Well, here I am in this new anthology alongside Robert Pinsky, Seamus Heaney, Brenda Hillman, Thom Gunn, Czeslaw Milosz & Sandra Gilbert.
On the other hand, also included are Kit Robinson, Carla Harryman, Jean Day, Laura Moriarty, Barrett Watten, Lyn Hejinian, Leslie Scalapino, Stephen Ratcliffe & Bob Perelman.
Then again, there’s Ntozake Shange, Alice Walker, Maxine Hong Kingston, June Jordan, Al Young, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha & Ishmael Reed.
Even more mysteriously, William Shakespeare, Bertie Brecht, Li Po, Ben Jonson, Rilke & Sappho have also been included.
And, for good measure, you can also find Lenny Lipton’s “Puff the Magic Dragon,” Gelett Burgess’ “The Purple Cow,” Country Joe McDonald’s “I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-to-Die Rag,” and Percy Montrose’ immortal “My Darling Clementine” here.
But you shouldn’t forget Robert Duncan, Jack Spicer, Helen Adam, Madeline Gleason, Robin Blaser, Allen Ginsberg, Michael McClure, Philip Lamantia, Gary Snyder, Larry Eigner, David Meltzer & Barbara Guest.
Nor Dean Young, Louis Simpson, Alice Jones or Sharon Olds.
Or Judie Grahn, Malvina Reynolds, Susan Griffin, Opal Palmer Adisa & Alta.
Nor Gertrude Stein, Robinson Jeffers, or Jack London.
Let alone Jack Foley, John Oliver Simon, Julia Vinograd & Ivan Arguelles.
Even, I dare say, Tom Clark.
What may be the quirkiest collection of poetry I’ve ever seen weighs – I mean this literally – three tons, making it all a tad hard to fit in your book bag. You can find it on Addison Street in Berkeley, stretching from Shattuck Avenue westward on either side of the street. This is Berkeley’s Poetry Walk, which the Academy of American Poets named the first of 31 “National Poetry Landmarks” around the United States.
Put together by Robert Hass & Jessica Fisher, with porcelain enamel texts in cast iron plates designed by David Lance Goines, the one-time Free Speech Movement organizer who has evolved into the beyond-chic poster artist for Berkeley’s famed gourmet ghetto, the Poet’s Walk is an exceptionally nice gesture on behalf of a city that has been identified with poetry ever since the days of Ina Coolbrith in the 19th century. I, for one, certainly benefited enormously from the fact that I didn’t have to travel at all to discover poetry as a teenager. It was all around me.
Not only could I literally go watch Kenneth Irby writing intently into his notebooks at the Café Med every afternoon, one of my teachers in high school even published a novel, The Softness on the Other Side of the Hole, about that establishment & did so with the same press that brought out the Donald Allen anthology. Everybody, back when I was just coming into poetry, always seemed to be pointing out just where Allen Ginsberg’s “A Supermarket in California,” was or just where he had been living in Berkeley (tho I noted that people pointed out different houses).
Attempting to capture all of this activity in 120 plaques in the sidewalk, a street notable for the presence of the Berkeley Reparatory Theater & the large number of Berkeley High students who use it as a thoroughfare betwixt the campus & the city’s shops, is one of those impossible projects & the diversity of what & who got included shows Hass & Fisher trying nobly to play Noah to a vast ark of possibility. As it happened, people & poems were added as the project evolved so that the new Heyday Press book documenting this project has 126 poems & poets – and I believe another two others have been added more recently to the walk.
As it is, there are inclusions that make you feel that anybody who ever looked at Berkeley could have gotten in (Heaney taught there for a year when I was a student, making no dent on the consciousness of writers in the community at all, George Oppen simply lived across the bay, which is more than one can say of Shakespeare, Brecht, Rilke or Ben Johnson, shoehorned in I suspect to make the theater company happy). And there are some obvious omissions as well – Pat Parker, Robert Grenier, Robin Magowan, Paula Gunn Allen, Arthur Sze, Gary Soto, James Tate, Kenneth Irby, even Rod McKuen.
The individual plaques are spare & fairly dark, as the sample above demonstrates. The book makes no effort duplicate the look & feel beyond its cover. The volume does have background notes for each contribution, tho, so that you learn, for example, that Witter Bynner taught the very first creative writing course anywhere on the UC Campus in the spring of 1919 (two of his students, Genevieve Taggard & Hildegarde Flanner, are also included). The notes, unfortunately, are sloppy: Allen Ginsberg’s “A Strange New Cottage in Berkeley” is dated as 1965 (it was 1956). On my own note, we discover that language poetry is an “imitation of abstract impressionist painters” !?! Whoever they were.
Still, living 2,853.7 miles from the location of my plaque for the past nine years, it pleased me to discover that I’d been selected for this. If the town you grew up in (or in my case, next to) is going to have something as schmaltzy as a “walk of fame,” it’s nice to be remembered.
