 Our first reader this afternoon is Barbara Berman. Barbara Berman's work has appeared in the Village Voice, Washington Post, San Francisco Examiner, and elsewhere. She served on the board of the Friends of the San Francisco Public Library, whose auditorium we are currently sitting in right now. And on the jury of the California Book Awards, her book, The Generosity of Stars was published by Finishing Line Press. And she also reviews poetry for the San Francisco Chronicles. So please join me in welcoming Barbara Berman. Thank you, Robin. Thank you all for coming. It's a special treat to be here in this wonderful space. And I'm especially grateful to the staff and the volunteers at Litquake. This is just a tremendous event. And I'm really delighted to be here and to share a bill with my friend Joel Gomez, who couldn't make it, and with Michael McClure, who my hope is here. He is following me, and he is wonderful. And if any of you are especially interested in a shot in the arm and getting a sense of what it's really like to lead a life of creative integrity, take a look at the introduction to Michael's book, The Rebel Lion, and to The Shape of Content by Ben Sean, which these are two real classics about how to lead a creative life. And I totally recommend them. I'm going to begin with a poem called Harvest. It was published a few years ago. It's dedicated to Amos Oz and David Grossman, Israeli novelists, and peace activists. Harvest, there is no enemy. Insist your rugged hands and muscled backs, half hidden in olive branches shading. Women, darkly veiled. None but the enemy of a piece of fruit. It's oil, a balm, for the rest of us who need to be so brave. Found poem, Orphans of a Forgotten War. And for New Year, they decorate the holiday tree in the backyard with the skeleton of a Russian soldier. Peter Baker, The New York Times. Bone flute. Creatures took bone long before language. Science now tells us and knew to cut holes in it, shaping note breath, to carve measured spaces that once held flesh. Literatures say music is a higher offering of prayer. So surely God knew bone gave praise in low whistling sorrow and greater praise in multitudes exulting. Surely God was pleased that song was formed by giving new life to trembling bone. The sun is metaphor. Study of stars said the sun had a violent youth. The New York Times, 9901. Scientists suggest the sun was born in vast and vicious particulate storms. Radioactive gas blasted at such high frenzied heat. Nothing but blizzards of brightness could live. The evidence found in patterns of scars that help herald our hope. I see a few of you from last night. David Duncan just did a brilliant excerpt from his book, The Experimental Man. And this poem that I'm going to read is for him today. It's called The Brittle Star. I wrote it some time ago. But if you take a look at his book and at the science writing of David Perlman, you'll see some connections, I hope. The Brittle Star. That's what it's called. And it is covered with hundreds of tiny, perfect eyes and is about the size of an average human hand. Magnified hugely in newsprint image, calcium scaffolding resembles a gentle, translucent, breeze-borne, philodendron leaf. In dreams that take place on laboratory benches, begin responsibilities and speculation about application. While I wonder if every pore on the skin of every human hand could learn to distinguish predator from healer, stealer from donor, and subtleties between astronomers' gifts for Selena's son. I have asked myself if and how I should break the news to my favorite six-year-old, sure to take it better than I did, not concerned about wonder stolen by science, which did not concern me until I learned that stars could be forced to stop twinkling, to give viewers a clear view inside churning interiors. I have never doubted the ability of the sky to communicate. And I'm grateful astronomers have assisted the generosity of stars. I don't plan to tell her how foolish I feel for the weeks it has taken me to accept the good news that first seemed so contrary to the need that's a gift to gaze up in the darkness, strive for the infinite, light, o magnanimous light. We are, as we all know, in the city of St. Francis. And the feast of St. Francis is today. It's celebrated over the past few weeks. I'm going to end with three very, very short poems. The peculiar mix of the earth here makes a perfect digestive for parrots and macaws, allowing them to eat nuts that would otherwise make them sick. Two, the parallels between the genetic structure of people and pufferfish have been tallied with fewer differences between us and sushi than might have been supposed. Those are found poems from the New York Times. I'm going to end with a short poem from my book called Otter. Sleekly he possesses current, shimmering, glad, wet grace, silver-brown, well-muscled, his whispers swift. It would be a sacrament of delight to guard him without words beside his river in each season, grateful without knowing all his ways. Thank you. Thank you, Barbara. Our next reader is going to be Michael McGriff. And Mike McGriff is the author of Dismantling the Hills, which was just published in the last couple of weeks, in fact, from University of Pittsburgh Press. It's a gorgeous book. He's also the translator of Tomas Tronstomer's The Sorrow Gondola, and is currently at work editing the selected writings of David Wevel. He also builds his own bookcases with his own hands, and he has the most remarkable record collection imaginable. So please welcome Mike McGriff. I'm Mike McGriff. I'm happy to be here. Thanks, volunteers, and library, and all of you for showing up. Six minutes of my best poems. The Last Hour of Winter. This winter is carnival of rain, tears down and moves east for the hills. No more working wet or boots by the wood stove, no more sweating booze in your rain gear, or fouled chains stripping the cogs. He sits at his bacon and coffee like a man at a piano. His hands begin to work. He becomes invisible. The coast wind chases the tide and passes through him. The jetty, the seagulls, the broken piers moaning on their barnacle stilts. He is tired of the gray world that says a man can't leave his body unless he leaves it for good. So like Chagall's rabbi, he floats out of himself through the kitchen window to the old coast highway where the sandstone banks lie etched with names and swastikas, arrows and desperate propositions. He sees fields that seed farmers will burn where Mennonite countries skirts paper mills and roadside nurseries. Sees himself in a bend of water filled with junked cars where the river eddies then changes direction. The old water riding from one season to the next through the skeletons of bucket seats. There's a tear in the world where he places the name he's called himself all winter then reenters his life. Now a short poem by Tom Gunn. Their relationship consisted in discussing whether or not it existed. Great poet, everyone knows that who's here. Entering the kingdom. The summer's gone. Now it's the gray machines of the rain. 530 November, the sun breaks through long enough to open something along the ridge. Then darkness and more rain. A woman sits in the middle of her living room surrounded by stockpots filling with the ceilings brown rainwater and chunks of plaster. Her eyes are the milk, a blue granite and blind as the salamanders. Earlier, a man came with a lawyer who came with a letter from the city. A letter condemning her three and a half acres for the new pipeline. She believes in many things. The cayenne should be sprinkled along the thresholds, salts along the window sills, that the pole should be taken each night before entering the kingdom of sleep. She believes in her hands that the sand scraped from beneath each nail contains a desert where a family of refugees discusses who will eat the last of the dried fish. She keeps the shadows of her hands in a jewelry box beneath the sink. She keeps the thoughts of her hands in a jar of raisins. She thrust two fingers beneath her jawbone and accounts her pulse backward from 100 as the sound of water and metal ferries her into sleep. She keeps the dream of her hands in her dream where she climbs a rope into the tree of sadness, hands that wind the clock and hands that divide the fish. Here's the first poem from my book. Iron. I was wrong about oblivion then. Summer mornings we walk the logging roads north of Fairview. The gypo trucks leading miles of gravel dust eddying around us. You were the queen of iron and I, the servant, Barcelona. The slash pile we tunneled through was the whale's mouth, our kingdom. Jake Breaks sounded the death cries of approaching armies as they screamed over the ridge where we held our little breaths and each other passing the spell of invisibility between us. Five years later, you brought your father's hunting knife to school and stabbed Daniel Carson in the hip and I never saw you again. I could say I left town for both of us that I drove I-5 south until I reached the aqueducts of California and for the first time felt illuminated before the sight of water as it rushed beneath the massive turbines spinning on the bays and dusty hills powering a distant city that would set me free. I could say after your father covered the plastic bladder of his waterbed with baby oil and wrestled you to it that in those days after your pregnancy I made plans to drive a claw hammer into a skull but I never left and when I moved it was only as far as the county line. If my life has been a series of inadequacies at least I know by these great worlds of dust how beauty and oblivion never ask permission of anyone. In the book I read before bed God lowers himself through the dark and funnels his blueprints into the ear of a woman who asked for nothing. Tomorrow night she'll lead armies and a few more she'll burn at the stake and silver birds will rise from her mouth. This is the book of the universe where iron is the last element of a star's collapse and the moon retreats each moment into oblivion. My blood fills with so much iron I'm pulled to a place in the hard earth where the wind grinds over the ridge bearing the wheels of tanker trucks oiling the access roads where deer ruin the last of the plumes where the slews shrink back to their deepest channels and I can turn away from nothing. Thank you. Thanks, Mike. Our next reader is going to be Elena Hairston. Elena's prose and poetry have appeared in Drunken Boat, Callaloo and Elsewhere, a 2007 to 2009 Kavek Hanem Fellow. Her poetry collection, The Logan Topographies, won Perseabook's Lexi Rudnitsky Memorial Prize and was a finalist for the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America. Please welcome Elena Hairston. Thank you for coming. Thank you for having me. Thank you, thank you. I'm going to read from my book. It's set up as a postcard book and it's loosely based upon the history of southern West Virginia coal miners and the book is parsed into four topographical sections which are mythological locations in southern West Virginia. And each of the poems are set up as postcards so that the poem operates at the level of the page and then the poem can also be read within the context of the topographical region in which it exists. And then all of the poems can be read as one long sort of sequence. So please bear with me. And they're all sort of different and kind of wild and kind of just wild. This is from a 22 Mountain. Pregnant belly of coneflower and lark spur, coal caves of Lupine and Barbary, where shale grows up and bumps into sun, breeze across the moon, lunar party, dream of history striated. People find here, people found here, people lose here, people lost here, people hunt here, people hunted here, people trapped here, people trapped here, people live here, people lived here, people sing here, people sing here, people take here, people taken here, People come here. People left here. People return here. People stay here. People gone. At its base, a labyrinth of rivers spilling sedge and cat tail into an island creek, beholden and cut for use. Sentry and citadel flying. They know their poverty only when the wood of those who have crossed shine a deepening brown. Otherwise, they live amidst a mountain they claim daily and proudly in an ethos of only we belong here. The pig boys recite their zip code over sipped liquor, a syrup made slow by bloody knuckles pinching tobacco between tight lips. They do not speak often, but speak enough. Sons of early men, there is brotherly duty to keep what is kept, to spit where there is dirt, to stand in the wind. Worry is for what is left behind. The future is a fist of coal. The tyranny of pig boys. Brotherhood of men children whose hands split coal and faces that sweat more than smile, than their own. But they do not own these sweating faces that shout and pray like their own. And they are not home, and thus they are not welcome, nor welcoming. Homelessness makes home for the dust spot. Even the caress of clover or flocks does not sway cruelty when cruelty knows its own. Yet there are those who plow for other water, dare love through any loam. Exogamous, willing history and death, but more smiling lives beyond their own. Children born in a land of mind to daughters and sons of tunnel walkers estranged must smile for their first picture of the world as a tiny window of mulberry and faces fighting surprise. They smile because they are born from a dare men who eat their own flesh must abide. She was to give birth to a child who had not maintained her skin, this one night woman hunched in hemlock, churning earth, looking for her other side, her papa snatched away, threw into the galaxy of forest, dared her to find it in the matching peat and wet, this rifle eating her breast. They say you can hear her only after midnight and only with your ear to the ground. Love, not a crucible nor reservoir, between them a limbo of desire and lynching. She, a daughter of an early man, he, a son of brailed believers. They, children in a forest of midnight, they meet when the dirt opens in the moon and only light. She, barefoot and unashamed, he, open-handed and bold. They dance here in the secret roomless room where shale and peed and ash do not protect, but witness. She straddles him, cleaving dark memory between pale thighs, call it time traveling. She, filled, he, filling. An ancient exchange, the land too, a country of minds. No water for this love, only the thin light fingering oak and the music of skin, kissing skin. The fathers work their hands to meet, side by side, Terry Manor lining throats. This one, an early man, alabaster devout, helmed by immigrant arrogance, a willful ignorance and sometimes not. It was work and he needed Sicily in a small garden behind the three family company house. The other, brailed believer, mafic and refined by the quiet of bootstrap mobility, this too, a willful ignorance, a necessary erasure of plantation prologues, red long and deep in Alabama fields. The sweat of days on homemade collars, britches, crackling tar and sulfur ash, down there in tunnel after blackening tunnel, away in anaerobic, danger was a walking shadow camouflaged in coal. The early man did not see it, panicked, threw his shovel into its belly and was enveloped. The gilsonite now on tongue and legs broken under rock after rock, dark now and darker. The brailed believer crawled, crawled, clawed, hollered, heaved through silt and lime, ash pressed close and heaviest skin, found him, pulled him out, wiped his black face so that he might breathe. The two of them black together on blacker rock, pressed against the shadows of the hole. It was work, yet they were brothers, only then. Outside the caves and the daylight of public, they remained and grew continental drift. A saved life could not steer the course. Thank you. Thank you, Elena. Our next reader is Clive Mattson. And Clive Mattson's first book of poems, Mainline to the Heart, was published in 1966. His most recent book, which I know I'm going to mispronounce, Calcedony. Am I even remotely close? Calcedony. The first 10 songs came out in 2007, which means he's been writing poetry for, at the very least, 40 years. He's also the co-editor of An Eye for an Eye Makes the Whole World Blind, which is poets on 9-11. And that book was the winner of the 2003 pen, Oakland, Josephine Miles Literary Award. Please welcome Clive Mattson. We're still trying to figure out how to pronounce that word. I was coming across the street with John Rhodes, who put together this DVD, and my son Ezra. And this car full of guys was counting off the seconds, as if we weren't gonna make it across the street. Seven, six, five. And then they saw my t-shirt, and they yelled out the window, we don't got poetry. I wanted to say, thanks for not making it dead poetry. They were just having fun, though, it was good in nature. I hope you're having fun. Calcedony's always having fun. Here's her song number two. Not one button, not one stray curled hair. You think you've left nothing here, not even a skin fleck tickling my nostril. Cut strong clover, horse manure, and the ocean salt breeze, what is that odor? Heavy machine oil links to notes from a lilting organ that fly over bumpkin fields and dance, sycopated over red-tiled roofs over my head. Do I have you in my mouth in nasal cavities? Is that you dripping down walls through my esophagus? I breathe you in and out. I bend faux boundaries with my lungs. You think you're a discreet entity? That's past. You're disseminated over water. You're on the airwaves in your dotted across Pine and Juniper High Desert. You're inside and outside my body, spread up and down my belly and my legs. You think you can pull your hand back? Get in your truck and drive off? You think you can put your heart back in your chest and go? No, you've left your essence. I'm eating you with strawberries. I'm sipping you with black tea. Your glands left a mark on my eye, the oil from your skin osmosis balm through hungry membranes. You're just your cutting the air, that five finger wave is still there hanging from your wrist. Oh yes, those fingers attached to your hand, your hand to your wrist, to your arm and to your shoulder as you stride your yard. How independent you are. How distant your profile against distant trees. How foreign your boot in the dirt. How unique the metal keys you toss in your hand. You think you're as discreet as the cognac bottle the drunk hides in his trousers. But the warm sun lifts your smell from your neck, from your pores tagged molecules jiggle off into wide surging breezes for places known and unknown and to one new place known very well. Can you feel your soul escaping? Your shadow right in front of you leaps away from the morning sun and into my pocket. In 2004, a character in one of my stories, Cal Sidney, began writing poems and asked me to write them down. It felt pretty strange writing somebody else's poems, but by now, four years later, they feel like me. Here's your song number five. Can you remember for one day, for one hour? Does frigid air blow through your brain and your bones rip flesh off and chatter on to the ends of the cosmos? In those far reaches, one small ear listens through faint hissing of neutrinos and here's the words I whisper. I adore you, adore your flesh, your fleshless bones, adore you even when skeletons clatter like rock chimes in the wind. That cold wind winds clock hands around and forever around and with every whirl my lips shaped the same few words. Can you remember? Can you remember for even five minutes? For one minute? Does sweetness land on your skin and turn to vapor? My body and my soul turn to liquid and I enter your every pore. Volumes and candy volumes, delicate taffy streams pour into you and go where? Right through? Into thin air? Does your mouth not remember turmoling lips? Does your tongue not remember the question poised on its tip like a moth with wings quivering and then fluttering into the vast emptiness? But it's not empty. The moth is that void and its wings caress every thought and every atom, committing their shapes and sizes to memory and waving flags in a parade down Main Street. Does asphalt remember the imprint of feet? Does the chick remember its egg? Does the egg remember soft down of its nest? Does your blood remember its course? Can you remember for even five minutes? Even rock remembers and turns every morning toward the one bright spot of sky, a single grain that hasn't heard, I love you. I love you. I love you. Thank you. They're taking the stage apart. Thanks very much, Clive. Unfortunately, Michael McClure and Maxine Chernoff and Jules Gomez were not able to be here today, which is a disappointment to many of us, but fortunately, we can read their work. And we have the pleasure, actually, of having a poet here who will read his. And our final poet for the hour is Sean Hill. And Sean has received fellowships from Kave Kahnem, the Bush Foundation, the McDowell Colony, and the University of Wisconsin. And in March 2008, the University of Georgia Press published his first book, Blood Ties and Brown Liquor. He's currently a Stegner film poetry at Stanford University, and an incredibly nice guy. Please welcome Sean Hill. Thank you for coming out. Thank you, Robin, for having me here. I'll be reading a couple of poems from Blood Ties and Brown Liquor. This is a book that sort of explores the history of my hometown, Millageville, Georgia. I had to sort of invent a central character to do that exploration. This fellow named Silas Wright. And this first poem is about Silas learning to write. Silas Wright at age seven, 1914. Silas Wright follows a fish's wriggle in the shallows between reeds. He scribes the line in his tablet as much pride in that line as a man in his son. He almost giggles. Still he goes on. The next letters come easy. With this, he'll have more than a mark to bind. Rambling across the page again and again in messy rows, on it flows until he goes a little off the page's edge. He smiles. He's surprised to hear when his mouth opens. That's mine. This poem is about him. It's very important in the South. Uncle John, that was the year granddaddy Thomas died. Left the family worse than broke. Uncle John stole a ham from Mr. Enos's meat market. He was 17, lost his taste for it, locked up 14 years. Ham, salt cured and earth red. Sliced with the fat hanging on. Yellow sunshine on a white plate. The ham bone cut crosswise, rings marrow. A dark eye, all in the skillet, making gravy for grits. Lost his taste for all things salt. The ocean he hasn't seen, woman and man. He don't never want to see no more ham on his plate. Hate's pigs was hard for him. Hate's white folks too, time off for good behavior. They didn't hold him to the last six. He's a hog farmer, only eats beef and chicken and turkey. Fish, turtle and rabbit.