California, dreaming

exuberance is beauty says William Blake & look at the light hitting this ginkgo tree on Prince Street, Berkeley.

I’m 10 days into a 6 month art residency in Berkeley, California. I feel so lucky to have been invited to come and make work in this beautiful part of the world.

The last few days have been extra tough aloneness wise – dealing with the UK election result, far from family and friends. But Berkeley is a liberal city and the fact that people here are saddled with a president who inspires universal loathing made them sympathetic to my despair. This blog post wasn’t going to be about that, but it turns out I couldn’t not mention it.

One of my index card collage poems made long before the election, but political anyway, like all art, all poetry!

Since my arrival here I’ve made friends with some exceptional trees, as well as tentatively, some people.

Maple on Claremont Avenue on day one

This maple wakes me up, it sparkles at me from outside my bedroom window as special emissary from the sun!

The trees aren’t too curious, but the people are. ‘What are you going to be doing?’ follows on from the usual cheerily delivered, ‘Welcome to Berkeley!’

‘What are you going to be doing?’ asks a Mexican angel in a store called Tail of the Yak, full of decorative wonders.

I went to a small publishers fair in San Francisco on Sunday. It was brimming with lively books, collaborations, people. I met some poets! One I warmed to immediately was called Eric Smeathen, (I know, great name, and he even had a pink jacket.) His book Snail Poems, is a hymn to love written by and featuring metaphorical and real snails and many other manifestations of strength and beauty. It even has Matisse’s snail on the front (from my London, lol,) so it was pointless to try and resist it.

A dose of Eric Sneathen’s snail poetry, published by Krupskaya, one of the small presses with a stand at the book fair I went to on Sunday.

Small publishers fair at SFMOMA in SAN Francisco. This table features publications made with 2727 California a public access print resource with art residencies & other excellent, accessible stuff.

I also caught a reading in the Doe Memorial Library on the university campus the other day. A poet called Margaret Ross read in the lunch poems series there, set up and also attended by, former US poet laureate Robert Hass. Margaret Ross had memorised her long and richly textured poems and delivered them slowly and with a kind of American flatness, to great effect. I loved them, there was playfulness behind her sober intonation and the poems looked up close at time, relationships, aspects of our ordinary dust – she lit up question marks in my head, make me laugh too. I was also glad to get a sighting of Robert Hass, as I heard him read in London at Poetry International a couple of years ago and I’m a fan.

People beginning to gather in the grand Doe Memorial library at UC Berkeley, for Margaret Ross’ reading in the lunch poems series.

You can read examples of her poems here,

On my way back I stopped at Moe’s Books. What a cavern of delights! I struck lucky as they had a box of broken publications destined for recycling, so I claimed them as step 1 towards my California Collage Stash. There was happiness all round at the timing. Apparently it’s rare they have such stuff as they only accept books in good condition.

Here’s a new index card collage poem, I made it yesterday – using pages from the broken books from Moe’s.