Dear Literary Folk,
Remembering Jack Hirschman
Brilliant poet, scholar, translator, and advocate for the rights of the dispossessed, former San Francisco Poet Laureate Jack Hirschman passed away on Sunday, August 22, at the age of 87.
Hirschman was born in New York City and grew up in the Bronx. He worked as a copyeditor with the Associated Press in New York as a young man, and earned degrees from City College of New York and Indiana University, where he studied comparative literature. He taught at UCLA in the 1970s, before he was fired for his antiwar activities and for encouraging his students to resist the draft. Hirschman remained in California, “making an artistic and political home in the North Beach district of San Francisco” (https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/jack-hirschman).
I did not know Jack personally, but his presence in the San Francisco Bay Area poetry scene was wide and deep and profound. Opal Palmer Adisa wrote this personal reflection and brief tribute to Jack:
Farewell My Friend, Jack Hirschman
(December 13, 1933 – August 22, 2021)
“Jack Hirschman was a friend, a poet and a social activist who lived inclusion and diversity in and throughout his work. I met him when I first moved to San Francisco, and he saw me at an open mic and invited me to one he was hosting in North Beach, where he featured me. Thereafter he featured me on numerous occasions, and always invited me to participate in any anthology in which he was engaged, even as recently as last year. Jack was funny in a not-so-obvious way; he was committed to change and transformation. He believed in poets as change-makers; he advocated for us; he created spaces for us to share our work, to have meaningful dialogue, to write and share our truths. Long Live Jack Hirschman…You will be missed, but your spirit will travel the globe, continuing to make space so the word is heard loudly…ASÉ”
This poem, reprinted from Front Line and featured on the Academy of American Poets website, will give you a taste of Hirschman’s poetry. You can read more at https://poets.org/poet/jack-hirschman. And if you scroll down to the end of the post, you’ll find one of Hirschman’s translations for the September poem.
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The Happiness
by Jack Hirschman
There’s a happiness, a joy
in one soul, that’s been
buried alive in everyone
and forgotten.
It isn’t your barroom joke
or tender, intimate humor
or affections of friendliness
or big, bright pun.
They’re the surviving survivors
of what happened when happiness
was buried alive, when
it no longer looked out
of today’s eyes, and doesn’t
even manifest when one
of us dies, we just walk away
from everything, alone
with what’s left of us,
going on being human beings
without being human,
without that happiness.
________
Crime Mysteries Author at Copperfield’s 
Those of you who are fans of Vera and Shetland are in luck! You have a chance to hear the creator of both these popular British Crime Mysteries on Thursday, September 9, 11:00 a.m. Copperfield’s Books presents New York Times bestseller Ann Cleeves in conversation with Barbara Lane.
I admit when I first read this announcement, I envisioned Ann of Cleves, the fourth wife of Henry VIII (for about 6 months), reinvented as a contemporary British crime detective. And why not? Jane Austen and Elizabeth Bennet have come back to solve murders and fight zombies. Sherlock Holmes boggles his contemporary fans not far from the Millennial Bridge and the London Eye. But I jumped to entirely the wrong conclusion.
I have seen many episodes of Vera, and am now getting better at keeping up with the quick twists of plotline (using English subtitles helps), but I had never noticed the name of the author of the books behind the series. I did catch several zingers that made me laugh, so I should have known there was a keen writer behind a line like this:
“I don’t understand how anyone can write if they don’t use public transport. I earwig all the time.”
Anne Cleeves is the author’s name, and her new book is The Heron’s Cry: A Detective Matthew Venn Novel, the extraordinary follow-up to The Long Call, soon to be a major TV series, alongside her two hit TV shows . The event is online and free, but you do need to register ahead to get the link to tune in. Details and registration: www.copperfieldsbooks.com/event/ann-cleeves-conversation-barbara-lane-online.
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Where Literature Meets Science
Occidental Center for the Arts presents a conversation with novelist Susan M. Gaines and Sonoma County Poet Laureate emerita Maya Khosla. The conversation will take place on Sunday, September 12, 4:00-5:00 p,m, and will be moderated by Ray Holley.
Former Sonoma County Poet Laureate Maya Khosla is also a field-based biologist whose concerns for the natural world have led her through the wild, to the page, and to the screen. She is currently working to assess the forests and rivers of California. Her book All the Fires of Wind and Light was the winner of the 2020 Pen Oakland Josephine Miles Award.
Trained in chemistry and oceanography, Susan M.Gaines is the author of the novels Accidentals and Carbon Dreams, and co-author with Geoffrey Eglinton and Jurgen Rullkötter of the science book Echoes of Life: What Fossil Molecules Reveal about Earth History. Her short stories have been nominated twice for the Pushcart Prize. She is a former fellow of the Hanse Institute for Advanced Study in Germany. In 2018, she was awarded a Suffrage Science Award for women in science and science writers who have inspired others.
You can attend live at the OCA amphitheater and online via OCA’s YouTube channel. No pre-registration required. Free, outdoor event (Follow COVID-19 safety measures according to county regulations). Refreshments, wine, beer, and signed, personalized books for sale. OCA donations welcome. For more info: 707-874-9392 or occidentalcenterforthearts.org. OCA is accessible to people with disabilities.
____________
Celebrating Fran!
Poet and teacher extraordinaire Fran Claggett-Holland has for many years been a guiding presence and an inspiration. Fran will read, along with her friends and “family” on Monday, September 13, 2:00-4:00 p.m.
Fran taught high school English and humanities for many years. Former department chair and mentor teacher at Alameda High School, Fran was twice named Teacher of the Year in her district and county, where she initiated an achievement and portfolio writing assessment program. Her teaching experience includes college appointments in English, biology, and physical education; she has also been the James Lynch Lecturer in English at the University of California, Berkeley. She has given workshops for teachers across the country, evaluated schools in Guam, and taught in the Bay Area Writing Project Panama and the Virgin Islands summer workshops.
In October of 2020, Naomi Shihab Nye, writing for the New York Times Magazine, featured a poem by Fran called “On Taking the Measure of Your Book.” Shihab Nye writes:
“In this deeply appealing poem. . . from her new book The Consciousness of Stone (RiskPress Foundation), reading is experienced as a supple activity, an actual posture as one moves to engage with textual experience. It’s a physical revelation as well as a landscape — not just a passive stare. I could feel the fresh exhilaration of a beach, wind and air inside my own body after reading this, without having been to any beach for a long time. Sometimes when people ask how to read a poem, one might simply say, “Go inside it.”
You can read Fran’s poem at https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/01/magazine/poem-on-taking-the-measure-of-your-book.html.
Most important, you can join in celebrating one of Sonoma County’s finest poets. This event will be held on Zoom at this link: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/82943803259?pwd=NTRoZnJnVk1CMHV5K2cxc2MzckNKUT09
____________
Last Call for the Upcoming Sonoma County Poetry Anthology
I want to remind you all about the anthology Phyllis Meshulam is creating as one of her Poet Laureate projects. If you have already submitted poems for this, thank you! If not, please consider sending up to three poems touching on one or more of the themes noted below.
* Gratitude
* Honoring our Pain for the World
* Seeing with New Eyes/Talking Back to Foundational Texts
You can submit 1-3 poems, each poem no longer than 65 lines, including title, epigraph (if any), and any acknowledgement of prior publication.
Please send English language poems to Phyllis by midnight on September 1, 2021.
Spanish language poems and poems by teens will be accepted up to midnight on September 15, 2021.
Send poems to this e-mail: phyllie@sonic.net.
For more information about this project, or to see sample poems and prompts on the themes mentioned above, be sure to check out the archives of the Poet Laureate News on the Sonoma County Literary Update webpage: https://socolitupdate.com/poet-laureates-news/laureate-archive-2020-2022/.
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Poetry and Translation: A Conversation with William O’Daly and Terry Ehret
On Saturday, September 25, I have the great good fortune to spend an hour and a half sharing poetry and conversation with acclaimed translator William O’Daly. The program is called Poets in Conversation, and runs from 4-5:30 PM Pacific Time.
Phyllis Klein, poet, founder, and host of Poets in Conversation, describes it as a Zoom poetry reading with two authors at a time, featuring poems from the books as well as conversation and connection between the readers and the audience present in the Zoom Room. The conversations are then posted to Youtube for later viewing.
William O’Daly has translated eight books of poetry of Chilean Nobel laureate Pablo Neruda, and most recently Neruda’s first volume, Book of Twilight, a finalist for the 2018 Northern California Book Award in Translation. O’Daly’s chapbooks of poems include The Whale in the Web, also published by Copper Canyon, as well as The Road to Isla Negra; Water Ways, a collaboration with JS Graustein; and Yarrow and Smoke. A National Endowment for the Arts Fellow, O’Daly was a finalist for the 2006 Quill Award in Poetry and has been chosen to receive the 2021 English Language Literary Award from the Korean-American journal Miju Poetry and Poetics.
I first discovered Bill O’Daly’s fine renderings of Neruda’s poetry back in the early 90’s. Our literary paths crossed again when, in appreciation for his work, I sent him a copy of Plagios/Plagiarisms, Volume One, a bilingual translation of poems by Ulalume González de Leόn. Bill wrote back and graciously agreed to write a blurb for Plagios/Plagiarisms,Volume Two, which is currently in book production and due out in April 2022.
Check out Poets in Conversation at this link: https://phyllispoetry.com/poets-in-conversation/. To let Phyllis know you’re interested in attending, contact her at poetry@phyllispoetry.com
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Poem for September
I chose this poem by Roque Dalton in gratitude for the many conversations I had with my student at Santa Rosa Junior College, Bryan Chavez Castro. He introduced me to the poetry of Roque Dalton, and the bravery of his life and work. Born in 1935 in El Salvador, Roque Dalton was the author of several influential poetry collections, including Taberna y otros lugares. He spent much of his life in exile in Mexico and Cuba and died in 1975.
Like You
by Roque Dalton, 1935-1975
Translated by Jack Hirschman
Like you I
love love, life, the sweet smell
of things, the sky-blue
landscape of January days.
And my blood boils up
and I laugh through eyes
that have known the buds of tears.
I believe the world is beautiful
and that poetry, like bread, is for everyone.
And that my veins don’t end in me
but in the unanimous blood
of those who struggle for life,
love,
little things,
landscape and bread,
the poetry of everyone.
____________
Como Tú
Yo, como tú,
amo el amor, la vida, el dulce encanto
de las cosas, el paisaje
celeste de los días de enero.
También mi sangre bulle
y río por los ojos
que han conocido el brote de las lágrimas.
Creo que el mundo es bello,
que la poesía es como el pan, de todos.
Y que mis venas no terminan en mí
sino en la sangre unánime
de los que luchan por la vida,
el amor,
las cosas,
el paisaje y el pan,
la poesía de todos.
(Curbstone Press, 2000), edited by Martín Espada.
____________
Terry Ehret
Sonoma County Literary Update co-editor
Petaluma poet, executive director of the Poetry Walk, Sonoma County Poet Laureate Emeritus, and founder of Taurean Horn Press, Bill Vartnaw will be reading with several poets he has published on Sunday, August 15, 2:00-3:30 p.m. San Francisco Public Library is hosting the event, which will be online. Bill Vartnaw (Suburbs of My Childhood) will be joined by poet and musician Avotcja, poets Gail Mitchell (Root Tracings, Bone Songs) and Jeanne Powell (February Voices), Tom Sharp (Spectacles: A Sampler of Poems and Prose), and San Francisco Poet Laureate emeritus Kim Shuck (Clouds Running In). 
Brian Fies will discuss the art of graphic storytelling—how words plus images add up to more than the sum of their parts—and how Brian used comics to tell the story of our community’s trauma and renewal during recent fires in his latest book, A Fire Story. The event will be on Saturday, August 21, 1:00-2:30 p.m., and will be hybrid in format: In other words, you may attend in person at Finley Center, 2060 W. College Ave., Santa Rosa, or virtually via
American Sansei poet, dancer, and community activist Janice Mirikitani was celebrated for her poetry and for her dedication to helping others. Mirikitani co-founded Glide Memorial in San Francisco with her husband, Cecil Williams. She passed away on July 29.
Five Sonoma County authors were nominated for a Northern California Book Award this year: Joan Frank, Kathleen Winter, John Johnson, Nancy Morales, and Terry Ehret. At the awards ceremony on July 11, Plagios/Plagiarisms, Volume One was honored by the Northern California Book Reviewers with first place in Poetry Translation. This year, for the first time, the translation competition was statewide
A bright light in the Sonoma County literary community has gone out. Like many of you, I knew Amy from her presence at so many readings and events in the community, especially at the Sitting Room. I didn’t really know her poetry, though, until I read a stunning selection submitted to accompany her nomination for Sonoma County Poet Laureate (which I believe was 2015). Amy’s poetry was a gift, as was her indelible presence—gentle, strong, spiritual, funny. Amy’s friend Nancy Dougherty composed this remembrance of Amy. And if you scroll down to the end of this month’s post, you’ll find two poems of Amy’s, selected for the Literary Update by Nancy and Abby Bogolmony.
Emilie Lygren is a poet and outdoor educator who loves talking to strangers, taking long walks, cooking for friends, and reading Naomi Shihab Nye’s poetry. Emilie has developed dozens of publications and curricula focused on outdoor science education and social-emotional learning through her work at the award-winning BEETLES Project at the Lawrence Hall of Science. Her first book of poems, What We Were Born For, was published in April by Blue Light Press. Visit Emilie’s website for more of her work and words: 
Naomi Shihab Nye is a longtime fan of Emilie Lygren and her work. They met at Tassajara Zen Mountain Center years ago and have spent many happy weeks writing together there. Naomi lives in San Antonio, Texas, is on faculty at Texas State University,. and is the Young People’s Poet Laureate through the Poetry Foundation (Chicago). She is author of author of Cast Away (Greenwillow/HarperCollins), The Tiny Journalist (BOA Editions), and many more books we all love.
The poems in Fog and Light were selected by Diane Frank. A love letter to San Francisco… in this collection of poems, we show you the city that most tourists miss…
Congratulations to Sonoma County authors who have been nominated for a Northern California Book Award this year! This year’s nominees include and Joan Frank in Creative Nonfiction, Kathleen Winter in Poetry, and John Johnson, Nancy Morales, and Terry Ehret in California Translation in Poetry.
Each year, outstanding works are selected by Northern California reviewers and editors, members of Northern California Book Reviewers. All of the nominated books are acknowledged and celebrated at the ceremony. The Fred Cody Award for Lifetime Achievement and Service will also be presented to a distinguished member of the Northern Californian literary community; the award carries a $1,000 honorarium.
A Cauldron of Crows
by Priscilla Jane Thompson
‘Tis a time for much rejoicing;
Let each heart be lured away;
Let each tongue, its thanks be voicing
For Emancipation Day.
Day of victory, day of glory,
For thee, many a field was gory!
Many a time in days now ended,
Hath our fathers’ courage failed,
Patiently their tears they blended;
Ne’er they to their, Maker, railed,
Well we know their groans, He numbered,
When dominions fell, asundered.
As of old the Red Sea parted,
And oppressed passed safely through,
Back from the North, the bold South, started,
And a fissure wide she drew;
Drew a cleft of Liberty,
Through it, marched our people free.
And, in memory, ever grateful,
Of the day they reached the shore,
Meet we now, with hearts e’er faithful,
Joyous that the storm is o’er.
Storm of Torture! May grim Past,
Hurl thee down his torrents fast.
Bring your harpers, bring your sages,
Bid each one the story tell;
Waft it on to future ages,
Bid descendants learn it well.
Kept it bright in minds now tender,
Teach the young their thanks to render.
Come with hearts all firm united,
In the union of a race;
With your loyalty well plighted,
Look your brother in the face,
Stand by him, forsake him never,
God is with us now, forever.
This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on June 19, 2020 by the Academy of American Poets.
Terry Ehret
Sonoma County Literary Update Co-editor
Two of the most talented, brilliant, generous, and gracious writers I’ve ever known have passed away this past month. Gerald Haslam, Sonoma State University professor emeritus and Penngrove resident, passed away at 84 on April 13. And Mississippi poet, jazz musician, music historian, novelist, screenwriter, and professor Al Young died on April 17, after suffering a devastating stroke over a year ago. So many of us were touched in personal ways by the generosity and inspiration of Jerry and Al. I will try to capture a little of this in today’s post.
And even before I moved to Sonoma County and met Haslam, I had the great good fortune to meet Al Young (along with Tobias Wolf, Carolyn Kizer, and Ursula LeGuin) at a writing workshop in San Jose for writers interested in crossing genres. He had the unique ability to make you laugh, which was just what a scared young writer like me needed. And from then on, whenever our paths crossed, he welcomed me like a long-lost friend—an intimacy he fostered with hundreds of writers. I have so many Al Young stories, but the one I’ll share is when Al was selected as California’s Poet Laureate in 2005. I waited every morning for a month to see an article about his appointment in the San Francisco Chronicle. Finally, I wrote a letter to the editor about this oversight, and when my letter was published, I received a very sweet note of thanks from Al. Apparently Al and the editorial staff at the Chronicle had some kind of falling out—a petty reason to overlook his being awarded the state’s highest literary honor.
Other local poets Al befriended and championed include our dear Geri Digiorno, pictured here, and CalPoet teacher Jackie Huss Hallerberg. Her story of first meeting Al at Squaw Valley and of writing the poem “the moon” appears below.
As I write this, I’m heading to the big south, Big Sur, to catch sight of condors and walk the steep hillsides of lupine and poppies. Seven years ago, I led a Sitting Room year-long workshop on the poetry and lyrical drama of Robinson Jeffers, who built his iconic Tor House along the shoreline of what is now 17 Mile Drive, and who lived deeply in the landscape of Big Sur. For a field trip, we spent a weekend in the Monterey area, took a private tour of Tor House, wrote together in Jeffers’s library, visited Point Lobos and the Big Sur Coast. The images of his poems followed us everywhere, though perhaps it’s more accurate to say we followed his images where they led us. In one particularly memorable poem, “Vulture,” the speaker addresses a vulture/condor circling over him, and imagines after his death that these winged scavengers will free his spirit from flesh and bones, and that he will fly with the condors.
I had walked since dawn and lay down to rest on a bare hillside
Where I’m headed is a place called Ascension Point, high on the ridge above Ventana and Nepenthe. The word ventana means window in Spanish. Local Spanish speakers in Big Sur gave this area its name because the Chumash Indians used it as a place for sky-burials, and saw it as a gateway or portal for souls entering and departing and arriving the planet-sphere. The veil between spirit world and our world is supposed to be very thin at a portal, allowing a space for souls to depart and spirits to pierce through.Besides being a sacred portal, Ascension Point is also one of the places where the California Condors are released to make their way back to the wild.
In 1984, at one of the first Napa Valley Poetry Conferences, Bob Hass recited the first lines of a poem by Polish writer Adam Zagajewski. I had never heard of him before (but then I was pretty green as a poet back then), but Hass wanted us to listen to the way the words carried the poet’s thoughts and conjured the poet’s images, while his rhythms, repetitions, and variations drove the poem on a physical and unconscious level. I shamelessly imitated Zagajewski’s syntax and repetition to create a weird little prose poem called “In the Bones of My Face,” responding to Hass’s assignment to create a self-portrait in rhythm.
In 2017, I had someone copy onto a CD an old reel to reel tape made in 1960 by my late husband of Lawrence reading his poem “Pondering the Insoluble Problem.” Visiting City Lights from my by then home in Petaluma, I found Lawrence putting some new books in the window. I blurted out the first lines of that poem, attempting to imitate him. He burst into laughter, saying he had almost forgotten that one. We tried in vain to find it in his vast collection on the second floor, but could not. I sent the CD as a gift. His thank-you note mentioned that he thought he sounded wonderful, and perhaps would include it in a documentary being made of his life.
Amanda Gorman’s stellar recital of “The Hill We Climb” brought poetry front and center to the inauguration ceremonies in Washington and to the political drama on the national scene. The nation’s first Youth Poet Laureate will also be making an appearance at the Super Bowl on February 7.
On January 17, the Sitting Room posted a short article about Gina Berriault in a new online feature called “Sunday Surprise.” Many of you may be on the Sitting Room’s mailing list, and so have already seen this. But reading this reminded me that Barriault’s great talent was not known as widely as she deserved, and so I thought this article merited reproducing here in the Sonoma County Literary Update.
I was introduced to Gina Berriault’s work when I was teaching at SF State through my colleague Molly Giles. I was also teaching at SRJC and serving on the Arts and Lectures Committee, and had the honor and pleasure of hosting Berriault as a guest writer at the JC following the publication of her collection Women in their Beds: New and Selected Stories (1996), which won the PEN/Faulkner Aeard, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Bay Area Book Reviewers Award.
Here is how the so unlikely book came about and here is how it came to the Sitting Room. Again it is a local story. Guy Biederman, publisher of “Bust Out”, who was teaching workshops at The Sitting Room, noticed our Berriault books.
José Luis Gutiérrez was born in Miami and grew up in Panama. His first poetry collection, A World Less Away, was published in 2016. His second collection, The Motel Entropy & Other Sorrows, came out in 2019. He’s also a screen writer and film maker.
By Assétou Xango
PEN Oakland, called “The Blue Collar PEN” by The New York Times, is honoring Maya Khosla’s All the Fires of Wind and Light with the Josephine Miles Literary Award.
by Kay Ryan
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