POETS!  Three Readings of Note

Bird & Beckett continues to offer one of the liveliest poetry scenes of any bookshop in town– in this City of Poets!

Monday, August 29th, 7:00 pm

Bill Berkson
and Duncan McNaughton

Bill and Duncan are contemporaries, friends and widely respected literary figures.  In addition to their writings (more than a dozen books of poetry by Duncan since 1961, and a like number of volumes of art writing, poetry and other material by Bill beginning in about the same year), both have been long engaged through critical work and correspondence in furthering the understanding of artistic endeavor.  Both have been important teachers in the Bay Area as well–  Duncan founded the innovative and highly influential Poetics Program at New College in 1965 and directed it until 1990; and Bill was a key faculty member at the renowned San Francisco Art Institute from 1984 to 2008. Both have roots on the east coast — Bill was born in New York in 1939; Duncan in Boston in 1942 — and came of age intellectually there, though they now firmly identify with both coasts.  They have both contributed significantly to American letters throughout their careers, for fifty years and more.

Monday, September 5th, 7:00 pm

HD Moe
followed by an open mic

Dave Moe is a West Coast poet from birth, born in 1937 in Corvallis, Oregon and raised there and in California.  His poems embody a surreal and supercharged onslaught of imagery and language.  He will long be remembered for the tabloid “Lovelights” (1968-1979) that many an unsuspecting tourist and businessman plucked from newsracks downtown to find scores of poems among the lurid photos and classified ads.  His publishing efforts these days are through the prodigious output of Beatitude Press, which he runs along with Doug Rees.

As someone has said, “Moe’s poetry isn’t the result of taking acid.  Moe’s poetry is acid.”

An open mic always follows the featured readers in our regular 1st and 3rd Mondays poetry series.  The series is hosted by wandering bard Jerry Ferraz, a San Francisco visionary mystic whose work is linked inextricably to the troubadour tradition of the middle ages, and a friendly guy, to boot.

Saturday, September 10th, 5 pm

Jane Rice
and Suzanne Sigafoos

The two  poets will read from their new chapbooks, The Truth About the World (Rice) and Held in the Weave (Sigafoos).

Jane lives in Glen Park.  Her previous collection, Portrait Sitters, is a painterly sequence of likenesses of Montparnasse artists during the inter-war period.  “Like any excellent portraitist, she exposes her subjects’ emotional landscapes, but she also goes beyond the frame of the individual to evoke an entire time and place.” — Cole Swenson.

As for Suzanne, Held in the Weave is her first collection; she’s been writing poetry in earnest since her first poetry workshop in San Francisco in 1997.  “These honed poems, messages to the living, offer the reader a door to the quiet deep, from which we ourselves return, deepened and gratefully aware of the power of song in this singing collection.” — Judith Montgomery