On a warm Saturday night in the Mission District, poetry is being celebrated. The LAB on 16th street hosted the second of four installments in husband-and-wife team Donna de la Perriere and Joseph Lease’s Bay Area Poetry Marathon. Incredibly, not only was it NOT the only Saturday-night poetry game in town, it wasn’t even the only poetry game in a five-block radius. Over at New College of California, on Valencia, a tribute to the late John Wieners was underway, celebrating the release of a newly-discovered journal, A Book of Prophecies. Readers over there included current San Francisco poet laurate Jack Hirschman, New College poetry instructor Micah Ballard, and San Francisco Art Institute professor Bill Berkson, among many others. Back at the LAB, de la Perriere and Lease both teach in the California College of the Arts creative writing program, and three of the readers (Camille Dungy, Brian Strang, and Paul Hoover) teach at San Francisco State University. This means the audience for poetry in the Mission that night was divided among no less than four MFA programs on two opposing axes: NCOC-SFAI at the Wieners tribute, CCA-SFSU at the Marathon. It’s too bad. Both readings would have had double the audience, had they been on separate nights.
It’s no matter. At the July and August readings in the Bay Area Poetry Marathon, there will be no such conflict, and you’ll be able to enjoy the poetry without wondering if they have better wine and cheese or more comfortable folding chairs down the block. Lease and de la Perriere began the Poetry Marathon when they lived in Boston (where it had a much pithier title), and up until this year it was a one-day, all-day event. Although it’s not really a marathon anymore per se, the new format makes it much easier to pay full attention.
Donna de la Perriere kicked off the night by promising there would be no police presence this time around: “and if you think I’m kidding, ask someone who was here in May!” she says. Apparently May’s Poetry Marathon was interrupted by cops searching for a fleeing armed suspect (not a rare occurence at 16th and Capp). In a voice dripping with sarcasm, de la Perriere repeated a police officer’s admonition: “A man with a gun is more important than your little poetry reading.” The audience hissed and booed. I was a little alarmed. This crowd meant business. These were people willing to risk death for poetry!
First up was the legendary Diane Di Prima, author of an astonishing forty-three books. Di Prima is sometimes referred to as “the only female Beat Poet,” which is both factually wrong and horribly reductive, considering all she’s done in the decades since she was a kid running around the Village with those wild boys. Seated in a chair beside the podium to rest her swollen feet, Di Prima has lost none of her fire or power with age. She read from her newest work, the as-yet-unpublished Loba, Book III. Di Prima explained that she began writing the Loba series in 1971, and that the newest poems were mostly written in the middle of the night when she was awakened by aches and pains. “Waking up from pain can be quite delightful because you remember your dreams,” she tells us. The new poems were written in fast succession in the weeks just before and after Hurriance Katrina made landfall in 2005. She invoked Robert Duncan, Federico Garcia Lorca, and Mnemnosyne, the mother of the muses and goddess of memory.
Next was Sara Lihz Dobel, a recent CCA grad. Dobel got her poetic education on the slam circuit before getting her MFA, and described the poems for the evening as being from “somewhere between” the two worlds. She declaimed, sans microphone, from memory, standing in front of the podium. Her performance was as polished as a one-woman show, using body and voice and facial expression as much as the words. I noticed Dobel’s imagery often involved nostalgic foods: spam sandwiches, white cake and white frosting, watermelon, squash, fruits and vegetables that conjure Nebraska childhood summers and the terrible sexual end of that innocence. “I discharge cherry pits and I miss my mother,” read one arresting image.