 Hello, welcome everybody. Thanks for coming to this month's very special edition of Kim Shuck's Poem Jam, which will be celebrating Poetry Flash, a poetry resource that is a Bay Area treasure and indeed a national treasure. I'm John Smalley and I'm a librarian here at the main library in the humanities department on the third floor, where we have tens of thousands of poetry books and 41 languages. Before we get started, I wanna take a moment to acknowledge our community and to tell you about a few of this month's programs. On behalf of the public library, we wish to welcome you to the unceded ancestral homeland of the Ramatush Shaloni, who are the original inhabitants of the San Francisco Peninsula. As the indigenous stewards, the Ramatush 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 homeland. We wish to pay our respects by acknowledging the ancestors, elders and relatives of the Ramatush community and by affirming their sovereign rights as first peoples. As you probably know, April is National Poetry Month and so we'll be having quite a few programs here at the main library. I wanna mention just a few of those to you now. This Sunday, April 14th, we'll have a reading by two South Asian poets, Monica Modi and Sophia Nass. These two poets retell the histories and memories of the sacred and the profane, the oral and the experimental, the liminal and subliminal India and Pakistan. Next Thursday, a week from today, all of these programs are in this very room. Author Morton Paley will be giving a presentation on poet William Blake's songs of innocence and of experience and that will be an illustrated talk. On Sunday, April 21st, we'll be screening two film documentaries, The Poetry Deal about Dan de Prima and The Life and Times of Alan Ginsberg. On Thursday, April 25th, Kim Shuck, poet Lauer Emerito returns to this room and will be introducing Dina Rod, Tanish Kaur and Manaz Badihan to read from their recent works. Lastly, on the final Sunday of the month, which is the 28th, the Haydashbury Literary Journal will be presenting a reading featuring some of San Francisco's finest bards and one of the editors of that journal is in our audience. So that concludes my two, I apologize, both are here at the moment. Thank you for attending. For those, if anyone is here for the first time, I wanna mention that this is a regular, the Poem Jam Poetry Reading Series takes place regularly on the second Thursday of the month and is curated by poet Kim Shuck. You can learn more about these programs and SFPL programs in general by picking up one of the newsletters from our table. There's also a special flyer just listing the poetry events this month. And while you're there at the table, there's a limited edition of the Poem Jam Pin. There's a few of those left. And there's coffee and cookies. So help yourself to all of those things. And that's enough of me talking. I'm going to turn the microphone over to Kim Shuck. Please give a warm welcome to poet Kim Shuck. Hey folks, that's really exciting to see. It's precisely who showed up for this. I think the room is just full of poets. I don't think there are non-poets in the room. Doug is raising his hand. You don't count because you're attached to a poet and cannot avoid coming to readings, Douglas. So that's kind of exciting. What a great audience to have. So when I was a baby poet, I used to have as one of my want to do things to be in poetry flash. Because I was a baby poet here in the Bay Area. And as some of us are all too aware this week in particular, we get to keep what we support. We get to keep what we support, particularly in the poetry world. We get to keep the bookstores we support. We get to keep the journals we support. And we get to keep the poets we support. And if we don't support them, there is always the possibility that they will just not be there when we want them. So it's really important to support institutions like poetry flash that have scope and breadth and historical knowledge as well as contemporary knowledge of the poetry scene. And I'm going to introduce somebody who's something of a hero of mine just now. I was trying to make her laugh, but it's real too. Joyce Jenkins is a treasure. She's a Bay Area treasure and generally a poetry treasure. Please welcome up to the microphone, Joyce Jenkins. Now I'm going to go a little bit rogue because, you know, what else is new? And I'm going to read one poem at the beginning and just about working on poetry flash for me. It's my signature poem about working on poetry flash. And then talk to you about some stories and history. Piano man, Friday night, beautiful jazz piano at the Contes, two people in the room, three grubby skateboarders and several ticket holders waiting for their food in the next. The music, simple, yet impossibly lovely, impossibly complicated, pours out of the shiny black spinet. The piano player notices me listening. He can hear me listening. He turns his head slightly to look. I look away to avoid eye contact because the music is impossibly intimate. How can I tell him that it's okay that no one but me hears that I will walk out and down Sixth Street and he will be alone but that he must not stop playing, that he is not alone as long as he sounds, that he means as long as he sounds, that he cannot stop playing, he must not. So that's just a little taste of contrary to popular opinion, I am a poet and that's how I got into this racket in the first place but then I continue to be and that's the only way I can think. So this event is a celebration of poetry flashes, 50th anniversary, it's now our 52nd anniversary but as you know it's been hard to celebrate things lately. Poetry flash, literary review and calendar poetryflash.org publishes book reviews, interviews, essays, poems, events for California. Right now we are featuring a review of An Ordinary Life by LA poet BH Fairchild and another on Alicia Osterker by associate editor Richard Silberg. Who you'll hear shortly and a review of the Linda Ravenswood book. A poem is a house by contributing editor Lee Rossi. We also present the poetry flash reading series in Berkeley. We have a YouTube channel of our readings, produced the annual Northern California Book Awards at this very library and the annual Watershed Environmental Poetry Festival in Berkeley that MK Chavez has read at beautifully several times. Poetry flash also manages the California poets in the schools, John Oliver Simon project in Berkeley in Oakland and we sponsor many emerging literary projects. Our mission is to build community through the literary presenting and publishing. Poetry flash was founded in 1972. The idea for poetry flash came from John Ford then a creative writing grad student at San Jose State and Anne Headley who was British. They got the idea from Time Out, a London publication for theater listings. They named it poetry flash and put in $10 each to publish the first issue in fall 1972. They divided the first print run of single sheets with four events listed and ran them all over town. Poetry flash was born. Early editors and writers included poet Alan Sadovsky, now director of the MFA program at San Jose State, poet Yana Harris who taught at University of Washington, many, many, many nonfiction writer, Joe Flowers, many other people. The San Francisco International Poetry Festival got me into poetry flash. I did two, 1978 and 1980. Kenneth Rexroth read at the 1980 festival. He'd been ill and his reading was downplayed because I felt he might not make it. He called me at 7 a.m. to howl, San Francisco, I am San Francisco. Then escaped from the hospital in Santa Barbara to get here. Poets came to that festival from all over the world. Michael Andace from Canada who at that time wasn't writing fiction yet. Kazako Shirai-shi from Tokyo. Isaac Peschevis Singer who knew he wrote poetry and more. I came to San Francisco crazy for poetry in about 1975. I went to every reading I could, ended up writing one of the first grants to the California Arts Council, then being put together by Peter Coyote and Gary Snyder and got 20,000 to fly poets in from all over the world. The idea was for Linguettis. He wanted to make a Carnegie Hall for poets in this great city that had always had a special relationship to poetry, like painting is to New York. I wrote poems about being the only woman in North Beach, carried my office around in a basket, co-directed the 1978 festival and directed the 1980. I was a young poet from Detroit. I had studied poetry in an experimental college in Michigan, worked on the National Poetry Festival and organized the Michigan Poetry Conference. One memory sticks out from when I got here, standing in line behind Lawrence at the old spaghetti factory in North Beach to hear a reading by Ginsburg. Lawrence waved me on and I tucked my finger into his belt loop. He towed me past the ticket takers. I remember stepping over or falling over Jerry Brown, who was sitting on the floor with his legs out. Just after the 78th festival of the Palace of Fine Arts, featuring Frillingetti, Corso, Ann Waldman, Entezakishange, Erica Jong, Audrey Lord, Michael McClure, William Burroughs, Tom Gunn, you get the idea. There was a community meeting by Poetry Flash founding editor, John Ford. He owed $75 to the printer and he didn't think he should have to pay. He was mad, he wasn't gonna take it anymore. I was there and watched him hand over the flash to Steve Abbott. You might remember the late Steve, so amazing. He was an amazing San Francisco poet and writer. And you might know him from Fairyland, a memoir of my father written by his daughter, Alicia Abbott. The Poetry Flash's mom and pop printer, Hoover Printing, in a basement in downtown Oakland, agreed to be publisher for the debt. Steve's first act was to knock on my door and ask for my help. I said yes. And poet and sometime actor, Richard Silberg, who was known for his writing for the now defunct East Bay Review of the Arts, joined us shortly after that. The Flash was then 11 by 17, folded bookstock, hand stuffed and collated. The first photo that ever ran in the Flash was a car door, spray painted. Poetry is the heart at liberty. They claimed it was Andre Breton, but I'm not sure. At first, Steve was editor and I was co-editor. I did all the production. Steve became and learned on the job training. Steve became co-editor in October, 1979, then contributing editor as he concentrated more attention on his own writing, readings and his literary magazine, Soup. I became Poetry Flash publisher with Steve's support in 1980. Richard Hoover, the printer, doubted that a woman could do the job. He lectured us about it dramatically, but finally relented after a poet's stage to sit in at his print office. Hand collating the Flash in the basement of Hoover printing became overwhelming, even with a big stuffing party. There were just too many pages when I got grew and grew. When I got pregnant, I knew I had to be clever. With topographer Alistair Johnston's help, I took it to tabloid in April, 1983, so a machine could do the folding and stuffing like a real newspaper. Artist Frances Butler did calligraphy for the logo. She often said, if I'd known you were gonna hang around, I'd done a better job. My daughter was born May 1st, 1983, hours after I mailed the May issue subscriptions. I gave up the San Francisco International Poetry Festival to edit and then publish Poetry Flash as a free newspaper. Over 300 print editions were published from 1972 to 2010. We started an online Poetry Flash in 1999, and for 10 years published both online and in print with different content. Now we are exclusively online at poetryflash.org. The print mag was a tabloid that grew to 22,000 circulation at the time, one of the, if not the, largest circulation literary magazine in this country. My motto, my God in Light, was always the quote from Lawrence, if you would be a poet, write living newspapers. Don't ever believe poetry is irrelevant. What strikes me after 46 years of doing this is how much love has gone into pain, so much attention. Poetry Flash has kept archaic punctuation, the semicolon and commas alive. Staying up all night, laying out the pages, driving to a printer in San Jose or San Francisco in the wee hours was a kind of radical practice. I remember working so intently on the memorial issue for the San Francisco poet Robert Duncan. He always said that typos could never be erased, that they went straight up to heaven. Every letter in that issue was polished and held up for scrutiny as if he were there. You might remember the 1980s language wars starring poet Tom Clark and George Lakoff and many others. I wanted to explore both sides of the issue and allow poets to vent their passions to dialogue, but in so doing, we managed to start a little culture war in my naivete. I had hoped to celebrate deep avant-garde poetry as a writer on the scene that others should know about, but as writing on the scene that others should know about, but being among the first, if not the first, to write about the experimental and avant-garde poetry from the outside, we started a shockwave, a ripple in the time-space continuum, though I'm proud of what we did facing the transformation of our times. We all learned together. Now we have a hybrid, an evolution, a situation where all of our poetry are influencing all of our poetry, hopefully as diverse as possible. And that was exactly the idea that I was going for in the first place. Our annual Watershed Environmental Poetry Festival was founded in 1996. The 29th annual would be October 5th in Berkeley. We started Watershed when Robert Haas was named the first US poet laureate from the West. The first Watershed was at the bandshell in Golden Gate Park. It was unforgettable. Rebecca Solnit mentions coming across it in her book, Wanderlust, A History of Walking. With Frill and Getty reading Buddha in the woodpile and Bob Haas reading from the stage, which was a flatbed semi-truck with a life-sized humpback whale carved from storm-salvaged redwood by a New Zealand sculptor whose brother became the poet laureate of New Zealand. So our reading series, the Book Awards, the Book Awards on September 7th will be our 43rd. I just wanna thank all of the people who've worked on Poetry Flash, all the wonderful people, all of you included in some way or the other. And as Robert Creeley, the poet, said as I drove him much, much, much too fast from the airport to a waiting crowd at Cody's books, his plane was late, onward. And thank you so much for letting me share the history with you. And just as I sit down, this is in case you weren't around then, this is what the tabloid looked like. And here's a very funny picture of me in the basement of Hoover printing with Steve Abbott. And a letter received spontaneously from Alan Ginsberg in 1988. The Poetry Flash serves national purpose, distributing critique, gossip, and local imagination of Bay Area from West Coast to Boulder to New York, keeping the poetry community in contact. For those of us who live in the Bay Area, it keeps us up to date on the epic of the San Francisco Muse. So there's more poetry. I happen to actually really love Joyce's poetry and I always invite her to do it and sort of try to twist her arm a little bit to make her read a poem or give me a poem. And so I appreciate that somebody said that because I agree, more poetry at all times. So Richard Silver, what do I want to say about Richard? We have had a really sweet friendship over the years that has been at some small distance. But it's really intense nevertheless because we are always working on a show when we see each other, which makes it really electric. And I love his work. And I also know him through other friends who ask me how he's doing periodically, assuming that I've seen him more often than they have, which is not always the case. But Richard had evoked one of Richard's poems for somebody one time and they were like, I don't know who that is. And I was like, what? Of course you do. They knew you as a poetry flash, Richard, rather than Richard Silver, which I suppose is a huge honor really. So please welcome Richard Silver to the microphone. Thank you, Kim. We have to see each other more often. This is very true. My father was a show business agent. And I heard too many Bush circuit comedians. And that feeds into this first poem, which is called Stilts Naomi. I left you on the Charles River Bank, high rain cloud, alternate lives. Take my wife, please. The poem of punchlines walks on high hips, long radii from the pelvis, with the speed of acronyms. Good shot, ma, right in the cunt. You're the one with a dirty mind. You with me in this poem, because I've said your name, long muscled river. Each joke begins in a sorrow. My wife is so fat that there's this woman with a dog named Uranus, a despair and laughs it off, outwits it. So St. Peter turns to God and he says, look, you wanna play golf or you wanna fuck around? A new life life, nano life in endorphin city. We're imaginary people. We're the same names as the real people. Only now we're walking on stilts. You're still there Naomi by the river in my mind. Although I backed out of your life. Although you rose up above me, working like a high rain cloud. That's no ladle, that's my wife. The telephone book walks on stilts. The dictionary, frozen dynamo. All the words laid out on spokes to the heart. What do you think that is? A piece of shit? So Thomas Edison leans in over the test to hello. Everything is a punchline for the right joke. A white, crumbling, cold light face, rain blonde hair. Your features working as though you were going to call to me. Backing out between lives. Tough luck to see long kind of vampire. They both had a beard except the mouse. Some people can tell them and some people can't. But I kept strapping on my head. Kept strapping on my stilts, backing and filling. I wanted the alternate. Naomi Colt, Naomi Cloud. Jokes and jokes, years and years you echo. Become my psychedelic straight woman in our band shell by the Charles. Why are you writing a poem of punchlines? When you love me, I puff on my cigar to get to the other side. Okay, the second poem will also be my last poem. And it's called Back Home. Dreaming into the TV's dead eye or into the living room really, the TV presiding. Plants, pictures, rug and easy chairs. Into time and stillness. Pop gone, a grin around his empty chair. Phantom me sliding down the wall, pounding my fists in adolescent Veltschmerz. Ghosts of hormones pass among my mother's floral knick-knackery. Shape, thread, poem. But no, here she comes herself bustling away all poetry. Mom in her pajamas holding tape and remote and a pair of scissors to do battle with the TV. I've lost my place here. To do battle with the TV, it won't turn off. I'm gonna tape the sensor. Years it's waving. Hidden out, lullingly perfect. And then click, the picture rolls on again. Click, roll on. Click, so she has to rain dance in front of it. War dance, crack the remote like a whip. Again, again to kill it. She can't get it to the shop and they won't come to her. They told me the sensor's the key. Kneeling in front of it, cutting and taping. This way I can see where it is. She turned on me in rage when I suggested she buy a new one. Take out $300 of the money she's willing to me and get one that works. Enraged as if I were betraying her. She ignores me now when I tell her she can see the sensor perfectly well. It's just not working. Please, I thought this through. I know what I'm doing. Two crooked white streaks of tape beneath the screen. Mona Lisa's mustache. They pull at me, grotesque. A stammer, scribble, stain. But my mother's all high rolling energy. We'll see what's gonna happen here. You mother imitating her uncle Orel's Romanian accent. Old family tagline. I know how to use my tuchis. Another joke. Mom's aging head of bulb lit from within with Romanian blood. Grandma Stanley, Doddy, Mac, her ancestral's invincibility. The TV though still doesn't work. It rolls back on demonically. Click, back, click until she has to kneel in front of it pressing the power button with the pen tip 20 seconds to drive a stake through its heart. She falls back exhausted in pop's chair staring at the said and furious thought while I try to ignore her, crawl back into my head when, oh look, a flickering of red light at the screen's left edge. She's forward, bird dog on point, interval. Then that ominous red burst flickers again. SOS from the ineffable inside. I'm into it now too. We sit there together, silent, breath held as if the screen were a deep evening sky and we were scanning it for heat lightning, shooting stars. Thank you, thank you. Thank you, Richard. That was excellent. Don't start or I'll start talking about evening in Paris and red lipstick. Lee Rossi. Lee Rossi and I have read together mostly on Zoom because of the era we are in right now and we have had some pretty great conversations over time. One of them was an interview, which was really good and fun to do. And I just read a newish poem by Lee because he sent it to me, which was pretty cool. Actually, you sent it to Caroline Goodwin, but I got it. So, anyway, please welcome Lee to the microphone. Thank you, Kim. I came to poetry rather late in life. I started writing shortly before my 40th birthday, which was a long time ago now. And I remember one of the first things I discovered was flash, the flash, and it's a little living room workshop. And the impresario was handing copies of the flash around. He says, this is the real deal. And ever after that, I was hooked. I even subscribed for several years. But I would always go to do two things with the flash. I would look at the calendar to see if my name were in it. And then I'd look at Richard's reviews because Richard had a kind of secret window into the nature of poetry, especially poetry, being written in California, but throughout the country. And I do a lot of reviews now, but Richard's always been my prime model. And I'm really grateful for him to showing me some of the ropes. When I was thinking about reading tonight, I was thinking about the fact that many of the poems in this new book of mine, say anything, have cluster around the theme of taking responsibility for one's life and for the world in general. The only problem is that most of the speakers of my poems are unable to achieve either of those goals. But so you'll find that out. I'll just read a few poems for you. The first thing I'm gonna read though is a duplex. It's a fairly new form invented by Jericho Brown, a kind of mashup of a sonnet, a guzzle and a Delta blues. So this is duplex, it's called, I was awfully young. I was awfully young, not yet a man. Yet they wanted me to know what a man knows. They wanted me to know all that a man knows. And yet the men I knew knew so little. The men I knew knew a little about living, but almost nothing about love or anything else. Nothing about love or tenderness. Or if they did, they kept it carefully hidden. They kept it hidden, what they knew about love or tenderness or how much they cared. How much they cared about things unseen, things they couldn't talk about with other men. They had nothing to talk about with men or women. I knew that, although I was young and still not a man. A little dark. Okay, so this is a next piece, recounts a brief encounter with my dermatologist or a dermatologist, let's say. Not me here, it's called, no, not that. The doctor says to take off my clothes. My clothes don't come off in front of anyone, not even my wife. They're very particular, they'd be embarrassed for me. And I appreciate their discretion. The doctor wants to look for things on my skin that might be cancer. I might bare my skin to the sun, but not to the doctor. Of course, I don't bare my skin to the sun anymore. I hide inside my clothes. It's better that way for everyone. I'm a tree shrouded in fog. I'm a winter storm that closes the airport, the view from the window like static on your high definition TV. I'm the rock slide locking the coast highway. The doctor tells me not to be embarrassed. She does this 24 times a day, every 20 minutes for eight hours a day. This does not help even after I've removed my shirt and returned it to the snowmelt that used to be a snowman. Even after I've lowered my easy on, easy off gym pants, the ones with the swoosh. Her hands, the only part of her that I can see beside her face are purple. Don't touch that, I want to say. And she touches it, looking right, looking left. And then she's on to the rear. I want to scream, but I don't. I'll be coming back in three to six months. That's what they do to people who've had skin cancer, but she won't be here. She's got lots of good colleagues. And in the meantime, she'll be adding another child to her collection. She's got one, a three year old already. I try not to think about another visit. I try not to think about cancer. I'm a one man golf cart delivering my writer to the dinner table three times a day. All right, that was happy little poem. Okay, here's a poem about wanting love but being unable to find it. It's called Rats and Squirrels. Last night, you might remember this actually. Gale-forced winds buffeted the house. Squirrels clung to the palm trees like shingles to the roof. And rats cowered in their nests while the wind ruffled their fur like a mother stroking her baby's blanket. Only the wind cares for rats. A squirrel might be nutty, but there's something cheesy about rats. Even if her feather boa is ratty, a squirrel's tail is fluffy, whereas a rat's tail is always naked as a stiletto. Who suffers their hair to the misery of a rat tail comb or their wrought iron to a rat tail file but the poor in spirit and bank book? Who doesn't prefer the hopping vegan, always threatened, ever vulnerable to the slinking nocturnal scavenger, bubonic pet rodent of the apocalypse? Which is less forbidding? The animal world's Uriah heap squirreling away her horde against winter's cruelty are the scrooge-like pat-crat, miserly to no gooder end, a thief at the mercy of his own compulsion. Does your boyfriend belong to a rat pack, rather? Does your boyfriend belong to a rat pack? So much the worse for you. When he couldn't keep a job or his driving license and his buck teeth seemed to glow in the dark, he was just squirrely. But now that he's stealing your cash and spending on another girl, you know what he is. You don't need to say it. Okay, one of the things I've learned about living in a working-class suburb, or from living in a working-class suburb as opposed to a self-selected gated community is that everyone's psychoses are on full display all day in the neighborhood. And so this poem is about a neighbor I had once upon a time. It's called Magnolia. It's got a little epigraph from Yeats. You probably know. Oh, great-rooted blossomer. Oh, great-rooted blossomer. Are you the leaf, the blossom, or the bowl? I hate this tree. The first words from my new neighbor, bending over the ground cover beneath her magnolia, Bella the South, sweet and fresh, subtropical exile to our fertile desert. She was 80 or 85. The tree half her age, and tall is a three-story house, still dropping leaves and seed pods like a teenager with a bad case of dandruff. It killed my lawn, she said, a violation 20 years in the past, which she held on to as if it were last year or last week. It soothed and fueled her anger, I imagined, to pluck the brown papery leaves from their hiding place in ivy and stuff them in a green bin. I wondered if Sisyphus hated his rock as much as she hated that tree. I knew how much I hated my job, eight or nine hours every day, trying to lift the world another inch. And every night more leaves would fall, leaves and pods, those sexual hand grenades, those pregnant cluster bombs, and yet she could no more live without the tree than she could without her anger. They were like an old couple, so deformed by their love that they couldn't want anything else. Every day after work, I'd come home and find her, bowed or kneeling, or toward the end, just sitting in the ivy, city of beetles, city of mice, and see the tree, its orange and ruby lights, lasened with sunsets, guilt, G-I-L-T. All right. Okay, I wanna do one more. This is a poem that is dedicated to one of my very dearest teachers, Tony Hoagland, who passed away several years ago. What did I learn about from Tony? I learned about irony and friendship, and how you need both in any life. The poem's called Not Brave, Not Free. All morning, some virus has been conducting military exercises in my throat, napalm, aerial bombardment, artillery. Bombing the dam was the last straw. You sound sick, my wife says, solicitously. No, I don't, I insist. Struck by the uncharacteristic rumble of my vocal cords, the basso profundo echoing in my ear bones, I sound sexy. I wonder if my penchant for lying to myself is a personal peccadillo, or something hardwired into all of us. I know that, I know that, I know that, says the kid in the back row, face red as a stop sign, hand waving high in the air, I ignore him. After all, I'm the teacher in this little classroom, and even though I too know the answer, I need to pretend I don't. Like those balloon faces floating on my TV, asking if after the latest shooting, the president will finally bring the nation together. They know the answer, but their investment in our collective stupidity is building interest in Switzerland and the Cayman Islands. Meanwhile, California redwoods, the few survivors, are in emergency conclave. Where's the fog they wanna know? I know, but have no way of telling them. Thank you. Thank you, Lee. Our last poet is a really good friend of mine, and this time I didn't book her myself. MK Chavez and I have spent a lot of time pre-show together, a lot of time reading at the same microphone, and a certain amount of time at my kitchen table having tea, more of that soon. Please welcome MK up to the microphone. So I, I was thinking, well, I learned about, you know, I first encountered poetry flash as a baby poet, and then I thought, well, was I a baby poet, or was I actually in my late 30s? Could be baby poet in my late 30s. So poetry flash hosted the first readings I ever attended. It's where I saw poets that I read and admired and made this connection between this idea of poetry and the reality of poetry. And so I would go on Sundays to Cody's. It was exciting and it was wonderful and sometimes really breathtaking. And then slowly, and at that point I didn't really, I just felt like I love poetry. I didn't think I want to write poetry. I thought, I love poetry. I'm inspired by it. And then I thought, well, maybe I'll just take this community college course on poetry writing. And that's where I met Lynn Knight, who in the middle of one of the classes, she said, like Richard Silberg says, you have to find the snail meat of the poem. And I thought, wait a minute, I know Richard. I know that name. And I connected it to poetry flash. And I guess the reason I'm sharing this story is because there are all these little connections and they seem like not a big deal at first. But now I'm looking back at over 20 years of being part of the writing community, over 13 years of hosting a reading series, being part of some really exciting and new things happening in the writing community. And I think it's really easy to forget that the sparks that lead to all of these different things are started by someone. And so I just want to appreciate you, Joyce, for you holding that and doing that and being so dedicated. I was at the Sonoma Writers Conference last week, and, or was it this week, no, last week, the days. And it was on a panel for literary citizenship. And we were talking about this particular thing and what we need to do, like what makes you a good literary citizen beyond like the writer's digest has an article that's like six steps to becoming a literary, good literary citizen. I was like, well, you can just check it off. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that part of what good literary citizenship is, is enduring and staying, even when it's not, when, even when it's hard, even when change is here. So I just, I really want to celebrate poetry flash and give it the credit it's due because you've been here for a long time doing this thing, Joyce. So thank you for everything that you do. Just an admiration of it. And then I had a crisis thinking, oh, it's a celebration. And then I thought, wait, do I read about missing people or do I read about ecological devastation? And I thought, no, I can't do that. That's depressing. I'll read about horror films. That's my cheerful stuff. So what I brought is, I brought a triptych to read you, but I'm gonna start with the process note for this particular project. Process note 60, 666 considerations on horror. The creature emerges as a fragment. In this act, reflections transform, the reflection transforms the intangible into the corporeal. There is a slipperiness to capturing identity. One Sunday afternoon, I found Frankenstein. I knew immediately that I loved him. I grieved him. I was him. I grew up with people who would not say certain things, but the words came, falling out like teeth row after row. I caught them. Like some people catch unsubstantiated fear of the other. Like Goliophobia was to the shark's demise. In a nightmare, I opened endless doors searching for answers. Collections of words are sacred realizations, sometimes glossolalia. The landscape of horror films is fashioned from the details of lost identities. In El Salvador, I'm black, but black in that we don't have black people in El Salvador way. Joan Didion's book, El Salvador, was a slasher film. It offered one way to see the worn-torn self, the walking dead. I shut my eyes as one does during the scary parts of a horror film and closed the book. There was blood everywhere. In conversations about identity, a friend says, I never feel Latinx enough. Says, but at least you speak Spanish. Another friend says, I knew it. When I tell her I recently learned that my father's side of the family is black. He said, oh, sorry. I recently learned that my father's side of the family is black. Another friend says, but you're not really black. Father never said, we are black. He said, try not to look black. Frankenstein is not the name of the monster. The monster has no name. Frankenstein is the name of the father. Horror films help to make sense so that I might love my monster, love your monster, love my father's monster, love the monsters my friends carry, even love that monster Joan Didion. American anxieties find a good home in cellulose. Becoming numb is body horror and an integral part of the pantheon. What I know is I can find myself in horror. Stories lurk, lurch and levitate. Stories are hungry ghosts that live in the back of your throat like an eyeball. Horror is an allegory, a not so secret secret. Horror has a penchant for mimicry and repetition. Recurring themes include desecrated burial grounds, infrasound that pairs with the spongy tissue of marrow. The company of the haunted. Cherry colored lip gloss, a certain coming of age trope, dioramas of wounds and the tender view of teeth, all that is swallowed. Horror gives trauma an alternate ending. Studies say we don't go to horror films to see violence, we go to witness the unraveling of rage. In The Thing, there is one woman identified character. Her name is cheating bitch. Cheating bitch is a computer generated voice that beats Kurt Russell at chess. Wrath is a meditation, horror is a wish. Consider the monogamy of some monsters, their single focus and the promiscuity of others, how they alter everything they touch. My father would drink and ask, why are you so dark? Monsters once lived on the edges of maps. Art historian Asa Mittman says, monsters do a great deal of cultural work, but they don't do it very nicely. Somewhere inside me lives a wish to incite fear. There are many casual things said about my skin, the tangle of my identities. Deep in the swamp, sunk in the silt, among cypress and tuplo, in brackish water, among Spanish moss and shoebells, lives the forgotten creature from the black lagoon. A good horror film shows us who we are and holds warnings and questionings. What if we are the monstrous thing? What if we are the rescue group that shows up at dawn to shoot the lone survivor of the long night? What if we are every character in a horror film? What if every horror film carries a truth, even the worst of them, emerging out of darkness? I'm shining a light, won't you come and see? So now you know me better, you know what cheerful is for me. No, but really, I do find it cheerful, I love horror films. So this is a triptych. And I think you'll probably know pretty quickly from the title of the first piece, Jaws. The tension goes on for 81 minutes before we actually see the creature. Is it vagina, dentata, or is it Maybelline? Consider fine china, a spiked Venetian chastity belt, shark's lament, not swallowing Richard Dreyfus whole. Smart fish. Some days I want to be a shark, a terror, armed with an ampula that predicts what creatures will cross my path. The magical powers of long breath and fame, to be the star of a mythology so strong that I become a franchise. My very being an opostmatism before tearing flesh with serrated teeth. I will say now you can be afraid of my skin. Every fourth of July, us a shiver of sisters will circle a reminder, a celebration, sharks basking and endless. Thank you. We're about to enter the schmoozing portion of the evening, which we don't film. So thank you all for being here. Thank you to the readers, Joyce, Richard, Lee, MK. Thank you to all of the people who came even though they weren't going to be on the stage and thank you for everybody who does this poetry thing because it's hard to do sometimes and we keep doing it. Take care.