Twice a month, on the 1st and 3rd Monday of each month, San Francisco troubadour Jerry Ferraz welcomes poets into Bird & Beckett.  One or two featured readers, followed by an open mic.

Tonight, Steve Arntson and Sharon Pretti are the features.

We don’t have much biographical detail on Steve, but he’s perceived here at Bird & Beckett as having been an important element in the North Beach poetry scene for more than a couple of decades.  We’ve heard him perform more than a few impressive, far reaching poems from the Bird & Beckett stage, and have heard him play some lovely classical numbers on the store piano– so we’re looking forward to hearing him perform at length, both poems and music.  It appears he was born in Massachusetts and received his B.A. at the University of Washington, having moved to Seattle with his family at a young age.  Later, he was on staff as an accompanist at Sonoma State University’s music department, and thence, we imagine, to Baghdad by the Bay.

As for Sharon, she has provided a bit of straightforward information, as follows.  She is a San Francisco native whose work has appeared in several journals including MARGIE, The Bellevue Literary Review, The Comstock Review, The Healing Muse, Marin Poetry Center Anthology, with poems forthcoming in Calyx.  Sharon works as a medical social worker at Laguna Honda Hospital.  Since 1996 she has run a poetry writing group there for the patients. For many years Sharon also taught poetry workshops to senior citizens in assisted living facilities in the Bay Area. She comes to us well vouched for by the formidable and charming North Beach surrealist, Ronald Sauer.

Jerry Ferraz

As for our M.C., Jerry Ferraz, we are pleased he’s made Bird & Beckett a home base lo these many years (some 15 or so)… Born in San Francisco’s Eureka Valley and residing now just to the south of the outer inner Mission, he has wandered these streets and hills since a pup, with his pint sized guitar and his head full of extended musico-poetic tales which he’s shared at construction sites, in cafes and, to the disapproval or the drivers, on the city’s buses.  Now he drives his own car, but he’s still no stranger to the city’s sidewalks and the dens of bohemian San Francisco.   He’s an ambassador of the Languedoc of yore serving our need of a cultural link to a time at once more courtly and more observant of human foibles and ardor.