 Good evening. Thank you all for coming tonight to the special edition of the poem jam I'm John Smalley a librarian at the General Collections in Humanities Center on the third floor of this building Where we have tens of thousands of books of poetry in 41 languages Stop by and visit some time most of you Perhaps have already seen the exhibit that ties in with this program on the sixth floor and the soaring gallery But if you haven't know that it will be up for a while, so please do Stop by I just want to mention There is an American Indian Film Festival taking place at the Charette Theater across the hall for two more days And there are a few film programs on the table as well as Library newsletters and flyers coffee and cookies, so please help yourself to all of those wonderful things I want to take a moment to acknowledge our community So on behalf of the San Francisco Public Library We wish to welcome you to the unceded ancestral homeland of the Ramita Sholoni who are the original inhabitants of the San Francisco peninsula as The indigenous stewards and in accordance with their traditions the Ramita Sholoni have never ceded lost nor forgotten Their responsibilities as the caretakers of this place as guests We who reside and work here recognize that we benefit from living and working on their Homeland wish to pair respects by acknowledging the ancestors elders and relatives of the Ramita Sholoni and by affirming their sovereign rights as first people So with out further ado, I'm going to turn the microphone over to the guests of tonight's show Please give a warm welcome for Kim shock and Lisa Ruth Elliott I'm in the slightly surreal circumstance of being the usual host for this event And also being tonight's guests, which I think I get to do every once in a while when something cool like this happens Thank you all for being here. I'm gonna let We do this on the second Thursday of every month But it's not usually me We have guests from all manner of Poetic expression and lately, I've been featuring either exigent political situations or Anthologies and that's what's gonna happen next time if you didn't see it Colossus freedom as our next event at poem jam Check that out. Sarah Beals been doing an incredible job putting these shows together Are putting these anthologies together that feature? Communities that are severely impacted by Certain political perspectives in this country and they vary but the last one is about incarceration Now I'm going to introduce Lisa Ruth Elliott I'm sorry about the cough and I know I'm not wearing a mask, but I need you to understand I have tested I do not have the crud and I will put a mask back on after I finish reading I'm gonna introduce you to Lisa Ruth Elliott who is my compatriot in this project Which was graciously funded by the San Francisco Arts Commission. So thank you to San Francisco for that Lisa Ruth Elliott Hi Thanks for coming out on a Thursday when it's getting darker earlier and it feels like no one wants to leave the house in this cold We hope that you will enjoy the taste you get of the words and images that we have for you in this program and We hope you get a chance to Filled out out even further on the sixth floor We're gonna try to keep this to a time limit that will allow you to see the exhibition either again or for the first time after the program but The library does close at eight so well. We'll see I'm gonna try to answer a couple of questions that have been coming up when I Introduce this project to people This is a book. It's an exhibition and this is a reading and It is a collaboration so Kim Shuck and I Put together this project That we were Parallel Lee working on in our own spheres during the pandemic This is the intro panel to our exhibition. It gives you some of the information about The show and what we were doing but this is pandemic poetry and What I like to call striple distancing collage work actually Kim was naming her poems quarantine poems and And it was sometime in April 2020 that we were We had been daily posting on Facebook our work and we were like I See you see you're doing the same thing that I'm doing and I'm gonna read a little bit of an exchange it from the third of April 2020 Where Kim wrote to me and said I had a dream that we did a poetry slash art book together think about it And I was like ooh, I like that idea a lot and when someone like Kim Shuck who has the kind of presence and Into it that she has in the world says she had a dream about something you pay attention so When I said I liked it she's like cool And I was like are you thinking of pulling together your quarantine poetry and she said does that sound like something? You'd want to respond to I like the stripes so my work incorporates a lot of stripes and We are both weavers, so she acknowledged it's very weaverly if you know what I mean so The Arts Commission has graciously Funded this project It's not very often you get to be paid in advance to be an artist or a poet a lot of times you like Pull stuff together just kind of in your studio and in the recesses of your home or wherever you are working And then you hope someday somewhere someone will maybe want to buy what you did in this kind of weird purchase arrangement for creativity But we got paid in advance. Well, we had been working during the quarantine, but in December of 2021 we applied for this grant 2020 and in January 2021 we Were granted this artist grant. It was actually Kim's artist grant. I'm the collaborating artist And there's a couple Things to say about this book. Here's the back and front cover we had the honor of being blurbed by three former and Current former poet laureates of surrounding towns all really strong women poets and our Book that you'll get to see after we speak after Kim speaks Is it's not an illustrated volume of poetry. So like I didn't make my poems to respond to Kim's words. We were creating like I said in a parallel way. So this is really about resonance and Both of our work stands alone But there's a way that the resonance makes it an even deeper experience to read and see the imagery And I think this book really highlights the deep dive you can have of daily practice For me as an artist what it meant during the pandemic Also, I was recovering from kind of deep heartbreak at the time to have created something small beautiful and completed at the start of each day was really grounding and Both Kim and I worked in the morning. That was our morning Ritual morning practice morning creation. So the themes you see kind of evoke that as one person said sort of the dream space of that morning time and So here's an view of the book and we want to thank Paul Corman Roberts here in the front row for book layout and design The exhibition staff here in this building are incredible. So Joan Hannah Jesse really made our work come together in such a beautiful way and then the book was printed by Piedmont copy and Printing and they worked on every little detail with me. I tell you I Really recommend them if you have anything you need to print so We're gonna move into just pure images while Kim reads but I do want to say that our work is also meant to even though it was created during 2020 and then deliberately in 2021 as part of this grant when we thought we would be responding to the pandemic, but we were still in it This man is also meant to respond to this moment, which is our emergence and how are we? Transforming through that deep internalized trauma that we all experienced collectively but really alone How do we come to grips with it? How do we get healing out of it? And so hopefully our book our exhibition the poetry the words the imagery can help move us all a little further along that road of recovery and emergence So Kim This is the point where I usually say That it's always an honor to read in Romitush territory But that's not gonna cut it this time because the way that we've worked on The poems and the images Really responded to what we were seeing and at the time we lived across the freeway from one another and So we were looking at the same birds and we were looking at the same Weather and we were looking at things that were in this environment an environment to which we are guests and I just really cannot thank The people of this place or the place itself sufficiently for not just these poems but really everything I've ever written because I was born and raised here and I'm really Connected to this place. Oh That's exciting you ever find things on your glasses. Do you have no idea where they came from? Or what they are in fact Whatever it was it's gone now. So I'm gonna read a few of these were definitely definitely gonna keep this Reading portion kind of short and then Have time to field some questions maybe and let you see the book Live they're really gorgeous and I have to say something else. I was a little concerned and I've been carrying one around in my purse in a Ziploc bag But other people handled it a bunch And it's really stood up Just have to say I was I was you know You birth these things and then they're just very Precious smoke of burning houses Bitter blessings smoke and somewhere on this hill dogs howling howling I watch houses tumble into living water off east where the Sun comes from More prayer more wind more flood dogs fire dogs howling I pull my hill around me tight Tight like unburst blossom and repeat my name to myself. It sounds so like this hill Take me to rain and let my parched body take deep wet breaths Be dissolved today's early light is fixed on my thirsty left eye. I crackle I spark I catch fire We bring old water songs to edges We are the instruments are dry our dry thoughts are dry and folded thoughts Crack the word for rain Building water from first principles. We've called the bones called a song another song Ravens from up the hill drop pieces of evergreen arrange the joyful things in every corner This is the cautious edge We stand where the redwoods were where the roots spoke one and another and as the singing begins Our neighbor child sends soap bubbles up the street The rain wind the rain wind winds along the twisting ways prayers offered to a bowl of tap water then given on to the tree roots an Acorn in my pocket so I don't lose my way a way through Can you make yourself strong enough to change? We are shape-shifting now Can you feel bone flow thoughts like rivers drawing new beds like obsolete roadways feeling for a way through? We are the cure not one tree split grounding one clean thought But all of our messy meander are beautiful impatient care Wake again Pull self out of idea of self the mechanics of it the dream awake of it The tea bath poem the laundry puzzle broom Another ritual of a day and the chewing reality of pandemic which is and isn't Crawling the corners of my kitchen before noon grateful Basking in the drizzle Cellular memories of being aquatic Ground floor air hanging thick with Sun warm apple puzzle day this Shifting this fruiting this year song. I read your poem the wind the collage and Think these things I want to know them I want to feel the hum of the hive the curve of the number the wind blown through your reframed heart. I want to Feel the damage corrected I want to live in a community deeper than a one liner. There's one poem in here that is so deeply creepy. I'm not going to Eventually you can find that one in the book yourself These houses may have come adrift unhooked runoff with rumors painted gray in a city that used to whisper Daisy crowns Rethought a city that's saying California that palmed wild hearts painted like an angry ocean not this loving nesting water that surrounds us the household membrane So aware of these days of place where outdoor changes to indoor That piece of wood I rest a shell there a piece of charcoal to heat the resin Smoke right there at a place like the Sun coming up a transition a hidden prayer a welcome Waiting for one welcome returns Up the hill houses belong to those century plants Don pulls pink out of the beige I crochet another skull a snake ask the plague ghosts what they remember Finally have a good talk with the great grandma dead in the 1918 from flu Revisit smallpox scars steer visible still visible in the family anxieties if not on our skin yellow fever cholera that visited my childhood in grandpa's curses Polio the librarian's hands across the street the house sparrows tucked in under the roof tiles Just out of the window a fern frond Uncoiling in a slow gesture my nose Pressed the glass wrapped in a cloak of ravens in history the neighborhood owl has some things to say Tying another button to the string I stand on the porch rain wet Street sings back Today has a different geometry just now a fullness with nulose pumpkin bread and owl company Untranslated stories narratives from the various centers tying this button a particular spell to this string of buttons It's all out there Mistranslated and sequestered uncured and unwary sealed box stories transformations of water of fire The owl wings you can't hear but can guess at with enough experience you can guess I Have worn cold iron. I have worn cold iron on a morning like this Bodies Relentlessly symbolized Where does the transformation take place rain becomes underground water another cosmetic surgery? Cellular engines on loan to the cooperative organism. Where is transmutation catalyzed? Constant fuss of change. I looked into her eyes and remembered life isn't always change a press of water moving water Underground water thinking itself into cracks and ever exploration rainfall There is an ache in my jaw for the slow hot flawed poor of a different season I can feel the closeness can hear the bullets and I'm not a bystander The damned twist in torture of their own devising and make their plans as accurate as their shots For now For now The floor sings warning the prayers sinews stretching. I will hold my place hold the people whole in my words The bearded iris are coming out and floating whites in songs of purple I can't hug my son who lives two hills north of here I Sweep the kitchen floor and scrum away boots guffs Pasta marks something anonymous and sticky and I call my parents to check in Two-hour poetry reading online a good cause a good lineup a great audience and Every recent ceremony missed all of the way we mark the edges because this is our job Taking care keeping safe. I believe in my job But today I absolutely hate it The cells light up early down by the old waterfront Blocks from the water now the city eats itself, but it uses fancy condiments Office become cubicle home become investment ice cube tray living Plenty of the housed are homeless a knife slipped right in under the sternum like external bleeding Shelter in a place where the place is a stone in the river not a bridge not a refuge and the city calls out community Where are we in that death of a thousand cuts? Mythological creature we are held together with running stitches and his stone tossed as a wish into water a Spell a stone in the rapids a tow hold One afternoon at the old star pharmacy Baron Samedi and rabbit were one after the other in line for the checkout The Baron danced gently to vague and unstructured shopping music and rabbit chuckled The night before quarantine we shared art at the kitchen table noodles may save us all What are you doing to keep yourself alive today? What are you doing in the hour of the war God the Baron and I danced to vague music I can hear rabbit now renaming the daily ritual designations. I can hear him He knows we need to try something new and Here is where it must start The rearticulation of the skeleton just the collecting of the phalanges will take some time Yes from the bones out as though we meant it rinse the fear from our marrow from dermis and spinal cord take with us eventually an understanding of the connections My bones need ache of coming rain in October are used to this place a few generations in gathering moon Soon over the water tower gathering moon seen through rain soon a song in my cells a song in silver light and set fruit Set fruit going orange orange for speaking through the membrane life Death we are spirit and ache. We are a calling thing here at the harvest Month of flowers and as the moon rises deep quiet takes the same path as summer fog Bay to ocean these lessons in holding breath holding in month of flowers and here in pools of deep quiet Moon singing These world pools these kissed and silenced incantations and finally I catch her the moon Reflected in the water of my footed cast iron pot. I have added chamomile flowers picked from sidewalk cracks Earth's Nictating membrane extends retracts like the April fog a Spell of gratitude starts here Gaduki mutuality the only solution Each drummer each dancer each piece of the ceremony aligns the circle Dances down the grass brings healing resists conformity Holds the spaces between balance Balance and stay well The wind has dropped What bridge are we standing under what bridge what measure I rest my forehead against a load bearing wall and Safe I breathe deep the dousers headache is back So much water and I can feel all of it Unfold your best healing dance The poison of centuries collected in wise toes calls for release Dress carefully coil all of your medicine around you those heel-worn angers and grandma's best earrings Mom's recipe for bell pepper and ginger weave the dried flowers of a lifetime into your hair Call them all to circle the cars to bring the rattles where the headlights cross stand breathe and Dance the deep healing We give each other hands full of words Sticky smelling of jacks or bread yeast. We give each other heart words words the taste of stew Beans sharply of coffee. We splint the brakes with words pull the boat bolt from the white wall with words Draw the fever with words We stand by the bedside all night breathing words and more words. We are relentless Listen to the crickets and tell you the temperature Look at the stars to track pathways call the houses by names of who lived there years gone The politicians are trapped between dates on the pages of books But we sing the world end-to-end and hand each other another word I think this is going to be my last poem This South Hills fog is a gift from the Pacific to the Bay Relabeled body parts sneaking inland painted with Delta mud seeking the things they came here for the petroglyphs The bear dance healing that somewhat translated out of utility by someone who looks like them and knows the order of forks and the rituals of somewhere else But the Bay takes it neat Sipped right from the rocks not cut with romance or the dream of wilderness But clean as the red tails kill Clean as an afternoon talking story and the Pacific sends the Bay fog to remind her That she's part of something that she loved Thank you so much for being here Yeah, does anybody have any questions I Have just battered you into submission. Do you have questions? Yes, Jonathan Yeah, but we should say in advance are for this purpose What we were showing you on the screen or not necessarily the pairings that we decided on for the book or the exhibition But I'll let you talk about it and I'll see if there's more We kind of went back and forth on it. So initially I think it was We looked at them by date and Some of that made sense and some of it didn't and we sat with it for a while and then Think you went through first and shifted some things around And then we sat around the kitchen and we sat around the kitchen table and put them all out and sort of paired them up that way And then we decided we didn't like some of those we adjusted that But it was a really organic process I think some of them are still with in same date pairings But most of them are not we've fiddled with it and played with it like cards until we liked what we saw and some of them really just Spoke to us through a phrase in Kim's poetry that related to either some words or Shapes or like this image for example kind of evokes kitchen wallpaper So when Kim is talking about the creaking floorboards or being in the kitchen This is sort of the one that spoke to me around that In our second iteration, so we did about 90 poems individually Collages individually in 2020 Until we were like September October. Okay, I think we're done with that and then when we applied for the grant We said we were gonna do daily poetry in 2021. So there was a little bit more deliberate. I see what your Word imagery is I'm gonna riff on that with that was more intentional for sure But it didn't always pair up exactly that way either No, it didn't and quite frequently they'd slip a day So the ones that went together was one from one day and one from the next day Right, but I write every day. So I wrote a poem every day for both years. It's just some of it wasn't mutually Resonant enough to actually look at and there was also a size concern because I did not want any poem to slop over to the next page and And Usually that's really achievable for me But I kind of went into this realm of verbosity at one point where things were all three pages long There was a lot happening in 2020 sort of mid-year to fall. Yeah, yeah, I have to say and it was Yeah, and I had started a project for the library at that point Which was called poem of the day and I was putting up a poem Every day and I was getting really sad because there was a couple of months where I had post somebody's work And there was like one person each week who died like within a little period I was feeling cursed a little bit and then I never thought of myself as a memorial poet But I certainly became one in 2020 and 2021 Like well it started with Michael McClure McClure passed away and I think the first poem in the project is my memorial poem to McClure and You know it just it became really depressing writing poetic obituary Commentary for my friends or people that I respected but mostly they were my friends Also, I have to say if you're ever tempted to create a poem of the day situation for anything Get a backup of about three months because We pulled it off, but I was sending Michelle Jeffers a poem sometimes on the morning It had to go up like can we sneak this in here? And because of that project is actually an honor for us to be here showing our work at the library because of the depth of connection and Service you have to this place through that particular Project and many many others the poem jam included so yeah well that'll happen because of a laureate thing, but um, oh Yeah, yeah seventh poet laureate if you didn't know that already I Forget that people don't know it and sometimes I forget that was true. There might be some people here All right, are there other questions, so we don't just kind of go off. Yes Thank you so much. Um, I have a couple questions if that's okay So you said that you were afraid of the words Slopping over to the next page does that mean you knew what size of the book you were already going to make and then my paired question is like I Am unfamiliar with the collage work. What is the size that you're working on here because I'm assuming the book small This is big. What can you just help us out with? They're three by five And the book reproduces them at roughly the right size but it's a Really good question if you go to the sixth floor exhibition, you'll see the originals And they're small so this is it's kind of weird to see them blow up like this in terms of the book size Kim you want to speak to the terms of the book size? I've developed this Really specific and persnickety notion of the size the correct size of a book of poetry I'm not sure where it came from and it's likely to change But I want it to conveniently fit into the pocket on This coat Which as you can see It does This is the standard measure Kim's coat Kim's coat pocket. So yeah, we knew we were gonna do a five by seven roughly book And you know, you can make the type really small for a long poem, but we also wanted it to be legible. So that did Influence our choices a little bit Yeah, and there's about 40 44 poems and Poem pairing and collage pairing together in the book plus the cover images and I just want to speak about this real quick the cover Let's maybe go back. I'll go back to show you the cover big but so when Kim wrote me this message Let's do a let's think about doing a book. I was I Took the opportunity to Read back through everything she had written which by that time was only three weeks So it felt like a lot at the time when we ended there You know we each did about 150 pieces towards this project even though we were both still creating daily But these pieces were really about our Corners that we were all stuck in and if they were their individual pieces But they're meant to work together and they also Can be shifted around so that the pieces come together and there's something in the center Instead of on the edges but a lot of the Images she talks about cats a lot we took the urban sort of landscape there's a lot of resonance for actual Kim phrases in the imagery here or at least that I was working with that so these were deliberate And I remember sending them to her. We're like, I think I think we're on to something now So this was a definite response kind of Project this particular set Yeah, I think when I initially asked Eileen Casanero to blurb the book. She was the current poet laureate of San Mateo County, but Which is you know the way my brain works I'm looking at this so I'm having a random thought I apologize for No, well, those are pretty powerful poets up there, too They all are really remarkable for all kinds of reasons and it was a blessing that they all said yes And they they hopped on that quite quickly so Also, I want to point out you won't be able to see this until you come over and look at the books But we knew we wanted to do hand-binding on this book and I'm a book binder Kind of more amateur than anything else If you go upstairs to the sixth floor and see our show, you'll also see Really professional meticulous book binders who make books like you would see in somebody's wood paneled library But this has a long stitch binding. So we had it all printed up Insignatures and then I bound them and then took them back to the printer and they cut them down to size. So this is they've all been held lovingly and sewn up and It should lie flat and be do all the things that a handbound book should do the first incarnation of the project as a final piece like as a book piece as opposed to the show piece or The poetry reading piece was Had a lot more poems It was like that big It still is it was that big was that big because we had the original art pieces on every page So it it ballooned up, but we we did take a whole bunch of them out and I think Paul Corman Roberts is an excellent teacher of how to create like how to Think about a manuscript and how to write poetry and he's always saying that Great poems are made by editing which is something I don't really do but instead we we edited the poems We took actual poems out instead of taking words out, and I think that worked pretty well Anybody else have questions Yes, what did it make you want to do next what did it make you want to do next? Well, the daily practice for me has been about creating this book So I actually want to get back to an artistic creative process in the mornings Kind of given that to the birds that's might the time I spend with the birds in the morning, but Maybe after the birds I'd like to go back to having something beautiful and small that I can take into the world For each day I Still write every day Thing I do What else happened So it transitioned into writing an essay every day for a Differently kind of published book that is out now called noodle rant tangent and I the there is a certain joy of distanced collaboration of Collaboration that's not locked together And I want to try that with some other people, but I need a break first So that's I have plenty of stuff going at all time. Oh, yeah, we don't want to Where you can match up your our own Puzzle and with whatever poem we what a cool idea You know, so we're gonna be up in that gallery until February and we do maybe want to do another event Maybe an interactive type thing, but maybe that's part of it. Maybe maybe that's maybe we create a little digital Puzzle-making that sounds fun. That sounds vaguely unsatisfying though digitally. I don't know. It's kind of like Eating a caramel with the wrapper on Let me think about that Yeah, I Gotta be honest with you if I find an old caramel in the purse that I cannot detach the label for the thing from I eat it anyway Which is probably visually something you can tell about me Anyway, we're gonna set up the books and if you have any further questions, I'm going to be available to answer them as soon as I pop a Cofftrop and put my mask back on and yeah, also again the library is open till eight So if you don't need to purchase a book but want to go to the exhibition, it's there for you Thanks for coming