 |
There was a slow period in the late 70s for North Beach open poetry readings. The scheduled reading at Intersection had continued from the late 60s until it left North Beach and moved to the Mission. Then in 1981 there was a Sunday after-noon reading at Petas on Columbus Avenue with free food, and a combined open and scheduled reading at Lyle Tuttle's Rose Tattoo. But it was a small cafe and soon closed.
In the spring of 1982 Jack Mueller, Paul Landry and Bob Rogers started a new open reading at the Savoy Tivoli with mostly North Beach regulars in attendance around a few large round tables. After a couple of months they moved it to the Flamenco Theater in the Spaghetti Factory on Green off Grant Avenue. It began with a massive poetry-jazz jam to pay the initial rent, and it continued on Thursday nights until the Spaghetti Factory was sold and became the Bocce Café.
The Spaghetti Factory was a landmark in North Beach. It was probably one of the first transformers of funk and junk into environmental kitsch. Hundreds of tables and chairs were hung from the rafters as if another ethereal dinner was being served above. It served the cheapest and largest plate of pasta in town and was the meal of choice for San Francisco's bohemian community. There was a bar and two small theaters in the Spaghetti Factory emanating a mixture of Flamenco dance, classical music, pocket opera and theater.
The poetry reading was in the Flamenco Theater. It had a high hardwood stage enabling the audience to focus directly on the dancers feet. Hanging from the ceiling were huge aluminum foil angels, formerly Mexican piñatas with soundless bugles in their hands. Old wine bottles, deer heads and pictures of Flamenco dancers hung on the walls. At the right side of the stage large wooden letters spelled out "BAAL", the generic Canaanite name for god. It was often associated with bull worship and fertility appropriate for both Flamenco and poetry, and a good balance to the angels on the ceilings. To top it off colored spotlights threw rainbow shadows on the wall behind the readers.
The reading alternated M.C.s each week. Some of them would bring a different group or school of poets to add to the blend of North Beach poets, poets from Marin and Berkeley, the Mission, Potrero Hill and the Haight Ashbury, and young poets from all over America finally arrived in their dream North Beach, and a few tourists wandering thru from dinner. M.C.s included Jack Mueller, Gene Ruggles, Tisa Waldren, Kirby Doyle, Julia Vinograd, Sue Carlson, George Tsongas and many others.
A typical reading featured 30 poets reading five minutes apiece with the audience and poets slipping into the bar for a beer and out into the alley for a joint and back again. But the listening kept a high intentionality. The poetry ranged from the inept and incoherent thru the bizarre to the beautifully clear and lyrical and on out thru politics to the eclectic and experimental.
Some poets performed their works on violin, drum, kazoo, guitar, and in dance and song: Emmanuel Ro does a farewell to San Francisco Taoist dance. Kirby Doyle sings an early lyric in celebration of receiving the galleys of his soon to be published collected poems. Bob Kaufman reciting T.S. Eliot's Prufrock again after 20 years of poetic silence. Diane Saez comes on disguised as an old bag lady and conveys a bag lady's lament, "what have we to dream of we street screamers." Then she changes and takes the makeup off in the bathroom and comes back later as herself with only a few noticing the change. Scott Macleod and Sue Carlson do a theatrical Beckett style dialogue. Janet Kanon sings her own songs country western style and then chants mantra sound poems based in Amerind chants and Tibetan mantra. Jack Micheline sings, "It's the dead. It's the dead. It's the goddam dead who rule the world." Young poets read from their first notebook. Neeli Cherkovski reads from a long poem, Barbary Coast, "I've given everything/to the open door/ of these chattering/brick edifices/on the Barbary Coast." David Moe shovels strings of symbols from within the cerebral Cortex's forgotten molecules. Ron Sauer reads from his new translation of Baudelaire "and you will pleasure forever reborn". Neeli Cherkovski said, "It's a family of poets" and legends abound. Here is literary archaeology and hope-fully a literary future.
*****
|
|
|
