A BARD & A PHILOSOPHER

Jerry Ferraz & Sterling Bunnell

POETS! featured readers + open mic, twice monthly

Jerry Ferraz was born and grew up over in Eureka Valley some years ago, let’s say in the early 1950s, round about this time of year… a San Franciscan to the core… though a much broader expanse of time and geography reverberates through him…

Through the years, he’s recited his winding and enigmatic fables in verse and sung his lovely flamenco inflected songs in the cafes and bars, at the bus stops and construction sites, in the parks… trading in the poetic coin of the realm of philosophers and seers.  There really are precious few like him, and they’re scattered like jewels over centuries of tradition, across the seas and the continents.  He’s a poet for the ages, and we’re not hesitant to characterize him thus.  After ten-plus years of Bird & Beckett poetry readings, and four and a half decades of rambling the streets in this most beautiful of cities with a long succession of small, festooned guitars (the ones stickered with images and evocative phrases… “poets are good with their tongues”), Jerry rolls along…  Join us to raise a glass of good red wine to a true wearer of the troubadour’s mantel.

This evening, Jerry has once again invited a long-time associate, a mentor, a falconer, a disperser of frogs, a sage, Sterling Bunnell to read with him.  Appropriately, Bunnell is credited with introducing the first living strain of Salvia divinorum, Diviner’s Sage, to the United States, on his return from a 1962 trip in the company of Michael McClure to Sierra Mazateca.  Sterling’s recent series of talks at the Humanist Hall in Oakland have been providing grist for the mill and food for thought to many, just a current manifestation of his continuing consideration of things as they are.