 Good evening welcome everyone to tonight's edition of poem jam our monthly poetry reading second Thursday of each month I'm John Smalley a librarian with the General Collections and Humanities Center the main library where most of the poetry collection also resides While we're waiting for one or two more people to join us. I want to start by acknowledging our community On behalf of the public library We welcome you to the unseated and ancestral homeland of the Rama Tushaloni who are the original inhabitants of the San Francisco Peninsula as the indigenous stewards and in accordance with their tradition the Rama Tushaloni have never ceded lost nor forgotten their responsibilities as caretakers of this place as Guests we who reside in their traditional territory recognize that we benefit from living and working on their traditional homeland We wish to pay our respects by acknowledging the ancestors elders and relatives of the Rama Tushaloni and by affirming their sovereign rights as first peoples As I mentioned, this is an ongoing poetry series We hope you will come back next month if you want to know more about the poetry events and other literary events There are flyers on the table over there. You could also pick up a monthly newsletter Or visit our website sfpl.org and go to the events calendar there Please also help yourself to coffee and cookies and tonight only there is a limited edition of a new poem jam Pin if you don't see them on the table talk to Doug. He's in the audience And that ends my announcements without further ado. Let me introduce the host of today's show Kim Shuck, please give a warm welcome to Kim Shuck Hey folks, I'd also like to thank whatever genus loci is responsible for the fact that a kayak was not necessary today because the weather For those who aren't aware and are watching this later on a video has been exciting in all kinds of ways so We're here today to celebrate a Book that I really believe in called beat not beat It was the brainchild of rich Ferguson and It's a really spectacular collection every time I go through it. I find new things that I think are pretty exciting and so This is the book I'm gonna read my poem and then I'm gonna Grab some people up. I Was one of the co-editors. There's another co-editor here Tonight Changing light and crows Today we are the streaked and fallen leaves in the red light of bookstore and bar in The tumble of road works and at least one tree full of crows and Five-fingered leaves the stroking wind and the purposeful fog in these moments before the walk down the main street Through an idea of history that is stretched until smooth Drawn between at least two people but usually more This is a song to this dangerous need to rewrite and we are the leaves We blow and skitter and know a different truth So the collection itself actually has It's a pretty good cross-section of Poets from different times. We don't really think about Poetic lineages as much in the United States as they do elsewhere, but this definitely you can draw some lines between Styles from era to era in this and it's it's well worth having our first reader tonight is going to be Judy Bernard who is Remarkable in a lot of ways But it's also a really spectacular poet, so please welcome Judy to the microphone It's an honor to be here. It's an honor to be included in this anthology I'm just delighted with the result and Delighted to be among such August company I was thinking about Beat the beat generation and what it means to be beat or not beat and I didn't come to any real conclusions It's a wide it's a wide field, but I Thought about as I I looked in this old poetry book of mine Which actually includes the poem that's in the anthology? I thought a lot about You know there have always there has always been a counterculture But somehow with the beats it was publicized it was lionized or demonized and So anyway, this is What I came up with this book is actually in three parts, and I think it this book was Dated even when I wrote it The first part is my experiences with the Construction company where I worked and I as I reread the poems I thought about the fact of the working class Which is a disappearing class in the United States now? one is either Rich or poor these days it seems so these are a couple of poems about the working class It also refers to immigrants Because the people that I worked with in the race in the construction company were were immigrants from Mexico and Central America This is Victor and Adolfo If I wrote down everything that comes to mind when Victor and Adolfo Returned to the shop to pick up a bag of cement or a can of paint Why a hundred pages wouldn't be enough? Skip the cliches How can I when these guys appear to me to revel in moldy stereotypes and to want to wear their ethnicity? Like a raincoat in a downpour Adolfo drives into the parking lot and screeches to a halt. He always drives the car is his Isn't my fault. He screeches to a halt. I Swear, that's what he does. He says something and Victor laughs Adolfo drives speaks Victor rides shotgun laughs Adolfo ironic short muscular Victor sincere tall bony The way I remembered which one was which at first the wrong one was sancho panza The sixteen-year-old Toyota Corolla isn't white. It's pearl immaculate The color decal in the back window is what the very day water loop a herself immaculate Irony and sincerity get out of the car like they own the world Who do they think is watching the boss and I are watching? He says here come your boyfriends I could almost be their grandmother. I Read about this somewhere Mexicans love masks wrestlers revolutionaries Victor and Adolfo don't have to pull anything over their heads an absolute lack of guile is not possible must be opposed and however convincing an Ironic distance can't be maintained in public and in private forever Must be discarded among friends and family or even just to get laid So these two come to work every day Five six sometimes seven days a week they work Don't mind if you see them sweat, but they don't want you to see how they feel about it The big diamond stud Adolfo wears in his ear catches the light its glint punctuates his impassive face He mimes shut in the car door Demonstrating to Victor how he wants him to exit Victor laughs. I Wonder about their lives where they go after work if they have wives girlfriends mothers who miss them What do they hope to gain from this endless heavy labor? I wonder all of the above and more and you see I haven't even gotten them out of the parking lot This is called work clothes I Saw these words in a shop window on Mission Street Uniformes para todo tipo de trabajo. I Asked myself are their uniforms for every kind of work. I Studied the drug dealers and their clientele hanging out at McDonald's There was something uniform about their grimy t-shirts and faded jeans But you can't get that look from a store. I thought I Walked behind some young mothers with their mothers and babies in strollers The young mothers wore tight pants and high heels The old mothers wore flower prints and carried plastic bags The babies wore baby clothes and waved their little arms in the air Wives mothers Grandmothers daughters granddaughters lovers these women have too many jobs for one uniform. I thought I Stopped in a cafe for a cup of coffee. I Remembered old-time waitresses in pastel uniforms with lace hankies in their pockets Here the barista wore baggy pants cut off below the knee and a stained wife beater He had plugs in his ears and a ring in his nose Tattoos all over his body You can't fool me. I know those tattoos are some kind of uniform This book seemed to me as I was rereading it to be very much about finding voice finding a way of communicating and I came across this poem This is kind of the social justice part of the book where we wrote about Many of us did I don't know if you remember Muhammad Allah Jami He was the Qatari poet who was Imprisoned for speaking against the regime and he became a cause celeb writers pen took him up and writers all around the world Agitated for his release which he finally was released after some years Anyway, this is called we will be your voice for Muhammad Allah Jami The darkness has not made you invisible and the rim them of your breath will not be muffled by the walls that surround you the meaning of your song is not lost to us and the Sound of your words will not be stifled by the evil of your imprisonment We will be your voice We will count the days and the hours of your solitude and we will tally the cost of your poems That the jailers have denied us We will grasp our pens with renewed strength and we will expose tyranny and praise justice wherever we find it We will be your voice Your punishment is our punishment and your memory our memory We will travel with you to the limits of our imaginations We will find a new country where we can say what must be said and we will celebrate the scent of Jasmine and the Triumph of spring we will be your voice and This one seemed to me particularly Out of time I think because of my growing up in the 60s and early 70s You know Vietnam was our war and I thought that maybe this anti-war poem was a bit dated But I hope you find something here This is called what to do about the sorrows of war Watch an anti-war movie any anti-war movie watch platoon or the Hurt Locker Look at photographs of from World War two Don't look at the raising of the flag on Iwo Jima Look at pictures of Buchenwald listen to someone who is in Korea Don't listen to Hawkeye Pierce or Corporal Klinger Listen to someone who was there Starr at news footage from Vietnam stare at videos of naked screaming children Think about monks setting themselves on fire. Don't think about peaceful stoned hippies Think about crippled broken men unable to speak out loud still using the hand signals They use to communicate with each other on combat missions in the jungle See if you can find a homeless drug addicted veteran who hasn't pawned his purple heart See if you can find a veteran who will say the veterans administration did right by me. They kept every promise they made See if you can find anyone who was there who will say I'm sure H and orange didn't harm our troops It's all in their imaginations Picture a Middle-Edge Latina a single mother her only son flies supplies into combat zones in Iraq Picture her sleeping with our cell phone on her pillow every day more terrified than the last Picture him wondering why if he's going to get killed. He didn't just join a gang make some money Take care of his sisters before he died picture him wondering where all the rich boys are Learn geography find out what countries border Afghanistan learn to spell find out about post-traumatic stress disorder Learn the cures for insomnia look into the use of substandard equipment Look into the reasons why so many soldiers come home without limbs Look into the bank accounts of the profiteers look into the crimes perpetrated on native people Imagine someone shooting at you. This is not a dream. This is not a movie about cowboys and Indians And anyway, who are the cowboys who are the Indians? Imagine the guy next to you suddenly dead. What will you tell his parents? What will you tell his wife? What will you tell yourself about why he died? Here is what you can do about the sorrows of war Ring your hands until your skin comes off Weep until your eyes are dry break into loud sobs Whale and scream until they put you away tear out Clumps of your hair throw your hair into the fire dig your fingernails into the palms of your hands until blood appears Rub the blood on your face Plead with them to stop fighting throw your body between the combatants and beg them to stop stop stop and finally the poem from the Wonderful anthology. I think this about sums it up Will the poets keep quiet No, they will not they will not linger in the gloaming they will not idle in the daybreak They will not drows at noon The poets will speak They will whisper to their lovers. They will talk among themselves They will relate and orate and berate they will traverse to converse and scramble to gabble They will stop and chat about this and that they will discuss what is old hat They will rhyme and keep time The poets will speak they will scurry to the dais they will lean upon the lectern They will hold forth in the hall They will hit and miss and flail and fail They will proclaim and decline and defame and inflame the poets will pounce to pronounce they will praise and They will amaze and they will search their souls for days The poets will not keep quiet. The poets will speak And as the the tech gets rearranged Our next poet is Paul Corman Roberts who is I I've introduced him far too many times as basically my good right hand for a lot of projects But to be honest There will come a moment. I'm fairly sure where my literary career will Basically be a tricky trivia question about his so if you will please welcome Paul to the microphone Little bit little bit It is an honor and a privilege to be in in beat not beat to have my work Alongside people that I oh hi Carolyn Along people that I grew up reading wanting to be like wanting to emulate people whose lives I thought I wanted to have until I got to know them realize. Oh, maybe I'm glad I maybe Maybe I be careful what you wish for There's been a lot of going around about poetry being dead again. It seems like it comes around every other year So I had to take it on. This is why poetry is dead Because poetry won't make you rich There are no poetry billionaires There are no poetry millionaires that there are no poetry thousandaires There are no poetry agents. There are no poetry managers poetry managers are even more broke than poets Poetry doesn't have a retirement plan Poetry don't make moves Poetry don't own a yacht Poetry don't get down with yacht rock Poetry costs more than it makes poetry eats more than it works Poetry's application with a country club always gets tossed Poetry is insolvent poetry is bankrupt Poetry isn't listed on the New York Stock Exchange poetry has no hedge fund Poetry chooses the path of most resistance Every hostile takeover of poetry has failed The Holy Ghost of the poet Rupi Kaur might have been compels you How is poetry even alive? What does it mean to be alive? What does it mean to be dead? check Poetry is viral Poetry has no cure. You can't stop talking about how it's dead Checkmate, you're dead. You're dead. You're dead and out of this world Just kidding that last part's not really there This is called Howard Johnson's end the counter by default Becomes the longest bar in this dying train depotown The middle of the floor is one of those circular stone fire pits where a fake fire would warm a fake hearth an oasis among the garish carpeting You can visualize the ghosts of polyester couples and corduroy lounging around the stone circle like ancient Pueblo people used to but with Fufu cocktails Inside the fire pit a guy on a stool with a cowboy hat Faux sequin vests punching buttons on an outdated looping machine Old pop country heartbreak at electronica beats. He straps an acoustic 12 string around his neck and croons like Glen Campbell. I Hear there are louder brighter nightclubs in nearby towns larger towns almost small cities I'm not interested in those places desperate people don't go to those places I'm interested in the people who would rather come here because they used to come here before on cold winter nights When this used to be a hojo's Little timeliness is an older poem I'm bringing back for the For the moisture from from the sky. This is called the ragged there All that ripples in this latest version of the world are sand dunes parched cracked rippling from lack H celebrates with abandon with anticipation of inundation Already more hyper aware of the importance of water relative to my awareness when I was her age She watches me go outside and stand in it for a while watches me lift my face to it for a while I motion for her to join me and she and she does so if somewhat self-conscious the smile of her mouth Perfect in its honesty You know, I've had my share of this My fear is that in the day not far away She will need to record these moments as much for herself and not merely her children It was all pretty new poems. This is a very new poem Goya was a family man Presiding over their children's funerals monstrosity chases all the quiet air from the chapel nothing but sobs choking and sobs a Mother teaches her babies how to perform tricks on the shoulders of high waves The big rigged driver gets life as if he acted alone Anyone who knew anything long ago melted into liquid air or Oregon or Arizona or Ogden Always deeper into the always heart of savagery Saturn still buried always deep in our DNA Two more poems. I have a new I just self published a book I've never really self published a book before and I had the hood spot I actually put my face on the damn thing Yeah, it's this is an old picture, but it was it was a color a cartoonist like it just out of the three years ago It was all like hey, man, let's do a comic book like a poetry comic book. Okay, I'm into it So we have I have a poetry comic. Unfortunately, I only have one copy for sale tonight But if anyone's interested, I'm gonna read this short piece from it called clash of civilizations If I could read my own font Tonight there are artists and activists putting their bodies on the line on the borders in Arizona and California And at the detention centers in Texas in New Jersey in Florida And tonight as I come home from a meeting with the resistance There are nine squad cars in a chopper dispatched out to the surfside palms apartment complex Something about youths gathering on the beach the night after Independence Day scattered into the residential enclave For a fanning out from the seek and detain Tonight my little neighborhood has become the center of the island of lost adults Tonight there are artists and activists Trying to find something to hold the children for the trying to find something for the children to hold on to besides the bars of cages Tonight grows thick with a marine layer thick with tactical and medical duffels thick with canines and extra units thick with chatter of a sucker punch and an activated taser a cry of pain somewhere out there on Kitty Hawk Avenue You can't tell me there isn't a clash of civilizations happening out there on the borders at the detention centers and on Kitty Hawk Road on Independence weekend on the island of lost and found adults and Finally, I will close with the piece from the from beat not beat And this is and this is and this is this is one of the most beat things. I've ever written. I got to say The explanation of pretty much everything And still I can't help but think you contain not multitudes nor even all worlds But all the galaxies all the universes and all the ultra universe sigh you manifest the spiral not a cycle But a vector and echo in every medium. We have ever encountered This is not motion so much as frequency bits and pieces of you cramming yourself out of and into the perceptible there and There between the silla of your wavelengths and the caributus of your antimatter This is the curve This is the crux where all the philosophers and shamans and alchemists and visionaries and poets rend their hearts and dash their minds against the impossibly dense contradiction of existence and It can't be easy cycling in and out of all of these dimensions relative to your journey But I want to be among the first from my dank cubby hole to thank you all for the hard work You are forever birthing these armadas of Prince Caspians forever sailing towards the gravitational barriers where oceans of poppies and posies inevitably smother our brave lonely vessels in pollen and nectar never to return Yet around and around we continue little foundations of you with whom I sharely share bits of with Hypatia with Krishna Buddha Ah Christ, but also The first post them primate to discover the practical value of murder It is you whom all of us share So once more now your long nights journey into day preoccupied and you remain editing in the fringe cul-de-sacs on the edge of town on the perimeter of a campfire Where cold and dark things reflect just enough? Candescent light to keep you hypnotized horrified and everything between just long enough to keep the rest of us hanging around Which goes a long way towards understanding the explanation of pretty much everything. Thank you What some of you may not have noticed Is it in this slightly unlit area over here? There's a table and there are books on it and These books are by Julie Rogers Who is remarkable whose work? I was introduced to you by Bill Vartan, who is also remarkable and We are incredibly fortunate to have her coming up to this microphone right now. So please welcome Julie Rogers to the mic I am really happy to be here and I was thinking of my poem in beat not beat like a leaf on a great tree It's such an awesome book and when I look through it I was astonished because there are all the great writers that I love, you know, so thank you so much I'm gonna start with the poem that's in this wonderful tome Which I never expected to be published at all, but I sent it to essay Griffin and he took it This is called tendencies Life drives me crazy. I swear. This is not my car. I don't remember buying it I can't afford to rent it. I don't recall parking here. There's never enough insurance. I Wouldn't shop here if someone had warned me Who knew? Right here this gets real existential like I don't understand the stricken world So sad and beautiful All I know is somehow I stopped here and choose to stay to continue the tradition. I Tell myself remember to stand up Then I look to see if I'm here with the key Then it all comes back Turns out I do drive. I even have a license. I drive good Thank you This is a book that came out right when COVID started so it sat in a box at the bottom of the stairs for two and a half years It's called life on earth. It's a little chapbook And so I'll just read a few these are fairly short and I don't think I need to say much I think they're self-explanatory This is called the country as a toilet politics Tissue on a bathroom floor Used and tossed the intended function fleeting as a flush Not to insult, but the pipes are clogged the deodorizers spent No claims to deciphering the news or how to fix the way it is continually running on But here I am in the sewer system with the classes sinking into lower economics in the swirl of the drain that starts in a full tank and Fills to empty us Thank you This is I wrote this a couple years ago for some folks that were living at the freeway off ramp that I often go by It's called barely in the race Might seem easy to sit there on a corner with a sign hand-printed hungry More legible than a doctor's scrawled script for meds Maybe forgot to take them or just can't afford it or that's not what's needed It's about food water Shelter just begging day and night Weathered face facing traffic Sometimes with a dog or a bottle or a kid or reading a book Waiting with no room for anything else Just your life all packed up beside you in a shopping cart or just a bundle Crouching down on the curb at the starting gate of the finish line Thank you This poem is from an unpublished manuscript that I've been writing for 39 years It's all the poems I've written for my daughter song a and So this was written well after she moved out of the house But you know you just miss them And this is for all the moms It's called hen house The mother is never done Her hands work her heart play dough shapes The mold cuts her to size She looks in the mirror of her child's eyes and stares back She holds a bottle a receiver a broom remembers not knowing what to do but she never stops talking Her voice an alarm clock bullhorn lullaby Crackling long distance muttering under her breath quick prayers Hopes like great clouds on the horizon She tells herself to let go all birds fly She cleans and cleans the nest its emptiness its clutter of songs She learns to sing a new tune She's off-key, but carries on late at night when the other hens are quiet Thank you. Oh, here's a quick little poem About What some of us are enduring daily? It's called mugshot Turning gray is just another disguise Wrinkles thicker than thieves with heavy bags under eyes blurring distances farther off Whenever I look up close that face in the photo is someone else certainly not me Mine got lost in the mirror ages ago when off with that blonde remember her Didn't stay long though. I thought she'd never leave Took what I had and left me with this. It's so good to hear laughter about that Might just have one more This is from a book called House of the Unexpected that was published 2012 ten years ago seems like a hundred years ago, doesn't it? During COVID which is continuing by the way It was really a hard time For everyone and it was hard for me and I had to have many many come to Jesus periods Happened all the time in fact So this is a poem written a long time ago, but it still really touches on some of the things that were going on in my Mind and it goes way beyond my mind. It's one of those poems where you sit down and it just floods out. I Don't know where it came from It's called revelation. I am woman man child I am the peak the cave darkness brilliance. I am that which is invisible without substance a vision of nameless form present in the body in the senses an atmosphere of bliss and profusion I Am the empty voice of rumors that tell everything Revealer of secrets and lies the throbbing pulse of a hidden life spent in full view You cannot control me. I Am assertion withdrawal giving taking force of energy and creator of frenzy I am in your arms under your tongue between your legs in your heart so firmly That your life is your own, but your eventual surrender is certain. I Am your mother your lover your enemy your idea of yourself Undone made more beautiful more real more of an illusion. I Am not a thought a phantom a mask a mirage. I am what you have always Wanted what you fear what you don't understand what you have inside you like a world You cannot touch but feel constantly. I Am your savior betrayer ally spy guru slayer There is nothing I do not know about you My throne is firm on your crown on your face your penis your lotus I live inside you blood bones whirling atoms filling the space of your dissolution Do not doubt my expanse Do not distrust the emptiness of my presence You speak of me as a mystery, but I have taken you everywhere. I Am prayer curse vow the promise of experience I steal your ideas and spin them off into the world without asking Do you know me? Sky Dancer mirror a blinding ray of heat. I have transcended belief. I am simple as faith Only the unknown can live beyond me and once made up you will think I am your mind Where nothing is lost Nothing is found Trust this Thank you My books I can never do that for myself so much doing it for you Our next reader is Another one of the co-editors of this incredible collaborative piece of work I say Griffin who Delightfully showed up tonight Wonderful surprises Paul knows I always say the right people show up at the reading both to listen to him to read at it Please welcome essay to our Mr. California I grew up in the East Bay primarily in Richmond grew up in the on South 26 streets most of most of time Oh, that's got a little thing happening in the Easter Easter Hill projects there and Lisa Maria Presley just died That's lifted me up in the beautiful Fox Theater on McDonald Avenue, which is no longer there it passed away in 1967 I would go there for 35 cents see two movies cartoons, whatever You know what I mean popcorn and nickel etc, etc And I would go see every fucking Elvis Presley movie that ever came out and every Jerry Lewis movie That's how fucked up and confused I am That's for Elvis Lisa Marie Thank you very much. Thank you for inserting me. Thank you very much I'm so pleased to meet you finally because you've been a ghost in the machine for me We've never spoken. We've never met so I looked at videos of you. I read your bios read your poetry So it's wonderful to finally meet you. Yes, that's the internet, baby. That's it I do you utilize the internet. It's no batteries needed So anyhow, I'm honored to be here with you. Thank you Kim And thank you for your work on this book. This motherfucking book is a great doorstop It will stop you at your door No, it's a and there is no such thing as an outdated war poem It's impossible another great anti-war movie pans labyrinth one of the greatest of all time and I served during that period of time because I was fantasizing about how to kill my stepfather and I had no idea what the real world was like although it's fairly street-wise and I'm the oldest of six and And I found out by the time I was out of basic training I got I really fucked myself good this time Did my four years got the hell out? Anyhow, I'm gonna read a few poems from this And one of the cool things like people Some years ago and I toured with my poetry bomb people would ask me this poetry matter Poetry is ubiquitous. It is elemental Really all religious text is what? What drives people nuts around the world and sends them forward it's all religious text is poetry poetry is what really? Lift you up and send you into battle. So anyway, this first poem. I'm gonna read is By a guy named Allie Friedman and we were discussing Ruth Weiss well Alan was one of the first poets I encountered in Los Angeles and and he died a long time ago and typical of people you meet in the poetry world It's like you think you know them then they pass away and you go to the funeral and you find out this guy had a little money He lived in an upper-middle-class home. He was a chemistry teacher and a Boy Scout leader I knew him as a wild man of poetry His name was Alan J. Friedman a Meditation on the responsibility of the poet Let us assume for just one moment that our poetry does matter Not in some aesthetic sense in which of course it does like every other art possess its proper form and substance But as matter in the world possessing weight and moments so that it does move Not merely to some pleasant or unpleasant action Let us assume that we are poets Fellows of an ancient order beneficial dangerous Significant that we possess our craft in measure that our craft possesses us that we must be Responsible for every word we speak and that our words retain their power even when the ink and paper have been lost Let us assume all this for just one moment then examine where and how we may be led in Disposition of our power and the crafting of our poems That's actually framed it on my wall man. It really is Why I mean seriously like you know we talk about all the living and dead poets when we speak their words when we speak Their names they are alive. We carry them forward with us. I'm only here because of these people in this book man, you know This is by My old best friend who passed away some years ago He he was from LA, but he went to SF State and got his master's degree in creative writing one of his One of the things he spent his life doing when I got all of his stuff after he passed away Scott Warnberg He died about almost 12 years ago now And when he I got his finally got his books and all of his other possessions The only books that were annotated were by William Carlos Williams Because William Carlos Williams spent his life in search of the American idiom and Scott was doing the exact same thing And this is this poem kind of sums up Scott and his life's work as well The dancer steps forward The dancer stays home digging in his earth looking for the bone that will sink to him His friends have run off to Europe. They groan pull their hair whale America is a paltry place for the imagination. They hit the walls deny their past. They become good Europeans The dancer shrugs in his New Jersey afternoon begins to dance around a circumference of his native ground I've got to learn the language. He says I've got to follow through on the syntax There is a music here. Don't be so quick to deny it. He steps out onto the American earth People come to him ask. Do you know what they're doing across the sea? They are writing epics. They are tearing up the linear fabric Let me do my digging He says and the music that is alive there begins to attach itself to his skin in that hard working New Jersey afternoon His patients come his patients go the good doctor knows there is a music here One of his good friends an old schoolboy pal who will later do time for mixing aesthetics and politics Keeps haranguing him to come to Europe. I'm too busy digging. He says there is a music here I tell you and my job is to find it learn it sing it You can have your poets of Provence. You can have Confucius. I'm hunting a different game altogether The Sun grows hot. He begins to sweat there in the yard digging He takes a drink of water. We leave him at his work as night quietly shows up Later he steps on to the front porch He will begin naming the new rhythm the kind of rhythm that you recognize on the street Maybe not some secret arcane language not some language You need a dictionary to understand the kind of rhythm You can maybe figure out all by yourself as you roll it around in your mouth as you begin to say it and it begins to sing you There is a music in the American idiom He says and wipes his face for the last time and begins to think about going up to bed Tomorrow is another song Tomorrow will be other patients and words to discover and stories behind such words that illuminate The game after all is one of discovery The day you stop finding out things is the day you might as well turn yourself in for good He slowly makes his way upstairs to his beloved Flossie. There is a music here All you have to do is believe and the rest is just some history of song and love And these are all poems from the book And I wish there were copies here so we could say buy it Fuck yeah So I'm gonna read I Know how we look if we're doing things right we wouldn't look like poets So all these books all these poems are in the book. This is another one by another friend of mine We were all the karma bums together and Doug and I were the lost tribe and the karma bums together We toured all over the country in Canada and smoked a lot of weed and had a good time Did a lot of horrible things and wonderful things together and this is also in the book and then I read my short poem And I'm done and thank you very much. I'm so honored to be here and thank you for allowing me to come up Apology to Greta Thunberg You're right about that global warming kid. We spent it. We drove it. We burned it We fueled it. We wrote it and we didn't pay for it. Didn't think it was your future, too We are your distinguished elders and came of age just before the peak of the wave and we've surfed it to the shore Rolling in like pearls We're the coolest didn't even work for it. It just got laid on us by the big living earth Gaia Yes, she said take my breast and we took her blood skin and bones, too and Our generation has enjoyed every possibility of living whatever we want Wherever we choose to go. We are the party of freedom meaning we partied with freedom Now we're those hard-boiled eggs in the sunset. What do you want from us? Please deliver your rage to our chattering class We are the tribe the human tribe and we welcome you to this fat ball planet where we're all born out of God's word And when we get hungry we go out on the crinkle bulgy landscape and kill kill kill a big elephant to feed our tribe Lots of meat meat meat we eat eat eat then dance pray fuck then pray fuck dance Afterwards sleepity sleep Then get up have coffee and make civilization Hammocks clay pots sexy figurines of God's Broadway plays we create a world of light and dark sex Poetry ocean-going plastic capitalism terrorism religion a house fantastic for us alone enough We hungry again. Let's get another elephant or at least an in-and-out burger. There's always more food isn't there Enough it will all work out somehow There will be a solution somehow But somehow all that gets fuzzy when I try to think about it. I can't shoot that hoop of what to do You say the only way is massive political action No oil and eat nothing in plastic not a chance even if everyone else does it Who helps who? Control who? The earth is so stressed digesting us. Where can it shit except on you? So sorry, we knew but didn't know and now you know, but what to do Also, there is no individual guilt. We're all absolved and complicit All I ever did was drive my car and turn on the house lights and some air con me such a tiny ordinary consumer in Case the planet might shrug us off You might consider the intrinsic death wish of the species and all that plastic in the guts of whales We share the gifts Climate change is a spiritual vaccination for those of us on the edge of the afterlife The seas will rise the continents fall. I Thought I'd never lived to see it happen But I was wrong and this is my contribution and then I'm off and thank you again very much And then tomorrow night we'll be doing this again at the beat museum Print be small. I think I can read this even though I can't get my eyes checked again Anyway, this is what the Ukrainians say to one another and there is no real glory and war But this is what they say to one another Glory to the heroes for the people of Ukraine Armed with an inspired lunacy Putin is his own God a nightmare for the modern era As his terror campaign moves forward the cult of war grows inside sovereign borders where all thoughts have been tried and found guilty The carriers of plague with looks that kill have landed with their tortured reward lost lives on parade collapse and despair as The people greet their makers of fear Ritualized by the underwriters of conflict the authorities of speech broadcast the intercepted letters of family and friends History bends before the orthodoxy of bombs flowers of evil Executing a catechism of calculated risk blossom with a bright and terrible lust a Global light of muted lifetimes baked into the sacred tapestry of night All the quiet stars falling like iron dice Tumbling into trapdoors of agony and tears ever after. Thank you When I can I make my life really easy and there's nothing like booking a handful of people who are all so good It doesn't matter what order you put the men really It's kind of nice But I do have to say that our next poet Also who currently holds a title Give me Sugioka is the current poet laureate of Alameda he is also She's brilliant brilliant brilliant poet and she's also Rather strangely because we don't see each other all that often, but every time I've won any important Award or gotten any accolade really important one two things have happened to me a bird has pooed on my jacket And within a day or two I've seen Kiwi and if I were smarter, I'd just book her more often But I'm not anyway, please welcome Kiwi who is a good friend an excellent singer and a brilliant poet That's a lot to live up to Yeah, I've been thinking about beat and not beat. What's beat? What's not beat? I happen to be a graduate of the Jack Kerouac school of disembodied poetic So my teachers were people like Adam out like Allen Ginsberg Robert Creeley and Dianna Prima and Whatever and Waldman. Thank you and Waldman. Yes big time and well So I think my writing is kind of equal parts I'm obviously influenced by them and Also rebelling against them Yeah, so And I'm going to the set is really gonna be sort of dedicated to this This man named Harry Smith who was living at Naropa when I was there he was old It was only a couple years before he died But he was like a seminal figure in that world But you may not know who he was even though he was an ethnomusicologist a filmmaker mystic He did a lot of things. Oh, and he did the Smithsonian Folkways anthology of folk music Yeah, which influenced a lot of people apparently so I'm told So anyway, um I'm going to start with my poem from the anthology and Then oh here it is My I went to print my poems today and my printer said no So I'm just lucky I have this thing temporal beatitudes Howling is the one true song that eludes the fear of night and dogs Wailing is the one true utterance of a divine son that grapples with drips and drabs of futility Umbridge skywalks between the branches of things that fall and things that grow things that repeat and remember Ever so lightly ever so tightly the rains are pulled and dropped Sudden freedom sudden fear of freedom sudden sight sudden retreat a blessing and a privilege The white light of summer sings arias to fall we become moments We become prayers we become radiant and vital as thieves on the threshold of forgiveness a Trader and a saint living in the same shell blessing and cursing tyranny and innocence oh That the lake could drown these festering thoughts that the bindings fray and break and all words stretch into birdsong We could go where the sand becomes soil and remember planting Remember the taste of corn melting between teeth and tongue the taste of safety and home Where a mountain lullabies itself to sleep and marries the willow and the hemlock So all that is feral and fetal and indigent indigent might finally billow in sweet relief We may come and go with and without purpose But the whole is a fragmented universe. We carry like a dime in our pockets Thank you And then I'm gonna take a chance and read a A poem called the Chelsea Hotel from my first book and very old But it's really a story that Harry told me So it's Harry's story and I hope it's not too offensive because you know sometimes these guys were They were you know Troublesome yeah So he lived in the chair's Chelsea Hotel for a while and this is what he told me about that Got a letter from an old friend of mine for 12 years. We got drunk and broke a lot of bottles together Penny's sort of an occult artist's leader. I didn't hear from her for a long time because she was mad at me You see I had this friend Joe who accidentally murdered this other guy I'm sure it was an accident But this friend of mine Dan whistler he came to my room at the Chelsea Hotel grinning and yelling Billy Maybach's dead But he wasn't the one who murdered him You see Dan it was Jenny whistler's husband and she was having a affair with Billy Maybach But it was my friend Joe who probably committed the murder Someone else found the body all trust up and told the hotel manager He tried to make it look like it was natural death because he didn't want the police coming around Well, this other guy was going to jail for three 330 year sentences, so he said he'd take the rap That was nice of him He came from a whole family of criminals, you know and the grandmother was the worst She raised all these people who had a one-word vocabulary of yeah Anyway, he went to jail for it instead of Joe well Penny had a big mouth, you know It wasn't all just lipstick she got to talking big angry at my friend who may have committed the murder I'm not really sure she sent me this postcard one time And I put a big X on the address and wrote address unknown and I never heard from her again till today She said she'd send me money if she knew the right address. She knows I always need money So I called her up and she said she could hardly get out of bed anymore except occasionally when she uses her walker Here I am calling her and she can't get out of bed and I can hardly walk It was indeed a trickster He was a trickster and but he he taught us all things that we Not have wanted to learn And I went to his memorial at the Bowery at well in New York and Some people got up and said Harry was evil. He was rotten and Some people got up and said Harry was amazing. He was a genius and I thought it was just so interesting I mean like one person I met said yeah, Harry, you know I met him one time he threw a can of Campbell soup at me So he had very strong preferences and likes and dislikes So I wrote this song after he died Calls invisible heroes and sacred clowns You lived in a hotel of angels You lived on the streets with your dreams You lived in the town of the golden bow a cynical sublime refugee High in the smoke of your cigarettes With your books and your branches and gorts You furnished your home with a log and a stone Scattered may pull leaves on the floor You wore a stained seersucker jacket Your pants were two sizes too huge We offered you new clothes, but you said you preferred your simple suit Dionysian you now some may call Some may call you insane Stole a box of light and made a Asked you how you stopped you said valium works pretty good for you Try to kill the pain in your body and live off your mystic Cosmogenes And you kept squirrels and birds in your freezer And the varnished skeletons of mice I guess I was shy cuz I never asked why you kept their little souls on ice with your Jess of a sacred clown Divine Jess of a sacred clown and you laughed when you spoke of your war Said you crawled up on stage on all bittersweet to receive such Accommodation after food stamps and live in door-to-door And you used to speak with a squirrel lived in a tree above your house He had an old wife who rose early and a young wife who rose late And you laughed when they bickered in the boughs just a few are Celestial last fall you were going to Egypt to make a film or dying with a sphinx But you finally said if you weren't dead by then You'd probably end up in boulder and and I told you I loved you in a letter Needing to say it just once But you carefully said you never read quite that far The letter was just too long of light and made day who stole a box of light and made day Who stole a box. Thank you. I think I just conjured Harry I Could stop or I could do one more song. It's a sort of apropos of nothing, but I like it And it is about a kind of crazy guy, too It's called Gator blues I know a man down by the river He's got a gator smile No man down by the river and I've known him teeth are Right as moonlight Sharp as a crop. There's nothing quite like moonshine To make you take a man out of his skin Nothing quite like moonshine to make you think you're gone Shining make a joker jump right out Of the gym, there's nothing worth remembering can't be as soon forgot Nothing worth Regretting when what you took is what you've got Just the same old Brewing in the same Got a gator on the sand got a gator on the doorstep And there's a monkey on to talk to it's just me and the Rabbit man, thank you, and I'm very honored to be in this book. Thank you Kim. Thank you San Francisco Public Library Thank you Kimmy and Another hand for our features tonight Judy Paul Julie as a Kimmy Thank you all for being here audience Also, thank you to the AV crew from the San Francisco Library I'm not kidding. One of them's name is Mike Which is how I remember and Kenny and John and When we did a reading here one time and a group of younger people decided this was a poetry dungeon I think that may make it sound a little too sexy Okay Anyway, thank you all for being here next month. We have people reading from Shizue seagulls and recent anthology uncommon ground it should also be wonderful So give yourselves a hand Buy books And we'll see you next month