sometimes we write poetry to forget. But hidden in our forgetting, encoded there, is our remembering—our secrets.
Poetry holds paradox without striving to solve anything.
Sometimes it can speak the unspeakable.
Always the stream of language points backward towards its source. Toward the moment before speech: headwaters of the rivers of language that stream through unfolding worlds.
The poem can be ritual or dance, prayer or dirge. It is music, story, riddle, lullaby. Song, spell, enchantment. Hex or blessing. Serenade or reverie. There is nowhere it can't go, nothing the poem can't be.
The poem is dream and dreamer intertwined. It remakes language in the act of being writ. Mind and tongue, breath and mark. Papyrus, clay, paper, cyber-bit and byte.
When spoken, it cuts a shape in time, when written it forms itself in space. It is often there in your paper before you pick up the pen. At those times all you have to do is trace it. Sometimes you hear it like a radio in your head & take it down like dictation.
And yet it is always, inevitably, rooted in our flesh—the very flesh of the poet who writes or types: Music begins to atrophy when it gets too far from the dance. Poetry begins to atrophy when it gets too far from music, a great poet observed. The poem is our breath, our heartbeat.
Poetry brings us together, helps us know one another. It bridges time as well as space—we can glimpse the worlds of
"Whoso list to hount I know where is an hinde"
"Darkling I listen, and for many a time
I have been half in love with easeful Death . ."
though those worlds are long gone.
Just as we can read the poetry of a contemporary thousands of miles away and feel transported to that place, feel that soil, that sun.
At a reading for the Sandinistas, right here, long ago, one of my children said: "All artists are warriors, aren't they, Mom? That's because there's so many parts to art. "
There are so many parts to poetry—now more than ever, and today I am here with you because I've been named the Poet Laureate of San Francisco—a title I am barely able to wrap my mind around.
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Diane Di Prima - Revolutionary Letters, 1969by spookynorman3,574 views
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