One of the ironic coincidences of American history is that the oldest buildings still standing in San Francisco date from that fateful year, 1776 – a part of Mission Dolores, a building in the Presidio &, if memory serves, another out in the Fillmore district. In the century between that first construction and the arrival of my own ancestors in the late 19^th century, an indigenous population virtually disappeared as the City went through Spanish hands before becoming a part of U.S. territorial expansion. And the City – the only town for which I’ll ever capitalize that word – has continued to undergo an absolutely constant, relentless process of renewal – plowing under, displacement, new streets built literally on top of the old – in some parts atop the debris of abandoned ships, none too stable in an earthquake.

Fisherman’s Wharf is a curio for tourists, not fishermen, South of Market has been entirely gentrified, North of Market redefined again & again. South Beach didn’t even exist a decade ago. You can’t find the home where Robert Frost was born in St. Anne’s Valley, because you can’t find St. Anne’s Valley, but it’s right there on Eddy Street as it runs into Market, not so far from the original branch of the Bank of Italy, which changed its name in 1942 to the Bank of America & never looked back. The black community settled into the Fillmore for the first time during the war years because the Japanese residents there had been herded into concentration camps.

The history of San Francisco is one of populations arriving from all over the world – my own ancestors landed in Halifax, Nova Scotia, from England, then made their way to Anchorage before heading south – then struggling to hang on in the face of ongoing waves on immigration & enormous pressures from capital development. In the 1970s, I worked, successfully, to get the Board of Supervisors to enact a law preserving residential hotel units, primarily to save 10,000 homes in the Tenderloin that were in those days largely being used by the elderly & disabled. Within a decade, waves of new residents from Southeast Asia forced much of that original population elsewhere, with many of the disabled moving instead to the area around 16^th & Mission. The process itself was simple – a family of six, say, receiving assistance from the federal government, qualified for more funds than a single mentally ill person, which meant that landlords could charge them more for living in the same cramped quarters I found claustrophobic enough even for a single person. Where, in the 1930s, the lower Tenderloin was the first out-of-the-closet gay community in the United States, an adjunct to the city’s role as a center of merchant shipping, now we find Little Saigon.

Barbara Jane Reyes’ Poeta en San Francisco, just out from Tinfish Press, is intense, beautiful, sad, intelligent. It’s one of the great poems about San Francisco, not unlike, say, John Wieners’ Hotel Wentley Poems. Written mostly in English, with some intermixing of both Spanish & Tagalog, Reyes’ title may refer back to Lorca’s encounter with New York, but her focus is quite different. It is the fate of these populations, from the Ohlone to the present, that concerns her, especially the transformation of her own Filipino community from their ancestral home, with its own complex, compromised colonial history, into the new world.

The book is built symmetrically around three sections called [orient], [dis•orient] & [re•orient], in turn bracketed by relative brief pro- and epilogues. With [dis•orient] placed squarely at the center, Reyes moves through a cycle of poems, initially in verse form, a stanza of English followed by another of Tagalog, first in script, then phonetically. This in turn gives way to a series of prose poems, works in verse, even prayers:

[ave maria]


our lady who crushes serpents
our lady of lamentations
our lady full of grace whose weeping statues bleed,
our lady who makes the sun dance, pray for us

our lady of salt pilgrimage
our lady of building demolition
our lady of crack houses
santa maria, madre de dios, pray for us sinners

our lady of unbroken hymens
preteen vessel of god’s seed
your uterus is a blessed receptacle.

our lady of neon strip joints
our lady of blowjobs in kerouac alley
our lady of tricked out street kids, pray for us

blessed mother of cholo tattoos
you are the tightest homegirl

our lady of filas and lipliner
our lady of viernes santo procession
our lady of garbage-sifting toothless men
our lady of urban renewal’s blight

pray for us sinners        ipanalangin n’yo kamin makasalanan
now and at the hour     ngayon at kung
of our death                kami ay mamamatay

amen

Although, seemingly the least postmodern poem in the book – the end of [dis•orient] returns obsessively to the form of prayer – “[ave maria]” conveys a lot of the tensions in the book very quickly, culturally, linguistically, politically. This poem comes immediately after one that visits the International Hotel site in San Francisco (just a couple of blocks down the street from Kerouac Alley), where, in the early 1970s, a building filled with Filipino men was plowed over in the name of development – last I saw, that development was yet to turn up. The opacity of Tagalog here is matched elsewhere in this book with a similar failure to understand English – what does “m-town” mean? Who was Charlie during the Vietnam War? – and will lead, in the [re•orient] section, to a fabulous piece called “[Filipino Names],” like Rocky, Hazel, Ichiban, Bong, Dodo & GE

Does not stand for General Electric.
But no one can tell us her real name.

Elsewhere there is an allusion to calle de sección ocho & I wondered how many readers – especially at a distance, physically or culturally – will get it that that is a reference to federally subsidized housing. There are moments here in which I deeply felt how cut off I am by my own monophone roots, but this book is set up I think to let nearly everyone have some sense of this. What it is for me might not be the passages it would be for someone else, but the presence is pretty much inescapable.

In the hands of a lesser talent, this direct confrontation with global politics could suffer from what I think of as “John Sayles disease,” obviousness, a poetry to be agreed with rather than experienced. It is precisely because Reyes doesn’t settle for simple, unconflicted answers – us good, them bad, modernity (and post-) even worse – but rather lets the conflicts stay conflicts, the tensions stay tense, that render this a compelling reading experience. You don’t need an m-town in your hometown for this to be a very important book.