The gallery 21 Grand is a former auto body
shop along the northern edge of Oakland's downtown. Whatever
exhibit is showing has been temporarily displaced to make room for the more
than 60 people who will turn up for the reading I gave with Mary Burger.
Looking around as the audience gathers, I'm startled — nearly stunned — at how
many different worlds of my poetry have arrived all in one room.
My nephew
Daniel and niece Valerie have driven down from Seattle. Tom Marshall & K. Silem
Mohammed, who appear to have met only once or twice, have both come up from Santa Cruz. Eileen Tabios has
descended from wherever it is she lives in the wine country. Tim Yu is shorter
than I had imagined & has a terrific smile. Richard Krech, who published my
very first poetry back in 1965, is there in a straw porkpie hat. And of course
so many of the poets by whose work I have for so many decades measured &
tested my own: David Melnick, Lyn Hejinian, Jean
Day, Bob Grenier, Alan Bernheimer, Kit Robinson, Stephen Ratcliffe
(looking more windblown than ever) & Stephen Vincent. Kevin Killian sits in
the front row & kari edwards introduces herself, as
do Stephanie Young & Chris Sullivan. There is one of my
saxophone heroes, Larry Ochs, and two flute
players, Ahnie Barker & Yana
Zimmerman. If I have an imaginary "perfect audience" for a poetry
reading (my sons sitting attentive in the first row, Krishna a few rows back with my
nephew & niece), this is as close as it will come to ever being real. I
realize that I owe curator Michael Cross big-time.
I realize
also how these different worlds of poetry inhabit this room at one instant in
time, but don't blend into any homogenous thing. One great gift that my blog
has given me in the past year has been access to a world of poetry very
different from the one I'd previously inhabited. It is, to large measure (a greater
one than I'm usually apt to admit) the most active poetry scene going, composed
primarily of writers putting out not their 20th or 30th book, but rather their
first, second, third.
