BAY AREA POETS REVIEW
PROFILES IN POETRY COMMUNITY:
Raphael Jesus Gonzalez, Jeanne Lupton,
Raymond Turner & Zigi Lowenberg
Rafael Jesús González Honored by City of Berkeley for Lifetime of Community Service
An old hand-bound, brown leather book contains the poems that his mother, Carmen, typed and read from when he was a boy. Its pages are yellowed and thin but contain poems that he has loved all his life by classical Spanish and Latin American poets: Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Juan De Dios Peza, Gabriela Mistral, Amado Nervo, and Rubén Darío among others. This early contact with literature meant that Berkeley poet Rafael Jesús González has “been writing all my life.”
On October 13, at 7 p.m. in Council Chambers, the City of Berkeley honored González for his contributions to the local community. For someone who describes himself as “something of a hermit,” González has long been active in progressive politics and the creative arts throughout the Bay Area. His political passions are focused on environmental and social justice issues, while a career in writing and literature has inspired many others to use their pens for both personal expression and political action. But, González is also a visual and performance artist. For many years, he has been the elder in a Latino men’s ritual group, Xochipilli, which sets the ceremonial tone for Oakland Museum of California’s annual Dia de Los Muertos festivities. González has contributed several art installations to the museum’s “ofrenda“ displays marking the indigenous celebration, also creating installations for the Mexican Museum and the Mission Cultural Center both in San Francisco.
Although he grew up in a house full of books, his path into the arts was somewhat indirect. Born and raised in El Paso, Texas, González had a military career at first, serving in the Navy’s hospital corps and as a staff sergeant in the Marines. He attended the University of Texas, El Paso, on the G.I. bill and took a pre-medicine degree, majoring in both English and Spanish literature with minors in psychology and philosophy. Around that time, he realized he “loved literature best,” and switched gears, receiving a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship and a National Education Act Fellowship to the University of Oregon to pursue a career in education. González taught literature, English composition, and creative writing, first at the University of Oregon, then at Western State College in Gunnison, Colorado, Central Washington State University in Ellensberg, Washington, “where it snows a lot in winter,” and finally coming to the Bay Area where he taught at Oakland’s Laney College for 30 years. 
He retired in 1998, in part because the increased illiteracy of his college-age students made his job harder though less challenging. “Grading became more of a chore; class sizes were larger.” Students were entering college without the rudimentary skills in reading and composition. He lays this problem at the doors of those who promoted and passed Proposition 13 (the 1978 tax revolt which massively reduced public school funding). As an instructor “there was less time to comment on logic and the development of an argument,” and an increased need to focus solely on punctuation and sentence structure. After leaving Laney, he occasionally taught courses and seminars at the University of California Berkeley and San Francisco State University, and even returned to his hometown of El Paso to teach aesthetics at its university. As part of the assigned coursework, he encouraged students to visit one another’s homes to get a sense of each individual’s aesthetic choices. “Everyone is an artist,” González says. “You can not be human without making art.”
A citizen of U.S./Mexican border culture, with both parents having deep roots in Mexico (Durango and Torréon), González is completely at ease speaking and writing both English and Spanish. He writes poems simultaneously in Spanish and in English, but at one time, he felt he had to select the version that sounded the most ‘authentic'. . . “whatever that is,” he jokes. Knowing that the two versions were really one poem, he decided that it was dishonest to separate them and call them two distinct poems, to deny that they were part of one another. He has never described what he does as translation. “I think of a line in Spanish, then in English or in English, then in Spanish.“ The poem comes about through an effortless move back and forth between the two vocabularies. Now, when he sends work for publication, he insists that both the Spanish and English version be printed as he has no interest in publishing what he considers to be a truncated poem.
González has spent less time on his publishing career than his politics and teaching. For years, he has shared poems on a monthly basis via email to friends and acquaintances fortunate enough to be on his list. His last book was published first in 1977: El hacedor de juegos (The Maker of Games) contained 54 poems and had a second edition in 1978. Since then, he has published poems in journals and magazines. A new collection of his work is in preparation now and scheduled for a late October release; it is La musa lunática (The Lunatic Muse) and is anxiously awaited by his readers.
The older he gets, says the 74-year-old poet, the more important he finds the matter of accessibility in the writing. “Poetry does not depend so much on the dazzling combination of words or metaphors but on the spirit of a relationship to Earth, to our wonder of it; poetry shouldn’t require a great vocabulary.” Poets who have inspired him include the ones his mother read long ago, such as García Lorca and Pablo Neruda, but also Walt Whitman, Dylan Thomas, Wallace Stevens and William Stafford. “Erudition should not interfere with accessibility,” he believes, and offers the advice to young writers to “give their Thesaurus to their worst friend.” Instead, he believes reading and conversing with other people who love literature is the best way to develop your working vocabulary.
In his work, art and politics segue completely. He speaks of the “old cosmology” as having reached its limit, and the need for basing our future on a reverence for the Earth. “If She is wounded, we are wounded.” In spite of the daily news, González insists he is still only “a pessimist of the intellect” but “an optimist of the heart.” In truth, he would “rather be writing love poems” than having to devote so much time to the issues of the day that concern him: global warming, alternative energy, the fight for universal healthcare, peace and justice issues. “My rantings and ravings are manifestations of a love outraged.” The public is invited to the City of Berkeley’s honoring of González.
Copyrighted photographs by Jannie M. Dresser.
Originally published at www.examiner.com by Jannie M. Dresser.
Mark Taksa met his lovely wife Jan when he arrived for an interview at John Swett High School in Crockett many years ago. She offered him a cup of coffee in the faculty lounge while he waited. Now retired, the couple devote themselves to art and writing, to their family, and to their Jewish community as members of Oakland’s First Hebrew Congregation, Temple Sinai, where he has been involved writing liturgy for the Brotherhood Shabbat program and participating in a poetry reading series, sponsored by the Brotherhood at the Temple.
Mark is also the key coordinator keeping the
long-standing Berkeley Poets Workshop going along with Ted Fleischman. Meetings are held at Mark‘s home in Albany every third Thursday of the month and are open to Bay Area poets. His affiliation with the BPC goes back to 1978.
While still a social science, civics and English high school instructor, he earned an MFA at San Francisco State University. He has published ten chapbooks since 1986, including several that have won awards in national contests. He continued studying poetry in classes taught by Charles Entrekin at John F. Kennedy University in Orinda.
He has come a very long way from his origins. Born in San Antonio, Texas, where his father was stationed for his military service, he moved with his parents to Manhattan when he was a child; soon after, the family fell apart. His mother was institution-alized in Bellevue Hospital for mental illness and Mark became a ward of the state.
He spent most of his childhood and early adolescence in the Queens County Shelter for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, then four years in an orphanage. At age 16, he matriculated out of the Ottillee Orphanage and had to find work and shelter on his own. For a time, he worked as a messenger boy in New York and attended night school; eventually, he joined the Air Force.
Taksa started to write as a young man. “There were lots of artists in my family.” His father was involved in political theater in New York, his mother was a painter, his aunt, a ballet dancer, his grandmother, a writer, and his Croatian grandfather was a playwright still quite famous in that country.
The Torah at the End of the Train, Taksa’s latest chapbook, won the 2009 Poetica Magazine Annual Chapbook Award and was subsequently published. The poems reflect an imagination that was stimulated by a recent trip to Israel and by his deepening connection to Judaism.
“I can’t say I had a large theme like ‘truth’ or ‘justice’ in mind,“ Taksa says, “but I wanted to explore my feelings about practicing Judaism and what Judaism means in a world that is mostly not Jewish,” he says. “I wanted also to analyze the feelings of someone living within a particular zone.”
His poems are often sparked by an image that may ultimately drop away as the poem grows. He cites “The Musician and the Lost Piano” which was triggered by a story he heard someone in his choir recall; the singer’s parents had been in a concentration camp. Taksa also remembered hearing or reading about Jews during the Holocaust who were allowed by the Nazis to take some of their personal property with them as long as they could carry it. The poem expands beyond an opening image of a musician seated in an apartment, listening to ambient street sounds beyond his balcony window until he hears:
Boots march from the plaza and climb to the apartment.
Light dies. The musician hears the voice
that, in a life as dead as a cat stiff in the rainy gutter,
dressed in the uniform that stopped traffic--
and then stopped visiting to sing.
Hard as its boots, the voice told the discarded player
he could escape with the piano, if, before noon,
he proved it was his by playing it.
In the end, however:
All things were cold that morning.
No one helped carry the piano.
Taksa’s poems are exemplary in the “show-don’t-tell” school. He cites the Imagists, such as Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams as influences, along with T.S. Eliot, William Wordsworth and Elizabeth Bishop. Later, he came under the sway of Wallace Stephens, Rusell Edson, and George Oppen.
“I try to develop a story that carries meaning,” Taksa says, “while using my imagination to create something new with language.” Although the poems take seed with a personal experience, a brush with another person, something overheard or witnessed, the poetic imagination soon takes over.
“I don’t feel I must directly state what started the poem. I learn something about my own feelings and my understanding of the world,” Taksa says, as the poem progresses, with imagery being the dynamic force.
Taksa says he is not trying to be obscure in the poems he writes. In fact, he works to make the poems as under-standable, yet as imaginative as possible. But, he also does not expect that everyone will understand his poems. “Poetry is difficult; if it is too easy, it’s not poetry.”
UpSurge! is celebrating its twentieth anniversary. Recently, I interviewed Turner and his wife and fellow performer, Zigi Lowenberg. The anniversary of the time they have spent together coincides with the birthday of the unique jazz poetry ensemble that Turner launched in 1990. It is a testament to their creativity, resilience, and shared purpose that Turner--a southern-Californian, African-American poet--and Lowenberg--a New York Jewish visual artist--have sustained their long-term commitment to one another and their artistic pursuits. As Lowenberg put it, the art has been one of the things that has kept them going.
Turner grew up in the south-central/Watts area of Los Angeles. Raised by Caffie Greene of Arkansas who turned 90 this past March, Turner remembers his mother inviting him to come with her to political meetings when he just “wanted to play baseball.” His mother responded: “You know that baseball park where you want to play and that coach who comes to teach you? Well, they all came from people being involved.” Greene walked her talk; she helped found the Martin Luther King General Hospital in L.A. and pursued health and human services issues. The youth center where she served as director became the nucleus of the Southern California chapter of the Black Panther Party. But Greene also loved stories, nursery rhymes, and lullabies, and Turner remembers her reading to him a lot when he was growing up. His father, Raymond Douglas Turner, was a Hollywood actor who played many supporting roles in the segregated film industry of the 1930s and 40s.
In 1968, Turner’s friend was killed by the L.A. police. “I started to write, needing some kind of outlet.” He was studying theater in a local college and had the opportunity to open for an event featuring the great African-American essayist and novelist James Baldwin. Thousands had turned out to see Baldwin but Turner recalls that, in his warm-up, he went on and on. “In hindsight, the experience was a perfect lesson. I was foolish, young and arrogant--that’s what youth will do for you.” Baldwin was kind and patient, and the event led to other engagements where Turner was invited to speak and present poems. Soon others were calling him the “People’s Poet.”
Watts Writers Workshop poet Eric Priestley took Turner “under his wing” and invited him to contribute to an anthology showcasing young Black poets, including Quincy Troupe and California’s poet laureate emeritus, Al Young. (We Speak as Liberators turned out to be a seminal collection of modern African-American poetry, along with an anthology produced by another East Bay Poet, Dices or Black Bones edited by Adam David Miller.) Turner continued to pursue his college education at Evergreen College in Olympia, Washington. On flights up and down the Pacific Coast, Turner recalls “looking down and seeing all the bridges of the Bay Area. I knew I wanted to visit there one day.” At Evergreen, he discovered Bertolt Brecht, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Langston Hughes as well as modern activist poets Amiri Baraka (Leroi Jones) and Sonia Sanchez. Evergreen, a liberal arts college was nonetheless caught up in the student movements and Turner took part in protests to demand a broader, more inclusive and relevant curriculum. By now, he was a seasoned activist and public speaker; he was asked to come to Oakland as a community organizer.
It was in the Bay Area that Turner’s trajectory of political organizing, poetizing, public speaking, and jazz intersected with that of artist and poet Zigi Lowenberg. Lowenberg was raised in Queens and arrived in California from the East Village in Manhattan in 1986. Although she grew up in a “somewhat sheltered Jewish community,” both her mother and great-aunt had been involved in politics. Her mother had met Eleanor Roosevelt and been involved in fair-housing issues, as well as in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Lowenberg’s great-aunt was an all-out communist.
Lowenberg was living in a group house in the late 1980s, and was practicing visual art and teaching in Oakland’s parks and recreation programs. A mutual friend introduced her over the phone to Turner, and they spent six hours “about politics and art--from Engels and Ellington and everything in between.” Turner was divorced and had two children, Charu (now a 32-year-old professor at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst), and Bryana (age 30, a teacher and the mother of two small children). Lowenberg says that “the thing that really made me want to meet Raymond was when he told me that a highlight of his life had been cutting the [umbilical] cord on his daughter at her home birth.” They dated for a year and lived together for another year, but then separated. “Our first years together were tumultuous,” Lowenberg admits, “but the art kept us together.” Even when did not live together, they continued to work together.
Turner founded UpSurge! in 1990, a unique ensemble of jazz-influenced musicians interested in exploring a word-sound, instrumental-oriented repertoire that often used Turner’s poems as an original starting point. One of their first performances was at Oakland’s Coffee Mill reading series where proprietor Peter Torsiello’s had established an Italian style salon atmosphere. Lowenberg played a behind-the-scenes role at first, making flyers and photographing performances. “I was a secret poet,” she says. Then, one December she gave Turner a Hanukkah/Holiday poem. “I got the bite,” she says, when Turner invited her to come up and do the poem at the end of an UpSurge! performance. She became a member of the now seven-member band. UpSurge! has produced two compact discs, “All Hands on Deck“ (1999) and “Chromatology” (2003). The title of the latter CD is drawn from their poem about their relationship and all the stereotypes and challenges that face a mixed-race couple.
In 2007, Turner created the Bay Area Jazz Poetry Festival, held in the Gourmet Ghetto/north Shattuck area. “I have to admit, I love food,” he says. The Festival’s vision is to present out-of-town jazz poets and musicians on the same bill with resident artists. At an UpSurge! performance at New York’s Cornelia Street Café in 2006, Turner and Lowenberg met New York poet Golda Solomon and saxophonist Saco Yasuma and invited them to perform at the first Bay Area Jazz Poetry Festival. Local poets and musicians who have participated have included Avotcja and her band Modupue, Adam David Miller, Gael Alcock, Julian Carroll, Yancie Taylor, Lisa B., Arisa White, and COPUS. Elephant Pharmacy and Café de la Paz initially support the event, but since their demise and the decline in arts funding the Festival had to scale back.
Turner has toured and read in venues in Chicago, Detroit and New York where he met performance poet Patricia Smith and many NuYorican poets including Bob Holman. Though he participated in poetry slams, Turner’s ideas for the presentation of sound-based poetry avers from slam culture’s competitive climate: “Judging poetry is abhorrent to me,” he says. Turner detects a repetitiveness in the style of many performance poets: they seem to be saying “I can shock you, I can dazzle you, and I can speak loudly,” but often, he notes, “everyone starts sounding alike and the content is not there.” Nevertheless, Lowenberg and Turner are excited to see so many younger poets active in performance.
Turner and UpSurge! are attempting to bring the music back to the poetry while continuing to foster a larger audience. Jazz is key, and band members take their inspiration from musicians they have been able to meet and work with. “When you go backstage to meet musicians after a jazz performance,” Lowenberg notes,” there is a down-home humility about so many of them. Even though they are fantastic musicians, they greet you with an air of respectful and a lack of pretense.” Turner adds that master performers often respond to praise with the statement that they are “just trying to play this music,” often implying that they are still on a learning curve. The musicians who inspire them seem constantly to be “digging deeper,” says Lowenberg, “as if art itself was pulling them along.”
As for influences, in addition to jazz musicians, Turner acknowledges June Jordan’s Poetry for the People project and her recognition that Walt Whitman was a poet who sought an authentic, yet diversely rich, American voice. Mary Webb, a local writing teacher, novelist, playwright and impresario, has also been an important model and mentor to Turner. Both Turner and Lowenberg have participated in, and helped moderate dialogues on race and racism that Webb initiated. Lowenberg also credits their acting and voice teacher Dr. Lissa Tyler Renaud of the Actors Training Project for helping to improve their performance skills. Currently, Lowenberg is doing dance and movement training to open a nonverbal avenue for exploring rhythm and improvisation.
Turner and Lowenberg finally tied the official knot on June 17, 2001, but have spent the past 20 years together growing their relationship and UpSurge! Lowenberg has contributed her visual arts background and marketing skills, while Turner has been the artistic impetus and producer of events. Turner cut his teeth on arts management working with the great studio musician Donald Duck Bailey.
UpSurge! is Richard Howell (saxophone, vocals, producer); Angela Wellman (trombone, vocals, percussion); Ron Belcher (bass); Tammy Hall (piano); and Rob Rhodes (drums). For the July 3rd event, Michael Spencer will be playing drums, Melvin Bell on sax, Steven Turner on alto sax and piano, and director of the youth ensemble, and Victoria Theodore may join them; she is a keyboardist and backup vocalist for Stevie Wonder who now lives in the Bay Area.
Originally published by Jannie M. Dresser at www.examiner.com, July 2, 2009
When she called
the moon salmon
I saw it
arc upstream
in a river of sky
—Jeanne Lupton (Berkeley)
Jeanne Lupton’s
Autumn of Love
Jeanne Lupton, 63, “worked her way up to living in Berkeley.” She first came to the Bay Area in 1967, during the ‘Summer of Love’ but it took 35 years, breast cancer, and 9/11 to return. “I always felt my life would be better here and it has been.”
Born in Kansas, Lupton was raised in Arlington, Virginia, but visited Quaker relatives in Winchester near Willa Cather’s birthplace, Back Creek Valley (it turns out that Cather is a distant relation). In 2001, Lupton was diagnosed with breast cancer a day after 9/11. The two traumatic events propelled her to make dramatic changes in her life. She packed up and moved across country with the help of a supportive aunt living in the Oakland hills.
Lupton jumped into the local poetry scene. For three years, she has coordinated and hosted the second Saturday reading series at the Frank Bette Center (http://www.frankbettecenter.org), an artists’ community center and showcase in Alameda. Every month, Lupton showcases two featured readers and hosts an open mic, which has allowed her to quickly recognize the regulars on the open-mic scene. She acknowledges Debra Owen, the center’s administra-tor who endorses the poetry program. In a relatively short time, Lupton has considerably grown the audience which she says “has a sweet energy.”
After a 45-year career doing legal transcription and administrative work, Lupton now focuses on her writing and submission service “The Poet Genie.” (In her spare time, she maintains a foot reflexology business: www.thefootgenie.com). She founded and leads the Lakeview Writers, which usually meets every fourth Monday from 6-8 p.m. at the Lakeview Library in Oakland; (www.oakland library.org).
She also leads a women’s writing group on Friday evenings (email her at jeany98@aol.com for information). She is also planning to take a group to write in Sedona, Arizona. “I believe in writing together so much and love how people reveal things that even their friends may not know about them.”
Lupton likes to invoke her distant cousin, Cather, who once said that only great artists know how difficult it is to tell the truth. Lupton takes Cather’s admonition to write truthfully to heart. “I like to invoke the spirits of my writing ancestors,” Lupton says, “and I often feel them smiling down on me.” Lupton enjoys writing Japanese tanka. Her chapbook, but then you danced, is written entirely in this form; it was published in 2007 by Raw Art Press.
You can meet Lupton at Frank Bette on the 2nd Saturday evening of each month at the Frank Bette Center in Alameda.
