 And so it is, with a great degree of pleasure, that I present to each and every one of us for the first time in her role as the Port Laureate of San Francisco, D'Vorah Major, the new Port Laureate. Well, you've got a tough act to follow. I think I'm up to it. Oh, thank you. Before I begin my formal remarks, I just wanted to say some thank yous. First of all, thank you to everybody for coming. And I know I've heard it told that there are many people who accomplish things and do wonderful things out of adversity on their own with no help or hardly any help. I'm not one of those people. I am here and I have done what I have done because of the love and the support and the encouragement of my family, of my extended family, of my friends, of my community in no small part. I'm here because of a wonderful artist community. Yes, writers, but musicians, visual artists, a wonderful, wonderful community. And so I really must thank them because that's part of whom I am. I have to say that I know Glide is really important and I know Janice's work with Glide is really important and I know Janice's role as Cecil's husband is really important. But I've known Janice as a poet for a lot of, a lot of years and I really, really love her work and I've been bringing it to students for as long as I've been in the school. So I am very, very honored to be following her because I am so, just so enamored of her work. So thanks to her too. And of course, thank you to Mayor Willie Brown and to the city of San Francisco, not just for recognizing me, but also for acknowledging the fact that poetry should be valued and not marginalized and that the diverse voices of poetry need to be heard. You see, I love poetry. Poetry makes me smile. Even when it makes me cry, even when it's bite sense chills up my spine, even when it howls its ice fury. If it speaks truth, it warms me up inside and it makes me smile. I love poetry. Poetry with its infinite rhythms and shadings wears robes in so many colors and fabrics. You can travel the world in its grasp, ride through its bazaars of taste and tongues as it speaks its languages of love, of struggle, of determination, of faith, of humanity and our universes. I love poetry because it's a warrior for truth and passion, which takes no prisoners, only converts. For me, the best of poetry is like jazz in its ability to have people who don't always speak the same language swinging to the same beat. And if you want to swing to the world in poetry, San Francisco is probably one of the better places to be. In San Francisco, you can be at home and traverse the planet at the same time. I want you to bear with me for a minute because I started thinking about poetry in San Francisco and I realized that San Francisco has held poets in poetry from its very beginning. First were the Olone, who traded on its beaches with the nearby me walks, not only baskets and fish and deer skin, but also song, verse and stories all fed by the drum. Much of that voice was silenced as first conquistadors and then years later pioneers began to create settlements that became cities. Then the earth that held the healing bushes, the Yerba Buena, that grew wild on this land was turned into San Francisco. But now the city is once again home to many representatives of Indian nations and their poets' voice grows strong again, like San Francisco-based Tasalagi, Salk and Fox poet Kim Shucks Creek in a storm. She writes, I forgot to ask for the name of the creek that used to run through what is now my backyard. They piped it under, but with enough rain it remembers where to go. San Francisco has always been a fertile ground for poets. 49ers brought poetry with their pickaxes and saddlebags. African Americans in the 1850s were writing poems and creating hymns, publishing them in their newspapers, performing them in their cultural club and in their churches. The Chinese carved their poems in graceful calligraphy on Angel Island jail walls and those who finally found a home in our chopstick alleys continued to write first in their native tongues and later in English. This area, this city, has always been a place where cultures crossed paths. Some neighborhoods have, of course, stood out as areas where poets congregated and sharpened their craft. North Beach, for example, resonates poems, not just as historical monuments to the beats, but as a life force. If you happen there, you will find vital poetry, of course in Furlinguetti's Venerable City Lights bookstore, but also in the cafes, in the clubs, sometimes on street corners. If you're particularly lucky, you might happen on Jack Hirschman sharing poems, perhaps his own or maybe one of his translations from French or Albanian or Haitian Creole or Italian or one of the other polyglot of tongues in which he writes and lives. Perhaps it will be a poem he wrote that morning or the night before, but whenever its creation it will be of the now and however international its tongue. It will come close to home crying for justice for, as he writes, our home, our land, homeland, once and for all, for one and all, not just this one-legged cry on a crutch on a rainy sidewalk. I grew up in the shadow of North Beach's Bob Kaufman, devoured golden sardines and solitudes crowded with loneliness as if I had never heard a poem before. The first man was an idealist, but he died, Kaufman wrote. He couldn't survive the first truth, discovering that the whole world, all of it, was all his. He sat down and with a piece of string and a sharp stone invented suicide. You see the poetry of San Francisco that I'm talking about is not a poetry that is simply folded between the covers of a book. Page is still crisp after years on a shelf. The poetry that I speak of is a poetics that comes through and is for the people. A street corner poetry, a cafe poetry and on the bus poetry and in our parks poetry and in your face poetry. A poetry for the many, asking hard questions, posing alternate visions, showing us not only the city or the nation or even the planet, but the layers of the universe where we live, a multitude of the shades of humanity that we defile or embrace, scorn or love. I was about 19 years old when I first heard a poem by a Vietnamese poet. It happened that it was a translation of poetry by Ho Chi Minh, which incidentally he was a poet first. Several of us were crammed inside a car, riding through Fillmore, all of us proudly black, as one of the sisters turned to the back of the car and read from the slim volume she had just discovered. Sometimes someone commented on a particular verse, sometimes we all just nodded and affirmed as she went on to find another one and read that too. After winter comes spring, what could be more natural? She read, repeating the poem's last lines a few times. After winter comes spring, what could be more natural? And then we all repeated the lines a few times. Until moments later we reached our destination, changed in barely perceptible but persistent ways by the poems. I like the way poetry shows up like that, represents in unlikely places, is at home anywhere, if its rhythm is true and its heart open. Tonight some Vietnamese poets are gathering with their community and reading their poems because April 30th is the 27th anniversary of the end of the Vietnamese War, or as they call it, the American War in Vietnam. They are celebrating and mourning and remembering and they're being a part of the San Francisco poetry world. Perhaps Saigon-born Mung Lan is reading of the world seen now from San Francisco where as she writes, the Golden Gate Bridge from my window is a red of smothered crabs cooked in dream fog. Tonight in the mission two poets are holding force. There the poetry is like the anise Juan Pereira speaks of as it roams emitting its vapor, writing its vengeance on walls, tossing its idea into the random alleys. You see San Francisco as a local poetry organization, a certain is name, is a city of poets. Just the hill up from my western edition home, Jenny Lim lives and sculpts her poems, mixing her words with poetry and jazz, caring as much, if not more, for poetry as performance on air than embedded on pages, bringing China and Chinatown to her universal view. Got the transcontinental railroad tattooed on my back, 20,000 pounds of bones bound for China. Home is here where the heart beats, where the ghost of Anna Mae Wong and Jimmy Wong Howe sleeps. Every community and every age makes poetry in San Francisco. So many people, so many corners that the more I name, the more I quote, the more I'm forced to leave out. There's so many good poets that speak from their cultures in their language with the music that is unique to their clan, yet is also verse that is star and cosmos in the sensibilities of us all. Indeed, I haven't named any poets of the sunset, the Richmond, Bernal Heights, Excelsior, but they're there holding forth with strength and eloquence. And I've omitted so many poetry communities with skilled dynamic voices, Filipinos, Irish Indians, Palestinians, and I've not even made mention of the poetry skills, schools, some of whom have barricades and weapons poised, the new formalist, the spoken word MCs, the traditionalist, or the youth or the elders or the disabled. You see, it's all in San Francisco. I had to tell you while I was writing it, I found it really strange to be a poet making, preparing to present a speech. You see, the work that brought me here is inside the poems. It lives as breath and rain, not as narrative exclaiming or proclaiming, and it is as poet, not speech maker, that I intend to fill the post of poet laureate. I will continue to write poems of and for the city, a city that has schooled me, embraced me, fed me, a city that now honors me, but it's not always easy to write about San Francisco. It's easy to praise its beauty, even on a dank slate gray day, when the fog washes everything with sharp nails that cut through any space in your garb, even as it presses ice needles into your bones, even then San Francisco Hills still roll, Golden Gate Park is still blossoming in rainbows of greens, the bay still beckons in a group of swimmers who seem to trace their symbolic genealogies back to Icelandic sagas, are paddling near Aquatic Park Beach. It's easy to praise the poets of San Francisco. Any day, any night, there is an opportunity to hear poetry, to live poetry. No, not every poet is worth hearing and no, not every poem has magic. But at each of the cafes or clubs, libraries or schools or community organizations around the city, one or more poets is moving forward, perhaps with paper trembling in hand, perhaps unsure how to approach the mic, perhaps commandingly raising their voices over the cash registers and customers order some kind of espresso drink, perhaps with rhymes undulating off their tongues, perhaps shooting fire or spilling sweat, but surely breaking open the moment with the madness and majesty of spirit in word. But San Francisco is not only a city to be glorified and praised, a tourist gemstone at the center of strings of memorable odes and romantic ballads, perhaps the hardest part of being a poet, not just here but anywhere, and perhaps one of the more important parts of being a poet is to look at the corners that are not so wonderful, to find poetry in the blemishes and stains. For example, when I'm downtown, I always hear the voices, see the faces, feel the mantra that sweeps this wealthy nation's streets. Spare change, spare a quarter hungry, got a quarter spare any change, hungry, need a quarter, need a quarter hungry, spare change hungry dear, have a quarter, need a quarter across one block, hands, empty cups, hats, stretch in front of our spiked heels, scuffed brogams, high-tech rubber soles, dyed hair into pay, leather bags, see-through plastic bags, neon orange bags, monogram paper bags, hurrying to the corner to wait, talking loudly sometimes to ourselves, stepping past the curbs and doorways where they stoop and stand. One does not have calves or feet. Can you spare any? Another has on an army jacket, hungry, a third shivers under a woollen overcoat in the heat of August. Most are men, some are children, need a quarter, most are white or black. Spare change, young enough to have friends, family, babies. Do you have any? Old enough to have known another way to live. Spare change, hungry, spare a quarter, need, do you? I came to adulthood in the western edition, honed my own poetry at many's can do on Fillmore Street, beer, wine, pool table, regular people. So you had to like do something to get them to stop hitting the pool balls. I still live in that part of the city, but with all the changes, sometimes those streets seem like strangers, sometimes the black community who made our first inroads there over 150 years ago seems like the interloper. She's a dark woman, treading water in a life of hard choices, wrong decisions, limited alternatives. Stockpins are embedded in her eyes and mouth. Once she knew she was beautiful. If you look closely, you can still feel the edges of fire that burned in her eyes on her skin in the way her back arched across Fillmore Street corners. She wore her nails sculpted in red in those days when that street, when this street was ours. She sat on a bar school, staffed her fingers and hunched her shoulders as the smoke rose between the bandstand and the counter, and the scene got hot and sultry, and the music pressed out the doors and down the street, maybe. Maybe further down she, slinging it jacks, had another cigarette lit, flashed her teeth and laughed as the club spun tight, shoulder to shoulder, thick smoke and blare in saxophone. Maybe she checked in with many, bought a pitcher of beer and halfway listened to some crazy poet's chanta, Continental Promises, or with cungo drum and chakeray punctuating the rhythms, and a flute solo burstin' out over the tastiest of love poems, maybe. Maybe she slipped into Connie's for some curried goat and coconut bread, or sweated spices next door as Leonard pulled another sweet potato pie out the oven and poured his red-brown biting sauce over smoking tender ribs telling stories as she savored another mouthful then when the streets were ours. She can see those days. She knows them. She remembers before imported cheeses, before brandy-filled truffles, before double lattes, handmade paper cards. She sits on the iron-rimmed privately-owned bench to rest her feet and take the pinch out of her back. She holds the bitter in her mouth, sometimes spits it out at passersby with steel in her stare, there on that bench, on that corner, on that block, on that street, that was ours, that was hers, that was taken, that we let go, that is lost, that was Fillmore when the musicians had names and the rhythm was blues and the downbeat was jazz and the color was black and fierce like her. Thank you. At night, a time I often find myself in front of my glowing computer screen typing away or watching solid tear card bite shuffle and reshuffle themselves when the words won't wake up. Too often at those times, the stillness of the moment is broken by the sounds of gunfire outside of my window. Listen. Listen to the buzz humming around the words. Place your ear against the ground, next to the ringing water pipes, steal your sighs, breathe in silence, stand in waiting around the syllables. Zap! Pow! Pink! Pow! Zip! As you listen, an earthquake tremor becomes a 400-year fall off the Richter scale into a cascade of automatic rifles, recycled Saturday night specials, 2-bit-22s playing to a dying house. Kapow! Zap! Ratatatatatatat! Bam! Bam! Bam! Bam! And then the gasp, wine, shudder, thud. Last night, bullets rang again, Wild West live on TV, news at 11, poppin' hollow and thin. Gunfire explodes against the night. Flashes like a blaring series of freeway headlights caught in our rearview mirror, squeezing blood into your brain. They pop against night. Beirut some say it's become a metaphor, so much easier to deal with than reality. The down under right over there need not look at inner city outer limits. Not simply a burst, a New Year's debacle, a Fourth of July surrender, but a rhythm, a nightly beat of armaments pointed at self. Hip-hop ranting rhythms with the bass oozy coming in and shaking windows on the downbeat swing. Beirut some call it as a metaphor, only it's home. The blocks, where blood sharper, fewer and simpler words fuck meaning fuck, chill reaching beyond ice boxes and motherfucker meaning more than the dozens. They play wild, Wild West at night. When dawn should be caressed and assuaged. When lovers should turn and stroke each other's back. Enjoy the crevices between thigh, groin, tongue, cheek. When babies should suckle their mother's breast greedy with its butter fat. When old people need only listen to their knees and elbows creak while considering if getting up is worth all the inevitable angle sharp pains of aging. But instead the night begins its symphony. Ping, pop, zip, clip, pop, pop, double pop, zap, tch-tch-tch-tch-tch-tch-tch. Bullets burst as bubblegum balloons around our houses and our dreams again tonight and again and again and the news calls it somewhere across the planet. Somewhere you don't live but it's here too in your city, in your country, on your turf. Close to each day's dawning, bullets converse against a soon-to-be-gray sky. They chatter amidst the plasterboard walls, and every dawn, every dawn, no matter what battles have been fought and lost, every dawn birds come and sing perched in the wounded trees. Kapow! Pop, pop, double, pop! In silent surrender they roost, as the children play wild, wild, west for real. Pop, pop, double, pop! Sing! Kapow! Because there is this other San Francisco, this difficult San Francisco, this San Francisco that nurtures but also sometimes swallows its young whole, I will be using part of my tenure as poet laureate to create bridges that will provide public poetry dialogues between the generations and neighborhoods about what is happening on their streets to their age mates, to them. I'm hoping to work with Youth Speaks, the San Francisco Public Libraries and City of Poets to have people write and in a living memorial present poems that examine the sadness and miracles, the love and destruction that are a part of this city, and that reach out to, echo, support and reflect other cities, other nations, and other peoples' struggles and triumphs. San Francisco Peninsula, though it is, is linked by more than bridges to the east and north. It is attached by more than land to the south. It is bound by more than history to the rest of the nation. It is a microcosm in more than metaphor of the wars and truces, the terrors and struggles, the yearnings for peace and love that are a part of people all over this planet. Poetry you see can be a force that helps us to see and if we see clearly, we can move in the right direction. Poetry can be a force that makes us feel, can help us to know one another and in that knowing to move righteously through our love. These times are more than dangerous. What is there but blood, blood and death, hunger, hunger and fear, starvation of body and spirit, a cruelty cut deep into the maelstrom of our lives. The hour is late and we must raise up, resist, build barricades and armories and yet all I can add to the stockpile is a homemade pocket size acorn tool of a solution, a portion of my love. Not enough I know, I wish I could offer you more, more than a steamy caress. I want to give something that will ease the chaos, reduce the misery, foment a cure and all I have is love, an open-ended love, a never empty rice pot of love, a love garden that even in winter bears fruit and flower. In this place of humanity cordoned off, stripped, caged, forgotten in rich men's dreams of Star Wars and capitalistic metaphysical pornographic fantasies where all is owned and everyone and everything has its price, even God. I have nothing to offer but love, love and outrage. I hide my despair, fight daily against a brine of hate that will curdle my spirit and clog my will, push it back and offer love. One cannot fight a revolution with such a paltry weapon. Even a wordsmith must have more. I would become the red of the lava spewed from the volcano's stomach, spurt and flow and in my wake coax a few flowers to grow. Here I stand with nothing but my hands and my eyes and my heart, tendering not the honey that runs from between my legs at a moment's calling but my love. And if that's not small feathers under your wings to help you fly, forgive me. I am missing the last of my speech. However, I love my children. I knew there was a reason I brought to. Obviously the one I checked to make sure it was complete was the one in her hand. Here I stand with nothing but my hands and my eyes and my heart, tendering not the honey that runs from between my legs at a moment's calling but my love. And if it's not the rope you need to climb that mountain, not small feathers under your wings that lift you up, not the bulletproof vest toward office assassination attempts, forgive me. Forgive me my inadequacy. I have nothing to offer but a love that lasts forever. Take some, please. Perhaps it will moisten your tongue, coat your throat, feel a corner of a not yet full belly soothe your heart. Forgive me my paucity. I have nothing to offer but my love. During my tenure as poet laureate, I will make every effort to give voice to more poets and poetry, to let the poets and the poems demonstrate poetry's capacity to heal, to give vision, to provide clarity and to offer love. It is indeed a privilege and an honor to have this opportunity to serve as poet laureate of San Francisco. Once again, I thank you.