BAY AREA POETS REVIEW 

Adam David Miller was the 2011 honoree at the 9th Annual Berkeley Poetry Festival. He was given the Lifetime Achievement Award. The festival, created by Louis Cuneo of Berkeley, was held in the Berkeley City College auditorium This year's host was Marc Kockinos, and Wes "Scoop" Nisker gave the invocation. Featured poets included:

Jack and Adelle Foley * Julia Vinograd * Jack Hirschman * Judy Wells * Steve Arntson * Linda King * Dale Jensen * Jannie M. Dresser * Sammuel M. Ribitch * Sharon Coleman * Mel C. Thompson * Jeanne Lupton * Marc Kockinos * Dave Holt Richard Loranger * Claudia Castro Luna * Shaun Freeland * Inna Nopuente * Pamela Brenman Tomas Moniz * plus Poets & Artists from Milvia Street Arts & Literary Journal

Freeee, As A Bird

by Adam David Miller

You want to be free as a bird, you say.
Suppose you were a bird,
forced to make constant companion calls,
Are you there, dear, are you there, where?
knowing that in any instant
a predator will come and snatch
your love away, as they did with
your children, easy prey with their
blind adolescent squawking for food.

Wise old bird, says exactly
what it means, for most birds dont live long.
That old robin in your backyard willow
has wisdom of a sage, cunning of a fox,
agility of a tiger, stamina of an ox,
an awareness you can imagine but only.

Listen, friend, pause, stop, listen
to one slave to the belly, land,
sun, wind and tide.
Listen to the language of the bird,
learn what the bird is saying,
maybe to you?

--Adam David Miller, with thanks to Jon Young

Louis Cuneo and Marc Kockinos plan the 2011 Berkeley Poetry Festival which took place in May

Jack Foley receives Lifetime Achievement Award 2010 for contributions to the Bay Area poetry community

The Berkeley Poetry Festival is an annual celebration organized by Louis Cuneo and his Mothers Hen press. The 2010 event was held Saturday, June 5, at Telegraph and Haste near the University of California Berkeley campus, and honored Bay Area poet Jack Foley with its 4th Lifetime Achievement Award.

"Its a very strange feeling to think youve had a lifetime. And then its even stranger to think someone is giving it an award," says 69-year old Jack Foley. Awards are encouraging but really they have little to do with the me that gets up and eats breakfast, or the me that writes the poems."

When I tried to pin the epithet of "professional poet" on Foley, he would have none of it: "I dont profess myself as a poet," he says. Nevertheless, Foley is a word-excavator and artist par excellence, a widely respected critic and a booster of those whose work he admires. A conversation with Foley always leads to an interesting and mind-bending place where etymologies spin excitedly at the center of the discussion.

By the time Foley was in college, he had already had an epiphanous encounter with a poem, in his case at age 15 when he first read "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" by English poet Thomas Gray (1716-1777):

"The curfew knells the close of parting day

The lowing herd wind slowly oer the lea

The ploughman homeward plods his weary way

And leaves the world to darkness and to me."

He attended Cornell University and later the University of California at Berkeley as an English major but eventually skedaddled from academes confines for a variety of reasons. One instructor dismissed Romantic writer Percy Bysshe Shelley as a bad poet; in his heart, Foley knew otherwise. And his efforts to write a paper on Shakespeares play Cymbeline, brought him up against terrible criticism that had previously been written about the play.

He was already a questioning lad, having been liberated by his observation that there was often a gap between what authority figures said (parents, priests, professors, etc.), and what he had experienced. As an example, he notes that his mother "would say things with great conviction that I knew to be false." He saw his nominally Catholic parents not attending Mass in spite of church teachings that this was a mortal sin. When he asked his mother why she didnt go to church, she explained that she didnt have anything to wear. "And," Foley exclaims, "for that, she was willing to brave Hell!"

Foley established his niche outside the academy and is the consummate poet-writer-raconteur in the Renaissance tradition. These days, we are in far too short supply of poets who are as excited about the work of others as they are about their own recent scribblings. Foley is as erudite as any Princeton lecturer but he is a critic of a different stripe, always linked to the community that he both boosts and regales, providing us with another model of what it is to be a working writer.

Sparky Mind
Foleys mind makes rapid-fire connections--and not necessarily obvious ones--a mind filled with decades of reading literature, poetry, philosophy, music history, and critical theory. If he had to be on a desert island and could only take five books, he says they would all be blank ones that he would fill with his own thoughts and responses to what he has already read or experienced.

While interviewing Foley, we had hardly gotten out the gate, before we were embroiled in a discussion about the seemingly simple pronoun "I." As I tried to get a fix on how Jack saw himself as a poet and writer, the man would simply not hold still! He instructed me in the ways "I" is distancing. While claiming to be "indivisible," "individual," the root of "I-dentity," it inherently sets up a dichotomy where there neednt be one.

Foley explains by way of poetry--what often happens while talking with him. Lately he has been reading Chinese poet and critic Wai Lim Yip. In Chinese, there are many personal pronouns, although they hardly occur in Classical Chinese poetry. While a poet speaking an Indo-European language might say, "I weep" or "I am weeping," the Classical Chinese writer would say, "Weeping is taking place." The effect this has on the reader is to include her in the experience of the poem, while the use of "I" is alienating, dividing speaker from reader.

Foley believes the mind is a multiplicity. One hears Walt Whitman thundering, "I contain multitudes," and must acknowledge Foley as a direct inheritor of the god-father of American poetry. But his is a Whitman that has been synthesized through Heidegger and post-modern language theorists. (Foley was a student of Paul de Man at Cornell.)

Poet and publisher, Lucille Lang Day commented: "I have never met anyone more open to or knowledgeable about all types of poetry, from the experimental to the formal, than Jack Foley." She suggests that what Foley is doing for California--and specifically, San Francisco Bay Area literature--is a great service of acknowledging and articulating both our history and our current responses to that history for future generations of poets and writers.

Visions and Affiliations
Foleys latest project is an 1,800-page "timeline," entitled Visions and Affiliations: Poetry in California from 1940-2005, which traces a 65-year period of California poetry. Lucy Day believes the book "will be indispensable to librarians, historians, writers, and others interested in our literary history, and that No one else could have done it!"

The prototype of Visions and Affiliations was published as "A California Timeline 1940-1999" in Foleys O Powerful Western Star (Pantograph Press, 2000). After it appeared, he was told he should amplify the timeline, and the monumental new book will be filled with copious annotations and quotations. "Over a 60-year period, you get people saying a lot of stuff," Foley says. Although he had thought to have finished Visions and Affiliations on a number of occasions, he felt compelled to add more information as new books came out, new writers were discovered. Foley quotes John Donne: "When thou hast done, thou hast not done, For I have more."

Share and Share Alike
Foley is a prolific writer, regularly contributing essays and reviews to Poetry Flash, online zines and blogs. His column, "Foleys Books," has appeared for many years online at the Alsop Review. He frequently shares his work in public readings and on radio. I once heard a poet complain about the "ubiquitous Foleys," but the comment revealed envy as much as annoyance. If Jack Foley is at many events and in the thick of scenes, it is because he has devoted a good deal of his life to this art, an art that requires sharing.

One reason for his community activity is that he got a late start, giving his first reading at age 45. He wrote for a long time without hope of publication but then "things happened quickly." In 1986 he was running a successful reading series begun by someone else at Larry Blakes restaurant on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley. Around 1988, KPFA Radio approached Foley for ideas about how to get poetry on air. An initial taping led to a weekly show that Foley has hosted for two decades, during which time he has interviewed hundreds of poets--local "unknowns" and national laureates. He has also presented essay-format shows on music and other topics, such as one popular one that focused on songwriter Cole Porter.

Foley came to writing criticism because he wanted to be understood--as succinct and candid a reason for turning to that dark path as any. "Initially, I started to show my poems to friends, people who were English majors." He had expected them to understand his work, but he explains, with a hint of incredulity, "they did not." He realized that he may not be understood by a lot of people. Finding himself in "an alienated situation," he determined that writing criticism would "allow people to understand my own work as well as the people I was going to criticize. It was to clear a space for my work," while providing "a way into understanding my poetry."

The Dancer & the Dance: A Book of Distinctions (Red Hen Press, 2008), a recent collection of Foleys critical essays was recommended by Marvin R. Hiemstra, editor of the Bay Area Poets Seasonal Review, who suggested, "Put this spiffy book on your Reference Shelf to relish when The Web is having a bad day. You may learn something." Hiemstra calls Foley, a "poetic historian" who makes critical distinctions with understanding, not the usual here today, gone tomorrow pronouncements." He regards the impulse that drives him to write literary and cultural criticism, however, as the same for getting his verse out as well: "I dont see a distinction between poet and critic."

Jack and Adelle Foley often perform together, creeating a chorus for multi-voiced poems.

Foley frequently and generously touts the work of neglected poets or unknown younger writers. He has written passionately about his friend Ivan Argelles and published a collection about James Broughton, the Modesto-born poet who was part of the San Francisco poetry Renaissance (All: A James Broughton Reader, White Crane Books, 2007). The book was voted # 1 Gay Book of the year by the web site Afterelton.com.

Of late, Foley has been impressed with Palo Alto poet Mary-Marcia Casoly and Santa Rosa poet Katherine Hastings, whose book Updraft he reviewed in the Seasonal Review (Winter 2010). He even "corrupted" his wife, Adelle , who frequently performs multi-voiced pieces with him, adding an essential choral element to his verse, but she also writes, publishes and performs her own work.

Foley has also gotten into literary sparring matches with other critics, defending his friend Dana Gioia for one, which led to publication of The Fallen Western Star Wars. The book presents responses by a number of Bay Area writers to Gioias essay "Fallen Western Star: The Decline of San Francisco as a Literary Region. Lawrence Ferlinghetti commended Foley for "doing great things in articulating the poetic consciousness of San Francisco."

Foley has been generous with writing back-cover blurbs for fellow poets, which both he and popular writing instructor and poet, Clive Matson, consider an art form. Says Matson, "Part of Jacks genius is to see whats in a poem very clearly. His brilliance shows even in blurbs; it takes only a few words to nail what is going on in a volume of poetry. But it takes persistence, devotion to the poetry, a very open mind, the discarding of ones inclinations, and clarity of heart to understand what that is. Add to this Jacks broad understanding of the historical context in which we write. To come up with the words takes more persistence, more openness, more willingness to risk. . . . He told me more about my book than I knew myself. Kudos to Jack."

And about that desert island--Foleys five blank books that would be filled with his writings, ponderings, remembering--he suggests: "I wouldnt need five books to give me ideas, awarenesses. I already have hundreds lodged forever in my memory. . . . The problem, of course, would be that there would be no one to share them with, so I would need the hope that someone would find me eventually, or at any rate, find them. Failing that, I suppose I could toss them into the ocean (in bottles?) on the chance that they would find some ready hands somewhere, sometime."

Here is Jack Foleys improvised poem from a desert island:

You write for yourself and for strangers.--Gertrude Stein

strangers indeed those
who live entirely outside
these utterly empty precincts
where I am lord, master,
slave-owner, and slave
alone, alone, all, all alone
how words from so many others
(misremembered?)
inhabit this brain-pan!
hello!
goodbye!
nice to have been!
now defunct to all except
me . . .
how can I not
remember

*
Five books of blank pages and some pencils

Portrait at Sixty
for Anthony Holdsworth

This man looks out at me
eyes full of interest and perhaps suffering
whatever he looks at registered on his face
It was not the actual circumstance the artist painted--
me, posed, at ease, happy to be with an interesting friend--
but something other which only he saw
and which makes me look over and over again to see what it was
Is that me?--that whirl of light in which red (fire) predominates?
It is only the sun reflected on my forehead
but perhaps the artist sees me as the sun--
Apollo? The poet?
The artist is my friend,
but it is not our friendship which is reflected here
but some inward, powerful thing
which manifests even in these public circumstances--
a caf, a little table, my glass before me.
It is a gloss
I guess at.
Does he know, does the artist
or was my face a passageway
into an underground
in which he was as lost as I?
It is vivid life
I look at with such intensity
and which looks back at me,
life neither in me nor in him
but something shared with the sun,
life all around, in my glass, in the lamppost behind me,
life insisting on its own facticity, its utter presence
so we cannot look away
but stare
into this heart.
Ill paint you so youll know what you really look like,
said the artist, smiling.
What he painted was not what I really looked like,--
though everyone says, It looks just like you--
but something like the real
something like life itself
leaping and dancing.
When I hung the painting,
I put it in a place
where the light shines
deeply.
***
Chorus: Cancer
for two voices

The beautiful young woman has contracted cancer.
The young man will die of it soon.
This child has cancer.
This middle-aged man has cancer.
Cancer is fully democratic in its destructive impulses.
It is willing to kill anyone.
You or I can get it
Even if we do not smoke cigarettes.
Even if we try to take care of ourselves with exercise and good diet
Some cancers can
Be cured others can
Not.
In the past few weeks I have heard
Of two people--two friends--who
Have pancreatic cancer--
In
Curable.
The friends are of different ages.
Cancer kills
Anyone
Cancer is willing to consider
Death at any time in any circumstance
The brilliant poet
Can die of cancer
The great musician
Can die of cancer
The dull uncle who bores everyone at wedding receptions
Can die of cancer.
You can die of it.
I can die of it.
Timor mortis
Conturbat me
Cancer is furious if you try to ignore it
Cancer insists on your full and respectful attention
Cancer is a magazine to which everyone submits
Cancer is a tune you cant get rid of
Cancer is full of the love
Of everyone it touches
(Loves you to death)
Some cancers can
Be cured others can
Not.
Can
Not.

*Timor mortis conturbat me: The fear of death disturbs me is a Latin phrase commonly found in late-medieval English poetry. It comes from the responsory of the Catholic Office of the Dead, in the third Nocturn of Matins.

***
The Skeletons Defense of Carnality

Truly I have lost weight, I have
lost weight,
grown lean in loves defense,
in loves defense grown grave.
It was concupiscence
that brought me to the state:
all bone and a bit of skin
to keep the bone within.

Flesh is no heavy burden
for one possessed of little
and accustomed to its loss.
I lean to love, which leaves me lean
till lean turn into lack.

A wanton bone, I sing my song
and travel where the bone is blown
and extricate true love from lust
as any man of wisdom must.

Then wherefore should I rage
against this pilgrimage
from gravel unto gravel?
Circuitous I travel
from love to lack
and lack to lack,
from lean to lack
and back.
***
Bukowski

I wrote this poem in response to a poem in Charles Bukowskis book, Mockingbird, Wish Me Luck. The words in the first, third, fifth, etc. lines are Bukowskis poem; the words in italics are by me. When I perform the poem, I speak the Bukowski portion in my normal voice; I speak the words by me in a whisper. I call this way of responding to a poem writing between the lines.- Jack Foley

the mockingbird had been following the cat
there was this cat
all summer
and I only saw him
mocking mocking mocking
once
teasing and cocksure;
when he gave a
the cat crawled under rockers on porches
reading
tail flashing
and burped
and said something angry to the mockingbird
at the audience
which I didnt understand.

yesterday the cat walked calmly up the driveway
and he read this poem
with the mockingbird alive in its mouth,
about a cat
wings fanned, beautiful wings fanned and flopping,
and a bird
feathers parted like a womans legs,
and he was both
and the bird was no longer mocking,
the cat and
it was asking, it was praying
the bird
but the cat
and he was devouring
striding down through centuries
himself
would not listen.
through the poem.

I saw it crawl under a yellow car
And I listened
with the bird
letting him die

to bargain it to another place. summer was over.
Bukowski.

***
what was the purpose
if purpose there was?
why all this fury?
did you hope to change
the perceptions
of people at large?
Yes, foolishly . . .
did you believe
that anything you said
could affect the immense
misconception
people call reality--quelle erreur!
Yes, it was a mistake . . .
so what did it do?
did you teach anyone
anything?
No
were you able to change
the nature of poetry
even in the smallest way?
No
so what reveals itself,
admirable author,
at this difficult point
of your being?
Nothing:
Jaime les nuages, les nuages qui passent . . .
I love the passing
clouds
As for poetry:
a ma donnn quelque chose faire
It gave me something to do

Note: It was Andy Warhol who said, when asked about his work, It gave me something to do.

I translated it into French for the next to last line of this poem. The other French line is from a prose poem by Baudelaire, Ltranger: I love the clouds, the clouds that pass.
***
MISSING U

this is a poem abot
missing yo
I know what dr. fred wold have thoght
and what carl jng wold have cleverly taght
oh, hear my nhappy shot:
I miss yo!

I took mbrage when the ndertaker ndertook to tter nspeakable llations!

Poems by Jack Foley, copyright 2010

Original article published by Jannie M. Dresser at examiner.com

Mark States:

Oakland home-boy takes 3,000-mile leap for love

Mark States is not afraid of change. In fact, he seems to court it. The latest redirection he has chosen was announced via Facebook over the holidays, the announcement of his engagement to Kyha Floyd from Charlotte, North Carolina. He plans to move from his native Oakland to North Carolina at the end of February. He broke the news to his beloved community at Poetry Express on Monday night.

States has long been a presence on the open-mic scene, mostly in the East Bay. He coordinates and hosts Poetry Express at Priya Indian Restaurant on San Pablo in Berkeley on Monday nights. The series, launched at the Berekely Bakery & Café, and for a long time held in the living room of co-host Jim Bernard, usually features an invited poet--perhaps someone with a new book or an out-of-town poet visiting the Bay Area. States invites audience members to read before and after the feature presentation.

Poetry Express attracts a regular crowd of local poets, including Debra Grace Khattab, John Rhodes, Jan Dederick, John Rowe, Garrett Murphy, Amos White,  Walter Liggett, Steve Arntson and many others. Because of States’ open and friendly personality, the scene is welcoming to newcomers and is run efficiently and with respect to readers and audience members alike.

Part of his goal, States says, is to create and run a reading series that a poet would not be embarrassed to bring a date to. For those of us who have attended many a readings series and open-mic venue, we know exactly what he means. (I’ve been at venues where drunks in the audience heckled the readers on stage and where a performer pulled out a very sharp, dangerous looking stiletto--knife not a shoe--and pointed it at the audience sitting a few feet away.)

States first got involved in the local poetry scene in Berkeley in 1993 at the Elmwood Café. Louis Cuneo, his next-door neighbor at the time, and Mary Rudge, Alameda’s Poet laureate, encouraged him. He started co-hosting Cuneo’s “Touch of a Poet” series a year later and has been active with running poetry readings ever since. “Louis taught me the ropes about hosting a series,” States says, while Dale Jensen, now a coordinator of the Nefeli Café series in Berkeley, “taught me about doing publicity.”

States is a Bay Area native, born and raised in East Oakland. He began writing poetry at the alternative high school he attended. He went on to U.C. Berkeley where he majored in Ethnic Studies and concentrated on Langston Hughes. The Harlem Renaissance poet is one of States’ major influences, offering an example of poetry that looks simple at its surface yet always packs a punch.

About his own work, States says his poems are driven by metaphors and usually “have a point.” He writes on buses, BART, and late at night and only occasionally attends a writing workshop. “Poetry Slams have been my greatest editor,” he explains. At these performance-focused events, readers have a short time to make an impact on an audience. At an open-mic, States explains, a reader may have five or more minutes to present work while a slam generally gives you only three minutes. Performing at slams has taught him to cut poems that are “wordy, repetitive, and take three sentences to say what could be said in two.”

States has published two chapbooks: Reinvention came out in 1995 from Mother’s Hen, and Grip of the Past in 2000. In 2001, he produced a limited-edition, mini-chapbook with the Laguna Poets Series called Tongue Control #215, and in 2004, a video entitled “Oakland Crazy” in 2004, which showcases his readings taped at the Beanery in 2003 during his annual Birthday Bash.

States has been a staple of the Bay Area’s most venerable poetry organizations, including the Bay Area Poets Coalition and the Berkeley Poetry Festival. Quoted by the Berkeley Daily Planet in 2001, States pointed out that such organizations are second families for many poets who have moved to the Bay Area without kin. On holidays, “this is a way for them to break bread together.”

States wins his way into your heart not long after you meet him, and he has formed solid bonds in the region. When he fell seriously ill in early 2009, word spread swiftly through the poetry community. Eventually diagnosed with an extreme form of hyper-thyroidism,  he had precipitously been losing weight and ended up in the hospital. The disease is now controlled with medication, but States believes he had probably been sick for several years prior to the crisis.

According to States, the Bay Area has an “enviable scene” of poetry readings and accommodates many styles of poetry and poet personalities. The audience is not as divided by tastes as in other geographical regions of the country. “Here, you will find slam poets who go to open-mics, and open-mic poets who attend slams. You have hipsters in San Francisco and people working in multi-media performance. Geographically, we are closer together and cross-fertilize more easily than in Los Angeles, or other areas where there is any semblance of a poetry scene.”

One of States’ central concerns has been making sure that younger people--the crowd who still like to go out late at night and go club-hopping, etc.--are welcomed in to the poetry community. He has also used his voice for positive social change. In 2003, States was quoted in the New York Times when he took part in a poetry slam organized to lobby for affordable housing. States took aim at local slumlords who expect high rents on properties they barely maintain: "The stench of mold on wet cement made even the gnats gasp and our throats burned like nuclear reactors."

The Poetry Express series at Priya will turn nine this year, and a special reading will be held at Priya on April 4th, but the show that States has carefully fostered will go on without his presence as he joins his pride in North Carolina. States met Kyha on Facebook--a true 21st century romance--and plans to wed and join her family in the south where undoubtedly he will be jumping in to the local poetry community and hosting a reading series in no time at all. In the meantime, Priya continues to serve as the venue for Poetry Express, a pleasant scene where poets and fans can enjoy delicious Indian cuisine at a discount as they warm their bellies for the evening of poetry. The community here will look forward to getting long-distance poems and reports from the southland from States.

Priya is located at 2072 San Pablo Avenue, in Berkeley. The open-mic sign-up starts at 7 p.m., and the featured reader is called to the microphone at about 7:45. Arrive around 6:30 to order and eat your dinner and be sure to tell your waiter you are there for the reading to get a 10% discount off your tab. The reading, however, is free, like so many of the best things in life truly are--made possible through the dedication and passion of poets like the Bay Area’s native-son Mark States.

POEMS BY MARK STATES

Steppin Out

Steppin out of a moment in time and in2
the space
U and i share, where
wind stands tall and still
where a twinkle in the eye appears in the sky

Steppin out of a door and in2 a feeling
sitting quietly & holding hands, a bridge we cross
over a river convulsing
we stop 2 sift diamonds from sunlight
2 inhale silence & exhale dreams

where love is 4ever what is a heartbeat or 2
when everything, Y question how we came 2 here
with the taste of ocean mist so far from shore
so close
2 each other's open mind
the highest branch of the tallest tree
glistens within reach

In the space of a moment
time fills a racing heart, and i can feel U enter
the room
with back turned 2 the door
         (c) 2009 Mark States

Stoned Has Turned

sometimes I get in these moods
where the only thing that moves
me is a jump and holler song,
work is heavy & my face stretches long,
there‘s so much distraction I cannot focus
on the moment, a month flashes
past and all I got to say is good riddance

a pot of water boils and someone
grabs its handle and this brew of words scalds

I look at you looking at me
a smile streaks comet-like across night
sky I sigh cuz the stone
has turned to heart and shadows in their morning take flight

Universe clears I hear your silent
thoughts, yeah, I too groove
to the spirit called U
with slow love songs filling shell of body
I lower an arm on your turntable knowin
folks will call this a silly love poem
so what? the world is too full
of hurt, sometimes I get in a mood
to reflect the love that’s shown me.
                   (c) 2009 Mark States