Monday, December 16, 2019

Impeach!

Tomorrow night is the impeachment rally, or rallies, all across this land.  So last night, we had to go to the Poets Reading the News Impeachment Cocktail Party in San Francisco. Great views on a cold night from Russian Hill. Fun drinks with impeachment themed names.

Our poems were projected on the wall. Interestingly, most of the guests were not poets, but I loved meeting editor Elle Aviv Newton and strategic director J Spagnolo and Baby Ziggy. 

So here are some not great pictures. With a wonderful poem by Kim Harvey

 


Monday, December 9, 2019

Five Angels - Recovered!

I now have a copy of my first chapbook - Five Angels, done by Five Trees Press in San Francisco, in 1976.  I searched out Kathy Walkup, one of the owners of the press, and now an instructor at Mills College, and found out about the exhibit she was having on that press and my book with it, at Mills. See earlier post.

We met, and it turns out we have much in common, mutual Califonria friends, and mutual Cambridge Mass friends. Connected through Rich Edelman, by way of Denise Levertov. I saw some books and a broadside of Denise's she had printed too. She was part of the Hovey Street Press Rich started in Cambridge, coming out of the New England Free Press, back in the early seventies.

She presented me with a copy of my own little chapbook, and little it is, about 3 inches high, and consisting of only one poem, which is really an ekphrastic poem, only I didn't know the term at the time, because the inspiration for it was a painting on a window in Faith Petric's apartment in San Francisco I saw when i visited with Rosalie Sorrels. I wish i had a picture of that window!

Here is the book cover and poem pages, along with some of the exhibition at Mills.














Tuesday, December 3, 2019

On the Day Cokie Roberts Died

 My poem in Poets Reading the News about Cokie Roberts.


On the Day Cokie Roberts Died

in Obituaries by
 
I had to remember she wasn’t Nina Totenberg
And that Dan Rather wasn’t dead, only banished
But Tucker Carlson was still alive and well
Alive anyway if not well
informed

I had to remember the news
isn’t just something you read
off a teleprompter

Sometimes it happens to you
while you’re sitting in your chair smiling
for the camera
or looking earnest thinking
you have a good story
about the current president

and then suddenly you become the news
because your truth was true but not
your sources
and then you’re gone

 Or you just die when your cancer comes back
the cancer you killed half a century ago
returned like a snake with its head chopped off, that boyfriend
you had arrested for putting his hands where
they don’t belong one too many times,
a news story that was never true,
alternative facts

Like Obama’s birth certificate
or that hurricane in Alabama

Sometimes good people who tell the truth
just die and the world goes on
turning

I pray for good health
for Nina Totenberg
just as I pray each night for
Ruth Bader Ginsburg
and for the meteor
the tsunami
the nuclear winter
to hold off just a little
longer.

________