I have given myself repetitive stress, wildly typing the past into the talk I am giving for the SPT Aggression panel. The talk was called "Outlaws, Lone Wolves and Made Poets: Bay Area Poetics from the Seventies to the Present" but might now be called "Re Vision." I have been also turning my house upside down looking for various items, including postcards and flyers for events. I found myself explaining yesterday to Brent and our volunteer Lina that we heard about events through postcards in the olden days and that part of running a series was making the postcards, buying the stamps, printing the lables, sending the postcard etc. Brent pointed out that people would have had to print their blogs back then and I agreed that that is how it was.

My talk does not focus that much on Jerry but for some reason the items that I am finding do. I think he is haunting this effort. This image is from the cover to the videotape of the group reading and memorial for Jerry Estrin that occurred at SPD when it was on San Pablo -- well before I worked there (here) on June 27th 1993. Jerry had organized the reading of his book Rome, A Mobile Home down to who would read what part but he suddenly died just before the event. Several people accidently showed up at SPT when it was on Guerrero and 24th instead of at SPD that day, which was very hot, so we waited for them. Readers included myself, Lyn Hejinian, Norma Cole, Ron Silliman, Barrett Watten, Carla Harryman, Leslie Scalapino, Norman Fischer and Jean Day, with an audiotape from Steve Benson.

"Aslant the sea he converts a survival manual, a coolness
of mind barely suggesting his life's ardent muteness."

Jerry Estrin, from "Frank O'Hara," A Book of Gestures, Sombre Reptiles, 1980


























"called Poem of the End

four evenings in a row
now with a bridge in the distance

I came upon by chance

called Poem of the End

blue seven like this
hazed: nothing but the printed lines"

Michael Palmer, "from C", Acts 5, 1986

Vanishing Cab #3, 1979

Christine Zawadisky
Ken Wainio
Jerry Ratch
Nanos Valaorits
Anne Nelson
Laura Moriarty
Marc Lecard
Jean-Pierre Duprey (translated by Marc Lecard)
art by Bruce Hutchinson

from "Sandy Koufax" by Jerry Estrin

"He grew up palpitating above a howl of moss, his fastballs were little creatures curtaining the scientific hungry nails -- how to be left handed like a kite and still simply downstairs?...

Yet, o song, a light had been expecting a hammer, it locked an ouce of pain in his picture window, increased the hydraulic seriousness of the doctor, and circled him with an autobiography already lashed to his wrist, like a basement. He had to throw in America.

And now 1978 pulls up in a dawn."

from "Ballad of the Blue Light Bar" by Laura Moriarty

"At sunrise she rose as always
In sleep she thought we lose our lives
And so refusing sleep
she wandered in her slip
drak gray rayon dawn
smoothed over thighs stung
as if from running or dancing
a long time.
It was hot when she went in
Hotter still as she reentered the bar."