Gail Mitchell is a poet living in San Francisco. Bill Vartnaw is a poet living in Petaluma. Both are long-experienced and long associated coming out of the 1970s poetic ferment that yielded a path for voices of diverse American cultures, much of it captured in print by Bill’s Taurean Horn Press — including Gail’s title, Bone Songs. Bill himself is an eloquent poet and an invaluable chronicler of the artists whose voices enrich the region’s culture.

An open mic follows, hosted by Jerry Ferraz and Michael Koch, themselves products of overlapping scenes, venues and personal histories with common roots.

A word about Jerry. A child of San Francisco’s Eureka Valley, hard by the Castro District, Burmese by blood and American by upbringing, he took to wandering the city at a young age, drifting on the San Francisco fog through the 1960s, through the Haight, North Beach, the Mission, traveling a million miles through the years without ever leaving the city limits. By the time we opened the bookshop in 1999, he had been composing poetry and songs for nearly 40 years, enigmatic, allusive and mythic. The first poetry reading in the shop had Jerry at its center. He’s been at once hard to pin down and solid as a rock all these years. Now that his mother Billie has passed, a remarkable woman, he’s about to break loose of his home ground and head north to the Portland area, where he has a grown son. We’ll miss him, but imagine he’ll never really be gone.

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