I am very honored to be reading with San Francisco Poet Laureate, and full on legend Diane Di Prima at the seismic poets session on Litquake’s opening day (Day of Days to follow Night of Nights?)

Our reading is at the Koret Auditorium at SF Public Library main branch at 1 PM, Saturday October 17th.

I know the irony/hypocrisy of reading at Koret while writing a blog loosely called Escape for SF Public Library is a little strong, but good lord if I really wanted to escape the library I wouldn’t write about it!

http://fullofcrow.com/prate/2009/08/lenore-weiss/#more-68

The Poetry Warrior is a promising young ‘zine from a promising young “player on the scene.” Don’t just read my poem while you’re there.

But make sure you read it:

LADYBUG

Ladybug I watched you maimed
in the desert of
this vast synthetic kingdom
by an all terrain stroller

Bittersweet because you
somehow
prefer it this way.

Poets are, as close to definition as possible, obsessed with themselves and death. All of the sex and drugs that get involved are merely byproducts of the twin disciplines of narcissism and morbidity. Of course not every poet gets tied up with sex and drugs, but whatever it is that comes out, the self and the grim reaper remain the core sources (and of course we don’t really write about those types of poets in these pages.)

While this doesn’t play out so well as a lifestyle choice in the mainstream of life, or literature and the arts for that matter, the straight world has a curious way of being slightly more tolerant of excessive or eccentric behavior in poets; a pass for being so obsessed if you will, in exchange for mining these depths for nuggets of brilliant enlightenment that will produce resonant truths that ultimately, allow the average reader or audience member quick access to the self-obsession “drug” without having to pay the consequences of addiction.

San Francisco poet LaDonna Witmer is very smart about this dynamic in her poem collection “The Secrets of Falling” (This Blank Page productions, 2007).

“I am both who you I want you to see
and who I really am
and sometimes those two
trip over each other so often
they are impossible to disentangle.”

* from “The Everyday Show”

While Witmer references Death intermittently in the collection, she uses it mostly as a storefront prop to dress up the much more real issue of identity and identity deconstruction and reconstruction. And this is not to say that significant “others” don’t wind up getting entangled in this mesh:

“at first glance
it would seem
we are becoming
mirror images
latin on one arm
blood on the other.
(you wear your scar
to the right.)

we are not identical
yet. “

* From “SWF”

Witmer’s prose can get a bit clunky at times (see 4th verse above) but unlike most poets who dress their work up in lacey black, she has a wonderful knack for cutting through the bullshit of the bleak vagaries of shoe gazing and pulling out the glorious little shining insights:

“Sometimes I think about
hurting myself
just so you’ll pay me attention.
Today it was the stairs and a
tumbledown vision. You
wouldn’t question the sincerity
of my fall.

You already know I am the clumsiest
lover. Heat seeking lips
fumbling for purchase
on a place that exists somewhere
that is else. Somewhere that is
no longer here.
Sometimes I think although
you love me better
I love you harder. “

* From “Lovesong”

It’s no accident that Witmer hearkens back to the spare brilliance of Sylvia Plath (and there is a tribute poem to “Sylvia” in the book) but very successfully builds upon the Plath legacy (since Sylvia is the seminal godmother of this genre of poetry) by updating the inherent relationship politics (“Newlyweds”) and identity issues (“Alter Ego.”) At the same time, Witmer adds a lyricism that is not typical in Plath, giving the poems the feeling of a conversation instead of a meditation.

Of course, Plath did not have a book that carried the multi-media production values the co-operatively published “Secrets…” has. The design of Kathy Azada using stark and alluring photographs with a mixture of black and white font (sometimes in the same poem further adding to the sense of dialogue with the self or “another” as in “Pretty. Good. Girl.”) This adds depth to the gothic feel of the collection, though in my opinion the font is too small; this may have been necessary to keep some of Witmer’s longer pieces within the necessary parameters of the design.

“The Secrets of Falling” ultimately succeeds in transcending the cliche’ ghetto of “confessional” poetry because LaDonna Witmer does not flinch from revealing the core tenets which make poetry so vital to its advocates.

http://www.cherrybleeds.com/

EYE ON MARS:
http://www.eyeonmars.com/

CP JOURNAL #4:
http://www.covertpoetics.com/roberts.html

SHOOTS AND VINES:
http://shootsandvineszine.blogspot.com/search/label/Contributor%3A%20Paul%20Corman-Roberts

OUTSIDER WRITERS:
http://www.outsiderwriters.org/content/view/809/44/

Hope to see you in 2009!
Heinous Pablo

While he may be better known as the publisher of Zen Baby (the Maximum Rock & Roll of the indie press) Chris Robin is a great minimalist storyteller in his own right, whose poems serve as a mirror to those types of critics, asking them in turn, “just who the fuck do you think you are?”

A drunk who thought I wasn’t homeless enough
heckled me in the middle of my set
He’d read the interview
he wanted blood…
I haven’t carried a bedroll in years
He claimed Bukowski lost his talent
when he got off the park bench
so I yelled into the Mic:
“What do you want me to do, vomit?
You want me to die?
I live in a low-income housing project
I’m quite comfortable
I hope to get out someday
if I get well’
rattled and nervous
I read Wide Open Fool,
the angriest I have ever read it
said “Buy my shit,” and sat down
It felt like a bomb
I wasn’t getting the laughs I’m used to,
They didn’t want my levity

- From “Heckled in Las Vegas (The Idiot Prevails)

Robin channels a lot of his friend William Taylor Jr., but with a kind of Denis Johnson (think Jesus Son era D.J.) runaway street kid ethos worked into the plain spoken lines. In particular, he captures the wide prism that is the Tenderknob (Anti 3 a.m. Poem, Fool at The Old Hotel.) Distinguishing his work from Taylor’s however, is a lot less Romance (of the tragic, doomed variety) and a great deal more morbidity shot through with downright hilarious barbs:

Nicole hands me a stack of her school papers to grade
as if I have nothing to do
I notice the kids are cynical or completely lacking in imagination
Do they copy this stuff off the internet? I ask
She nods and heads upstairs
After ten hours of staring into space and obsessing about why the
cast of Full House
were never massacred in a hail of gunfire
she returns at 6 am
asking eagerly “did anything HAPPEN?” uh no, I tell her
unless you include me wondering if I let that crazy looking guy in
after visiting hours
would he talk to me?
But I don’t tell the last part

- From “Anti 3 a.m. Poem”(w/apologies to WTJ)

The poems here are also a reflection of the larger purpose of Zen Baby, which is not so much to glorify the small, indie press or its participants, but to serve as a way to connect misfits and outsiders to one another, to find the potential in continuing to fly one’s freak flag so to speak, without having to sell out or give in to Dr. Phil and his all to ready acolytes.

Make no mistake, there is a LOT of death, violence and madness to be found in the pages of Angelflies (Coward, Love’s Dead Road, and Who We Kill being good examples) but these serve to create a fertile base for rebuilding redemption within one’s own life, and in doing so, Christopher Robin, with much savvy, displays one of the real purposes of literature outside the commodities market.

“She carries a small bird between her breasts
The news told her that an asteroid would hit the earth
in exactly 22 years
She doesn’t plan to be alive that long

One day it is culture and marriage she craves-
safety
Another day it’s abortion
going to Police Academy
or dancing with the Reggae boys
in a nice house in the suburbs

When she asked me to critique her story,
I did-
When I saw her at the reading, she said:
I won a car with that story-
I didn’t know what to say-
Stupid white boy-
We made her the bouncer
of the Open Mic

Tells me childhood stories of hitch hiking
up and down Highway 9
All of them riding in separate cars-
She had a big family
Over to the church of “stupid white men” for food

Every year her father stole the neighbor’s Xmas tree…
Once she told me not to steal her stories-
they were hers and only hers
but I’m a stupid white boy
and I have no history
All we have is Border’s
And Starbucks-
Are any of our buildings over 100 years old?
Most of us don’t know how to dance at Reggae parties
And you know Bea, all white men are thieves”

- “Thief”

ANGELFLIES IN MY IDIOTSOUP
By Christopher Robin
Platonic 3 Way Press, 2007,27 pages
www.platonic3waypress.com

Poets like Vladimir Mayakovsky and Ezra Pound knew this and wrote about it, both of them stating the poetry is real news…news that matters and news that lasts through time. Florida poet (currently) Michael Grover also knows this, and his endeavor to chronicle a brief period of time in the life of a homeless man living in his local park, The Man That Lives In the Park (Covert Press, 2008) engages his subject in much the manner of an old school journalist with genuine principles (they did actually exist back in the day.)

The majority of Grover’s poems functions as a portrait of an encounter with his homeless friend living in a pavilion near the edge of a river, whose voice sometimes sneaks in between the slices of life presented by the author:

“Visitor today.
We sit at the edge
Of the water and talk.
I don’t talk much anymore.
Except to myself.
Hair grows longer.
Beard grows longer.
I am stranded
On this desert island.
Far away from the mainland
Of society.
The president can’t see me.
Congress can’t see me.
The media can’t see me.
Businessmen can’t see me.
america does not see me.”

- Vignette 14

Indeed, that is the progression of the little story that is created when Grover puts his 39 mini-poems together to create, not just one big poem, but a micro or flash novel even, of a man whose is growing more and more invisible by the day, until even the author can’t see him anymore. Grover could have stopped this manuscript after his twenty second “chapter” and The Man Who Lives In The Park would have had a nice, tidy ending.

But that’s not how real life works and Grover, particularly since he works in the medium of plain narrative (even more stripped down with even simpler details than “plainsong”) captures the feeling of old fashioned news features, or what passed for one of the finer forms of the non-fiction genre over 50 years ago.

“A visitor today.
He sits in the shade
His back turned to him.
The café owner walks by
He waves and calls her name.
She keeps walking.”

- Vignette 24

The author himself says he doesn’t feel much removed from his subject matter, having drifted much in his own life and having his own set of hard times…again, in the true journalistic tradition or dialectic, reminiscent of George Orwell’s Down and Out In Paris and London (Public Domain, available at http://www.netcharles.com/orwell/books/downandout.htm) where the author is not just a chronicler but a participant in the underbelly of the supposed “great societies.”

Grover’s story would be the perfect document to pick up one hundred years from now to see what it was like to be a homeless person in the suburban USA today. Since The Man Who Lives In The Park is in print it will have a chance to make it that far, though we can’t much say the same for the human species.

Issacson is the main man at Zeitgeist Press, the legendary indie that has published Julia Vinograd, David Lerner, MK Chavez and a host of other legends (Danielle Willis, Joie Cook.)

Last night at the Poetry and Pizza series at Escape From New York (in San Francisco of course.) Chavez (nee: Maria Kaylib)read from her new book “Virgin Eyes” along with a host of newly written poems, and the good Mr. Isaacson read from his new tome, “Dumbstruck At The Lights,” perhaps indicative of his residence in the forever neon oasis/hell known as Las Vegas.

Issacson has a way of making poems about his father and his son sound edgy, while a passion about Rimbaud gives the old commune peripheral scalawag a “holy” sort of feel. Like a slam poet, he keeps his notes firmly in hand without ever really looking at them, subtly displaying his comfort and familiarity with his own material, but unlike a slam poet, not spending a lot of his alloted performance time trying to prove his cred or his mad skills or his alienated uniqueness…truth is, he’s just too grown up for all that. And it’s entertaining as hell to hear in poesy.

Chavez is too grown up for the young slammers too, not in terms of content but in terms of emotional maturity:

I’m in bed with the wrong man.

but it’s so human.

The poetry & pizza series at Escape from New York is a seriously hot SF reading, and always packs a full house which is an impressive accomplishment on a Friday Night in the Financial District for an establishment that is not a bar. Good on them for featuring two heavy hitting Zeitgeist poets last night.

Links:

http://littlebrownsparrow.com/

http://www.zeitgeist-press.com/