BAY AREA POETS REVIEW 

Ruth Daigon, Marin Poet,

Left Us on February 17, 2010

Ruth Daigon was a much admired Canadian-American poet, who hailed from Winnipeg, spent many years in Connecticut, and gave her last decades to the San Francisco Bay Area and a poetry community that she loved, and that equally loved and embraced her. She passed away on February 17^th and her friends and admirers honored her onSunday, May 30^th at Book Passage in Corte Madera.

“Celebrating Ruth Daigon” featured readings of her poems by David Alpaugh, Jack and Adelle Foley, C. B. Follett (the new poet laureate of Marin County), Lynne Knight, Jacqueline Kudler, Susan Terris, and Robert Sward. In addition, the organizers presented recordings of Ruth, who was a professional singer as a well as a poet.

I first became aware of Ruth Daigon while hosting the Coffee Mill readings series in the early 1990s. I was as much impressed by her poise and professional demeanor as I was with the power and tenacity of her poems, especially pieces that focused on the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, a subject that greatly interested me. Payday at the Triangle, Daigon’s homage was released in 2001, and stands with Chris Llewellyn’s book Fragments from the Fire, as two works that seriously treat the lives of immigrant and working-class women in poetic form. Both Tillie Olsen and Studs Terkel took notice of Daigon’s work, while book reviewer Mary Barnet said of Payday at the Triangle that “The smoke, flame, and terror are palpable in Ruth Daigon’s poems which tell the individual tales of persons involved in the terrible fire.” Some of these poems can be found online at www.forpoetry.com/Archive/ruth_daigon.htm.

At one account, Daigon published over 900 poems in literary journals and anthologies, and accomplished seven books of poetry in her lifetime. Her most recent collection, Handfuls of Time, was published in 2002 by David Alpaugh‘s Small Poetry Press. Alpaugh is one of the organizers of Sunday’s event.

Daigon received the Richard Eberhart Poetry Prize in 2001 and the Ann Stanford Poetry Prize (1997) among other awards. Aside from gaining a reputation for her poetry, Daigon was a valued member of the Bay Area poetry community, and helped to promote other poets by critiquing their work, writing book blurbs, hosting poetry events, and publishing them. She helped to organize the “Marin Poets Evening” featuring eight poets at Fort Mason's National Poetry Association, coordinated monthly readings featuring Marin poets, and was involved with the Marin Poetry Center and its Traveling Poetry show early on. For several decades, Ruth and her “Artie” (her husband Arthur) published Poets On, a literary zine that solicited work on a particular topic and then presented it in 40 issues for two decades.

Daigon’s creative career began in music. As a concert soprano, she toured with the New York Pro Musica group and performed with the Hartford Symphony. She had the honor of singing at Dylan Thomas’ funeral and she collaborated with W.H. Auden on a recording for Columbia Records. She described working with Auden, who came to rehearsals in “an unraveled sweater and old carpet slippers” as every inch a professional when she was interviewed for Lily, an online literary review.

Music was an integral part of her poetry writing and performing, and she was known to sing while giving a reading of her work. She said that “the sound and flow of my poetry, the rhythm, the cadence, lyric quality was given direction by my allegiance to music.” She advised others to “write to please yourself and not to impress others” and valued honesty, conviction, aliveness, and writing that was “fearless yet controlled” and “unselfconscious.”

Invocation by Ruth Daigon

Let there be cool linen

and lovers resting between sheets

humming a small heaven between them

Let there be a settlement of snow

long green veils of rain

and radiant squalors

Let the pulse beat within us

rich as salt, hot as sun

giving time its edge

Let us steep tansy, coriander

and cloves in wine

drinking deep its magic cures

Let us bring the knower to the known

for there are no second comings

and what waits is just a breath away

(from Handfuls of Time)

REGINALD LOCKETT

1947-2008

He Didn’t Take It With Him

Each of us has our Reggie, you yours, I mine

We were bone to bone friends
He put bread into my mouth, I into his
When one of us got a fat gig, he was sure
to recommend the other, he hired me, I hired him

He generously inscribed, “Mentor, friend, poet, who
contributed to the growth of these poems,” in my copy
of Party Crashers. He allowed me to tinker with his
Mss after he thought they were finished.

Reggie is the one person I would permit a half hour on the                              phone
to vent and clarify his thoughts. My wife Elise and I tended
his apartment, watered his plants, and fed his cat
when he visited Paris and New York.

Although he loved words, his own, he was
always willing to share space with other poets.
Because certain poets hog the podium, I’ll never read
behind them. Reggie is not one of these.

Once I read after him and the Word Wind Chorus
I took advantage of the glow they left.
So whether we were reading a at Katrina benefit
or a Kim-directed Oakland Festival, I loved
to follow in Reggie’s glow.

He did not take that with him.
Even now, YES! even now, I feel that glow.
        —Adam David Miller, May 30, 2008
   
    Berkeley-born, Oakland-bred, Reginald Lockett, author of Where the Birds Sing Bass and other books of poems, died May 15, at age 60. He embodied the verve, style, intensity, and grace of the East Bay poetry scene. In the early 1990s, I was fortunate enough to host him as a featured reader at Oakland’s Coffee Mill, when I ran that series for two years. Where the Birds Sing Bass won a PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Award. Lockett’s Juke Box Press published others’ work and he encouraged writers through his teaching at City College of San Francisco, Laney College, College of Marin, and San Jose City College. His death was a great loss for our community.                          





In Memoriam:

--Joel Fallon (Benicia)

MAGGI H. MEYER

1916-2006



Maggi H. Meyer (Margaret Eloise Hatcher) was born February 1, 1916 in Fargo, North Dakota. A resident of Berkeley for over 60 years, she passed away June 19, 2006. An active member of Bay Area Poets Coalition, she often opened her home to poets for their gatherings. She also volunteered at Malcom X Elementary School for several years. The City of Berkeley recognized Maggi's contribution to poetry by proclaiming April 29, 2006  Maggi H. Meyer Day. 

Much loved poet and teacher,

Josephine Miles

1911-1985

“Scalapino makes everything take place in real time, in the light and air and night where all of us live, everything happening at once.”

The following article was sent to us by Jack Foley and was composed by Leslie Scalapino's family members.

Leslie Scalapino passed away on May 28, 2010 in Berkeley, California. She was born in Santa Barbara in 1944 and raised in Berkeley, California. After Berkeley High School, she attended Reed College in Portland, Oregon and received her B.A. in Literature in 1966. She received her M.A. in English from the University of California at Berkeley in 1969, after which she began to focus on writing poetry. Leslie Scalapino lived with Tom White, her husband and friend of 35 years, in Oakland, California.

In childhood, she traveled with her father Robert Scalapino, founder of UC Berkeley’s Institute for Asian Studies, her mother Dee Scalapino, known for her love of music, and her two sisters, Diane and Lynne, throughout Asia, Africa and Europe. She and Tom continued these travels including trips to Tibet, Bhutan, Japan, India, Yemen, Mongolia, Libya and elsewhere. Her writing was intensely influenced by these travels. She published her first book O and Other Poems in 1976, and since then has published thirty books of poetry, prose, inter-genre fiction, plays, essays, and collaborations.

Scalapino’s most recent publica- tions include a collaboration with artist Kiki Smith, The Animal is in the World like Water in Water (Granary Books), and  Floats Horse-Floats or Horse-Flows (Starcherone Books), and her selected poems It’s go in horizontal / Selected Poems 1974-2006 (UC Press) was published in 2008. In 1988, her long poem way received the Poetry Center Award,  the Lawrence Lipton Prize, and the American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation. Her plays have been performed in San Francisco at New Langton Arts, The Lab, Venue 9, and Forum; in New York by The Eye and Ear Theater and at Barnard College; and in Los Angeles at Beyond Baroque.

In 1986, Scalapino founded O Books as a publishing outlet for young and emerging poets, as well as prominent, innovative writers, and the list of nearly 100 titles includes authors such as Ted Berrigan, Robert Grenier, Fanny Howe, Tom Raworth, Norma Cole, Will Alexander, Alice Notley, Norman Fischer, Laura Moriarty, Michael McClure, Judith Goldman and many others. Scalapino is also the editor of four editions of O anthologies, as well as the periodicals Enough (with Rick London) and War and Peace (with Judith Goldman).

Scalapino taught writing at various institutions, including 16 years in the MFA program at Bard College, Mills College, the San Francisco Art Institute, California College of the Arts in San Francisco, San Francisco State University, UC San Diego, and the Naropa Institute.

Of her own writing, Scalapino says “my sense of a practice of writing and of action, the apprehension itself that ‘one is not oneself for even an instant’ – should not be,’ is to be participation in/is a social act. That is, the nature of this practice that’s to be ‘social act’ is it is without formation or custom.” Her writing, unbound by a single format, her collaborations with artists and other writers, her teaching, and publishing are evidence of this sense of her own practice, social acts that were her practice. Her generosity and fiercely engaged intelligence were everywhere evident to those who had the fortune to know her.

Scalapino has three books forth-coming in 2010. A book of two plays published in one volume, Flow-Winged Crocodile and A Pair / Actions Are Erased / Appear will come out in June 2010 from Chax Press; a new prose work, The Dihedrons Gazelle-Dihredals Zoom will be released this summer by Post-Apollo Press; and a revised and expanded collection of her essays and plays, How Phenomena Appear to Unfold (originally published by Potes & Poets) will be published in the fall by Litmus Press.

Her play Flow-Winged Crocodile will be performed in New York at Poets House on June 19th at 2pm and June 20th at 7pm by the performance group The Relationship, directed by Fiona Templeton and with Katie Brown, Stephanie Silver, and Julie Troost. Dance by Molissa Fenley, music by Joan Jeanrenaud, and projected drawings by Eve Biddle. This production is co-sponsored by Belladonna* and the Poetry Project.

    to make my mind be actions outside only. which they are. that collapses in
grey-red bars. actions are life per se only without it.
    (so) events are minute — even (voluptuous)
        by Leslie Scalapino