On the occasion of a trip by Jerry Martien down to Monterey to present his book Waveshock: Ed Ricketts, The Voyage of the Grampus, and Our Biopoetic Future, long-time friends Hilton Obenzinger, driving up from Palo Alto, and Stephen Vincent, hosting on his San Francisco home turf, converge on the bookshop to read poems and compare notes with reference to their common 1960s/70s Bolinas and bioregional history and their present pursuits.  

Jerry Martien has lived on the northern California coast for nearly half a century, supporting his writing habit as a book clerk, doorman, poet in the schools, carpenter, and Humboldt State writing instructor. He has published several collections of poetry, including chapbooks and broadsides from Jerry Reddan’s Tangram Press, as well as Shell Game (Mercury House) and The Price of a Life (self-published), both histories of money and exchange in North America and northwest California. He is also the editor of A Watershed Runs Through, a collection of essays by Freeman House, published by Empty Bowl in 2023.

Jerry will read from his new collection of poems, Bodies of Water.

He will also talk about his recent book, Waveshock: Ed Ricketts, The Voyage of the Grampus & Our Biopoetic Future. Through the spring and summer of 1932, four questing souls made their way north to Alaska aboard cabin cruiser Grampus, among them Ed Ricketts and Joseph Campbell. From his home on the shores of Humboldt Bay, Martien sees the roots of his own generation’s journey and a chart for future voyagers.

Hilton Obenzinger writes criticism, poetry, fiction, and history. His books include Witness: 2017-2020 and This Passover Or The Next I Will Never Be in Jerusalem, which received the American Book Award. He taught honors writing, literature and American studies at Stanford University. He is Associate Director Emeritus of the Chinese Railroad Workers in North America Project.

Hilton will be reading from a forthcoming book, Old Fool, a chronology of the Gaza war, a memoir of an anti-Zionist Jew, a map of aging and mortality, an omnibus of upheaval and change from the 60s to today, a tonic against fascism, and the litany of an Old Fool.

Stephen Vincent is the author of numerous books of poems, photographs and haptics. He is a poet-artist, and he has produced numerous books, such as Walking and Sleeping with Sappho. From 1972 to 1981, he was the publisher of Momo’s Press books, which first introduced the work of such poets and writers as Ntozake Shange, Victor Hernandez Cruz, Hilton Obenzinger, Beverly Dahlen, and Jessica Hagedorn. In the eighties, he was the director of Bedford Arts Publishers, which became internationally recognized for the publication of books featuring the works of Masahisa Fukase, David Park, Roy DeForest, Miriam Schapiro, Mark Klett, and Christo, among others.

Stephen will be reading from and showing photographs from Street Work, a unique volume of almost one hundred pictures in which street marks and configurations—the stains, found objects, cracks, accidental chalk phrases; an occasional house, trees, foliage—variously combine to drive mind and eye into an alchemy of reflection bearing insights; crossfire politics, dance, romance, love, death, and words themselves bear down to offer life and consciousness into the formation of a human community.