Poetry Night!
Tuesday night was Poetry Night. In honor of it, I started the day by baking brownies. There’s something deeply satisfying about carrying a still fragrant tray of brownies through downtown San Francisco just before noon. You hear murmurs in your wake of “….chocolate…,” “Oh, that’s lovely, did you smell…” “Ohhh brownies!”

Poetry is alive and well in this city. We had thirty reservations. About twice as many people showed up that evening. We were a little late in opening the room because our café manager had hurt herself doing yoga that morning and was moving slowly (and let me digress for one moment to say that I hope when I’m in my eighties I can, as she did, truthfully utter the words “I hurt myself this morning doing yoga,”) but a godsend of a volunteer pitched in and everything went smoothly from there on. When the moment came, when we crossed over from getting ready for the event to the event itself, when the lights were properly dimmed and darkness had fallen outside, the faux candles on the tables were “lit” and everyone had stopped talking and had eyes front, when L stepped up to the microphone and said, “welcome everyone,” I could not see a single empty seat.



There were our regulars of course, but there were also many, many new faces. Young intense looking men in jeans and t-shirts who sat at their tables looking combative, battered looking veteran San Franciscans (probably regulars at City Lights), the women still wearing their gray hair long and loose and parted down the middle, the men with their own hair pulled back in ponytails. There was a lovely, well dressed couple in their thirties sitting in the back. He was a chunky fellow in a very nice suit, plainly come straight from his office in the Financial District, she was willowy and dark-haired, in a pale sun dress, resting her head on his shoulder as they watched the readings.

Lorca, Neruda, Yeats, Akhmatova, Hughes, Plath, Bluxon, Amachai, read in English, read in Spanish, read in Russian, read in Japanese, with occasional pauses for a Haiku chaser. All of the performers were good, but among the most memorable were:

The man in dreadlocks who read a Somali love poem with such conviction and passion that he convinced us all that the woman he described could enchant just by the way she swung one arm as she walked. After he read there was an appreciative murmur just before the applause.

The Caucasian boy who looked no more than fourteen, plump and puppy-faced but handsome, tightly buttoned into a silk Asian jacket and reading with astounding self-assurance a poem by Yi Sang in the original Korean (in which the boy is apparently fairly fluent. I overheard him later conversing in what I guess was Korean with the Asian lady who’d recited and performed the Haikus in Japanese.)

And the rough-faced performer who’d been assaulting the halls with Dylan Thomas for the past couple of weeks. Near the end of the program he recited “Do Not Go Gently into That Good Night,” moving through the room among the tables -- “Rage! Rage! RAGE…” -- his face and his voice capturing perfectly the anguish of an adult watching a parent die.

A few people left before it was over, as is usually the case in poetry readings, but most people stayed. They stayed to the last poem. They stayed for the little coda at the end, the reception where a few audience members were invited to come up and read. Everyone clapped as enthusiastically at these as they had at the performers. All of my brownies, which had been stacked in a steep pyramid on a plate at the buffet table, vanished. They were finished off by a trio of twenty-something girls who, after the readings, had a long, animated conversation next to the table and seemed barely conscious of how many brownies they were popping into their mouths in between sentences.

At almost 9:00 pm I did something unusual. I went home before the room was taken down. For once I hadn’t done the sound, and the equipment was too elaborate and foreign for me to even touch. I’d leave it to the sound guy. When I waved goodbye to L and left, the lights had dimmed again and the cafe was almost empty. A few people sat at the tables talking. An older women sat alone, bent over her paper tablecloth, writing a poem on it in colored pencil, her loose white hair spilling over her shoulders. Spanish guitar was still playing softly over the sound system and in the now cleared performance space, one of the male readers was doing a restrained tango with a lady from the audience.