HOMELESS LIVE OFF POETRY SALE OF JOURNAL GIVES THEM CASH AND SELF-DIGNITY, NPA, Poetry USA, SJ Mercury News

(I was an editor, along with Mother Earth News)

September 6, 1990 | Mercury News, The (San Jose, CA)
Associated Press | Page: 2E | Section: California News

Some people see poetry on the mean streets of the city. Sometimes it's there -- literally.
The lives of 10 of San Francisco's homeless people have gone from bad to verse. They're still asking for money on street corners, but now they're selling copies of a poetry journal and keeping all the proceeds.

Street sales of "Poetry USA" promote the work of unknown poets and give the homeless vendors cash and -- according to them -- a greater sense of dignity. ''I feel better about myself. People can't look at me and say, 'He's just a homeless bum,' " said Eddie Wright, who used to panhandle before he began hawking the journal several times a week.

Wright said he has sold as many as 40 copies a day of the $1 magazine, enough for a night in a cut-rate hotel.

For Randy Moore, another street vendor, the earnings provide things most people take for granted but which he considers minor luxuries -- a good meal, clean clothes, a haircut.

''Poetry USA," published by the National Poetry Association, offers a mix of styles and themes by generally unknown poets. The poets aren't paid for their work but do get the valuable, if intangible, thrill of seeing their verse in print.

Some of the contributors are themselves homeless, and some poems describe the authors' difficult lives. A line in "Little or Nothing," in the journal's summer edition reads: "When one dies on the street, we all get burned."

For the publisher, the arrangement is good business as well as philanthropy. The loss in giving 2,000 copies to the homeless vendors and not taking any of the proceeds has been offset by the number of yearly $7.50 subscriptions new readers have sent back, according to Herman Berlandt, editor of "Poetry USA." Advocates for the homeless support the sales program even though they admit hawking poems will not provide big bank balances.

Representatives of The Coalition on Homelessness, which stores bundles of the journal for the vendors, said they passed out their last copies of "Poetry USA" and are now looking for other publishers interested in having publications distributed on the street.

Poetry USA translations, Soviet poets

 

ECLIPSE OVER KIEV, 8/17/89

ECLIPSE OVER KIEV, 8/17/89 *

                                     Where the darkness of the silent caves
                                      Is lovelier than the royal halls.

Your tongue will lead you to Kiev, someone says.
The golden domes and crosses of Sofiski Sobor
have conversed with the stars for a millennia.
Gutted Uspensky Sobor, a reminder of faith and betrayal.
The tower sank then sprang out of the earth in a single night.
In Pecherskaya Lavra, beneath cobbled streets,
mummified monks sleep in the Near and Far Caves.
Candles in the dark. We carry the moon underground.
After a week of rain, the cornice of the main post office
gave up the fight with gravity and slipped off--
the way my grandmother did, talking of hedgehogs
loose in the living room again. A premonition of darkness
I don't understand. Eleven people killed. Withered roses
and gladioli strung up against the pale fence.
At the ruins of the Golden Gate, a crowd gathers
to remember the place where they died.

We run alongside the Kiev-Moscow train saying goodbye.
I send messages home, I'm staying on. Kopeks in my pocket.
Sasha and Jessica are in love. She is leaving with the other students.
This train weaves a thread across the green steppes to San Francisco.
Sasha and I hold hands and walk back to the waiting bus.
When he cries, I tell him this is how friendship begins
between our two countries, when people fall in love.
He says, I will be a statue of Buddha with candles in each hand,
will you take me back to the States with you, then?
I tell him, I will roll you up in a fine persian carpet.
Grisha wants to know how to spell courage. A capitalist at heart,
he dreams of becoming president of Chrysler Corporation.
He asks, what is a four letter word for people without courage?
I don't know. I hear the rain, common thief of the night.
Leaving Kiev under a red moon, the bus driver admonishes
it is unlucky to whistle indoors, it brings bad luck.

My friend makes me tea from the wild grasses of the Caucuses.
It's a Russian tradition to talk about life and politics
in the kitchen late at night, he says, we are victims of historyó
first to suffer before nations give up their borders. He says
I am a man who is dreamless. But I saw it beginning in his eyes.
I tell him he is my lips and ears, he makes no comment.
None is necessary. I'm not too sure where home is.
I find a bear's tooth buried in the river bank
the color of the eclipse moon in the dark pocket of night,
and cannot shake the fallen cornices of Kiev from my mind,
dreaming of home, a nameless disaster, white walls with oak borders.
I adjust two snakes around his neck, then pin on the crushed red rose.
The endless Ukraine. I am between worlds listening to languages
I don't understand. Even the ground is quaking.

* Written exactly two months before the San Francisco earthquake.

1992 First Leaves
1990 Poetry USA, fall issue

L' APRES-MIDI

L' APRES-MIDI

     —For Bruce Isaacson

in homage to Robert Sund & Georgia O'Keefe

You have found me out,
slipped in clean as a knife,
your poems lucid as a white room
in late afternoon where
I want to stand before you
pre-architectural. Slip off these words
into something more comfortable,
reveal the inner curve of femur,
the hollow of pelvis framed
against the purity of desert sky
& feel your breath sing against my ribs.

Where my breasts flowered
your disembodied hands harvest
brilliance arcing on blank pages.
We burn against the night's silence
lost, looking for home.
I taste your words on my tongue,
dreaming them as if they were alive,
incandescent as flanks of white horses
in the rain—your poems shed light,
nuzzle breathless in my ear.
It's not so much the words themselves
but the way they touch
the muddy river where, for a moment,
our tongues found truth hidden in the roots.

There is a curve of eyebrow,
an alluvial valley that speaks
of such tenderness, we turn stones,
& turn them again. What does it matter
if the sun will die, your kisses like stars.
The physics of writing consumes us.
Not ambivalence. Not the other sin.
It cannot hide serpentine from the river—
the brightness from within—a burning moth
circling the pale fire of your eyes.

You tell me : too many loves in our past
& slip into the Paris night, well armed,
calling it by the clear light of poetry
because love also requires such brutal attention.
Can one name the instant when the heart
of the untamable beast ignites or dies?
Afraid of what it might be,
in the naked room, what are we then?

4/18/89

BARKING UP THE WRONG TREE

BARKING UP THE WRONG TREE

Reina, a blind, dowager cat of 15,

who has learned to tell lies for more food

and has a paunch to prove her success,

ignores the catnip-stuffed mouse I bring her.

We can't tell her facts:

why it always rains outside each door

in the house at the same time, the dilemma

of eating tuna and the diminishing dolphin population,

or the effects of mercury poisoning.

Has it begun to manifest

its mad-hatterly ways in this idiot savant

well into second childhood?

Mornings, we find her upside down and drooling;

rubbing her whiskers and head ecstatically inside our shoes.

We make jokes about the narcotic effect of ripe shoes and laundry.

But when my new shoes are also

singled out for euphoric distinction,

I realize, slowly, how our conclusions are hampered

by our own anthropomorphic limitations.

It becomes clear, her need for scenting—

In cat terms, as we walk our daily rounds,

our shoes mark the outer boundaries of her territory.

Who'd have credited this blind old cat

with enough foresight to keep tabs on her realm—

She, who had us barking up the wrong tree all along?

10/15/1988  first draft june?
Berkeley

1995 CQ #22 California Quarterly
1991Poet Magazine, Fall issue
1990 Poetry USA
         Sparrow Grass
1989 Green Fuse
         A Night Full of Doves
         Outerbridge

RACIAL MEMORY

RACIAL MEMORY  

        —for Duane BigEagle

A lover seeking racial memory 

struggling with my blouse

prefers the old way of skins

Fox, rabbit, coyote, buffalo.

We hide too much from the elements

remembering other paths.

The feet never forget the scars 

they leave on the earth.  

He reaches for the breast in greeting,

concealing a weapon in his hand. 

The first kiss, even between old lovers

is cautious, not passionate. 

A hearthstone, the fire.

On this hillside, this grass, 

where are 

the men coming to terms with the earth  

spilling nothing more than seed?

Spring 1987

Petaluma

1990 Poetry USA

1988 Women's Voices

WHO, INDEED; ON RITUAL COURTSHIP OF POETS; FRAGMENTS OF THE MOON; three short poems

WHO, INDEED

Who is this beast breathing beside me

Like some long forgotten ancestor

Coming for recognition in the night

To give me new colors for dreams

That continue to shake me from the cradle

Where breathing came from

Beneath the skin of the ocean

1986

ON RITUAL COURTSHIP OF POETS

Returning from the mountains

I find poems taped to my fridge,

Words left to do their work

like an invocation

or a long, slow seduction

in case climbing the mountains

wasn't enough.

1986

1989 Poetry USA

FRAGMENTS OF THE MOON

Who will ask the gypsys how to line the edge of the moon

Who sobs for untold fortunes and greased lightning

to increase the weight of the sky

where dreams crackle like fresh dollar bills

The river is silvered with the coinage of fish

Wait cloud, a winter rooster wants to dance in the sun  

1986

don't know when

MERWIN'S INLET

MERWIN'S INLET
   I want to find the inlet
   where rocks rub thighs
   with the shore.

In the mango forest, small red flowers

the color of chickenblood

splatter against damp limed walls

& pulse against the shadowed green.

White veranda, gardenias, bleached shells

in black volcanic soil.

I check papayas for ripeness,

avoid stepping on the toad in the shower

& watch out for banana spiders.

As I dig the earth, my breath

says roshi roshi roshi.

Geckos chuckle in white-limed rooms

& swallow moths whole.

Last night I dreamed of lizards

eating the bark from trees.

Below the clearing, the sounds of the creek

are swallowed by the jungle.

Density & decay

the progression of desire.

Haiku, Maui 1985?
the experience was from 5/26/83; did I have another draft? I sometimes took poems that needed work to Napa for revision. I don’t know if it’s any good, but it was published enough times, so I put it to bed.

1991 Poet Magazine
1990 Poetry USA
1989 Chaminade Literary Review
1988 Women's Voices
1987 Electrum