The Poetry of the Pacific, Day 4

San Francisco is known as much for its neighborhoods and characters as it is for its sights, so I decided to feature one of them: Chinatown. It's supposed to be the oldest one in the Western Hemisphere, having been founded around 1848 for immigrants working on the gold rush and the transcontinental railroads. Due to the determination of its residents, it survived the destruction of the 1906 earthquake and plans to expand the Financial District into the area. Now it stands in the heart of a bustling, gritty urban center. More than just a collection of Chinese restaurants, Chinatown supports Asian-American art, culture, and activism.

Red lanterns in San Francisco's Chinatown, dwsmiley (pixabay.com)

Today's poem was written by San Francisco native, poet, playwright, and performer Genevieve "Genny" Lim (1946- ). It is the title selection from her book, Winter Place (1989). Whereas her more recent pieces have tackled more expansive or universal themes, her older work like "Winter Place looks at the world from my alley window." She is particularly known for Paper Angels, a play about Chinese immigrants incarcerated at Angel Island. Borrowed from Jaime Wright's website.

Winter Place

I live in this foghorn moon of a fishhole alley
Every night there's a derelict dog, mangy with a cataract stare
Lickin' the wounds of old North Beach
Leftovers, fish'n chips, upchucked cheesesteak, antipasti
Blasted against the antiseptic glare of trendy resaurants,
glossy Gelatos
Where MTV couples glide frozenly by
Catching in the corners of their ray-banned eyes
Their store-bought reflections 

It ain't so bad
Sundry hookers straining their fleshbait
out of windows, doorways
Orifices of the Europa glistening like fish
It ain't so bad
The winos and the refugees, bag can ladies and panhandlers
Eye-talians, Chinamen, tourists, punks, junkies
Boat people and runaways
Converging on this teeming waterhole
where the corporate buffalo roamed 

The city reeks of crab shells, fishheads, cabbages
Soiled pampers, cappuchino and Kotex
in shocking orange-and-pink
Day-glo shopping bags ripped and spewing out the
Guts of Chinatown 

They all come
The natives like homing pigeons
Midwesterners like homesteaders
Southerners like shipwrecked sailors
Eastcoasters like fugitives
Through the fog-laden cable cars plummeting
over Russian Hill backyards and
narrow chopstick alleyways
where camera-toting tourists
eat cheap chop-suey and
snap moon-faced babies wide-eyed on their mothers' backs
out of curiosity 

It ain't so bad
the Indians once said
They traded their land for horses 

It ain't so bad
the Coolies reasoned
as they jumped ship only to
Sweat in baskets
with pickaxes and dynamite
Twenty-thousand feet in the Sierras
like wet human laundry

copyright 2001, Genny Lim

p.s.--You should absolutely click here to watch Genny Lim perform a version of this poem.

Poetry of the Pacific, Day 3

Editor's note: these were pre-written posts, but due to a comedy of errors (not on our part), we did not actually arrive in San Francisco Thursday afternoon. I will post the story at the end of this series. Until then, please enjoy the poetry!

Golden Gate Bridge in fog, from toptravellists.net.

Lonidier Rampant 
            As from a distance, watch yourself
            Disintegrate in foaming seas.
                              -- Weldon Kees

You are too near the bridge
To have such hair
Hair a man would love
To comb his fingers through
Lonidier 

Walking down the old familiar street
Doorways reappear
Shoe Repair New Soles
Smell of polish and leather
Where you sat in a chair
Swinging bobby soxed feet
Lonidier

Salvation waits on the corner of doughnut holes
Six to a bag
And in Mr. Bay's barber chair
Platinum bangs feathered on the floor
Lonidier

The bridge Lonidier and the sea Lonidier
And the dark morning hours
Chew through your brain
Looking for innocence
Lost Lonidier 

And the stab in your heart where the intersection
Of life and death is marked

Cool fingers of fog have been waiting
All these years
Lonidier
Knowing one day you'd be theirs
You are too near the bridge

To have such hair
So you'll cut it off
Leave its stories behind
Or if they stay
Whispering in the roots
You'll feel it pulled by the updraft
Of love you left behind
Wasted
Unbelieved
Lonidier Your hair
Will be the last of you
To hit the sea
The city that saved you again and again
Rising swiftly
To still you
To sleep



The Golden Gate Bridge celebrated its 75th anniversary last year. When it was completed in 1937, it was an architectural marvel in "international orange": 8,891 feet long, 6 lanes and 90 feet wide, 4,000 feet between towers standing almost 820 feet tall from top to bottom buried under the water. At 220 (or 245?) feet above the water, it sadly also presents an opportunity for suicide. Today's poem, courtesy of the literary group Big Bridge, considers the possibility. It was written by California poet Katherine Hastings, known for her   beautiful, haunting, often mythical poems. This poem is dedicated to Lynn Lonidier (1937-1993)--teacher, feminist, poet, cellist, lesbian, activist--who committed suicide by jumping off a cliff in San Francisco.

As a bonus, when researching Hastings I found out she had led a campaign among Californian poets to raise money toward saving some of the state's parks from being shuttered due to budget cuts. The campaign is over, but she still had a copy of the resulting anthology, What Redwoods Know, to send me. That is a far better souvenir than any trinket I could buy in a gift shop.

The Poetry of the Pacific, Day 2

Editor's note: these were pre-written posts, but due to a comedy of errors (not on our part), we did not actually arrive in San Francisco Thursday afternoon. I will post the story at the end of this series. Until then, please enjoy the poetry!

Image of California redwood trees from Picryl (2016, CC0)

This series of posts has an alliterative title, but as I alluded to yesterday, not all of the poems will be about the Pacific Ocean. Today's verse concerns a more terrestrial topic: the redwood forest. These evergreens are some of the tallest and oldest trees we know of. They reach more than 200 feet into the air, with a trunk diameter of 10-15 feet. In the wet and temperate climate of the Pacific coast (from central California up through Oregon), the trees can live for more than 2000 years. Redwoods are of course part of a larger ecosystem, as they support an impressive variety of plants, insects, and animals, from their roots up to their crowns. Unfortunately, between the Gold Rush and the founding of Redwood National Park in 1968, 90% of the forest in California was cut down for timber. (Click here for haunting black and white photographs of big trees, little men, and the horses and oxen involved old logging efforts.)

Dear Husband got a tip from a friend to check out Muir Wood National Monument (est. 1908), the result of early conservation efforts. So yesterday, on our first day in San Francisco, we rented a car and drove north, across the Golden Gate Bridge, to this old-growth forest nature preserve named for the founder of the Sierra Club, John Muir (1838-1914). He is supposed to have said of the gift of having the park named after him, "This is the best tree-lovers monument that could possibly be found in all the forests of the world." To mark the occasion, today's poem is courtesy of the Golden Gate Bridge Highway and Transportation District. Yes, you read that correctly. Chief Engineer Joseph P. Strauss (1870-1938)--a native of Cincinnati and the man who took credit for the building of the Golden Gate Bridge--penned these stanzas a few years before that architectural marvel connected Muir Woods in the north to the city of San Francisco in the south.

DH wants to know when we're visiting the Gulf stream waters?

The Redwoods (1931)

Here, sown by the Creator's hand.
In serried ranks, the Redwoods stand:
No other clime is honored so,
No other lands their glory know.

The greatest of Earth's living forms,
Tall conquerors that laugh at storms;
Their challenge still unanswered rings,
Through fifty centuries of kings.

The nations that with them were young,
Rich empires, with their forts far-flung,
Lie buried now--their splendor gone:
But these proud monarchs still live on.

So shall they live, when ends our days,
When our crude citadels decay;
For brief the years allotted man,
But infinite perennials' span.

This is their temple, vaulted high,
And here, we pause with reverent eye,
With silent tongue and awestruck soul;
For here we sense life's proper goal:

To be like these, straight, true and fine,
to make our world like theirs, a shrine;
Sink down, Oh, traveler, on your knees,
God stands before you in these trees.

The Poetry of the Pacific, Day 1

This weekend I am giving two papers at a conference in San Francisco--and I managed to convince Dear Husband to take the weekend off to come with me. (SF was our first choice for a honeymoon, but we ditched it when the baseball schedules didn't jive, so it's been on our bucket list since then.) We're going a little early to do some sightseeing, and then DH will explore on his own while I'm attending panels. I'll post some photos later, but for now, I am so excited about seeing/standing in the Pacific Ocean that I found a series of poems about that great body of water (and the sights around it) and will post one per day. Also, April is National Poetry Month, so consider this my contribution to the celebration of verse.

Because we are traveling today, the first installment is "The Discovery of the Pacific," a poem by Anglo-American poet Thom Gunn (1929-2004), who followed his college sweetheart Mike Kitay to San Francisco. He taught writing at Stanford University and University of California-Berkeley and is most well known for his collection of poems entitled The Man with Night Sweats (1992). Although his work was often an autobiographical catalog of his bohemian lifestyle, this poem only partially fits that pattern. It involves a heterosexual couple, but one that finds its true nature as they move westward, toward and finally into the Pacific Ocean. Found on the blog Wandering Minstrels.

The Discovery of the Pacific

They lean against the cooling car, backs pressed

Upon the dusts of a brown continent,

And watch the sun, now Westward of their West,

Fall to the ocean. Where it led they went.

Kansas to California. Day by day

They travelled emptier of the things they knew.

They improvised new habits on the way,

But lost the occasions, and then lost them too.

One night, no-one and nowhere, she had woken

To resin-smell and to the firs' slight sound,

And through their sleeping-bag had felt the broken

Tight-knotted surfaces of the naked ground.

Only his lean quiet body cupping hers

Kept her from it, the extreme chill. By degrees

She fell asleep. Around them in the firs

The wind probed, tiding through forked estuaries.

And now their skin is caked with road, the grime

Merely reflecting sunlight as it fails.

They leave their clothes among the rocks they climb,

Blunt leaves of iceplant nuzzle at their soles.

Now they stand chin-deep in the sway of ocean,

Firm West, two stringy bodies face to face,

And come, together, in the water's motion,

The full caught pause of their embrace.

Jim Kucharek, Sunset at Trinidad State Beach, CA,Flickr (2015)

Gird Your Loins! It's Breakfast

Saturday morning was a real treat, as friends invited me to breakfast the Prairie Fruits Farm & Creamery. Despite being a Market at the Square regular, I had somehow missed this opportunity (and my evangelizing friend had neglected to convert me!). In March and April, before the farmers market starts for the season, the farm opens for breakfast on Saturday mornings. Folks drive from all around to stand in a long line, order from their hilarious menu, and eat a scrumptious slow-food meal in a converted barn. I don't doubt that such an operation benefits from a combination of do-gooder foodie-ism and the novelty of the farm for the couples and young families who make the short trek out from town.




Gird Your Loins! It's Breakfast #3

On the menu this week were biscuits and gravy; grit cakes with poached egg, tomato pesto, and greens; tamales ("If we were in North Korea this pack of two tamales would be called the Kim Jong Illest."); yogurt-granola parfait; coffee cake; and a short stack of pancakes for the kiddies. To drink was coffee, tea, goat milk ("really local"). and goat milk hot chocolate.




I had the grit cake with all the toppings and a goat milk hot chocolate. This was second breakfast for me, but I polished it right off. The cocoa smelled different than cow's milk--I thought maybe like almonds. It was good, too. (That's some multi-grain honey wheat bread I bought from one of the vendors. It was a little more than I like to pay for a loaf, but we had run out at home several days before, and I was starting to get desperate for my usual sandwich for lunch.)

Despite the size of the crowd, turn over was pretty quick. We also vacated our spots for the next group, and went outside to visit the goats. The farm has all different kinds: black, brown, tan, some with big floppy ears and others with hardly any ears. They keep the ones of similar ages/sizes together. Here you can see the youth playing "king of the hill." They had some very liiittle ones, and in the next pen over was a whole pile of goats. You can see the lamps to keep them warm; there is also a jug of milk with rubber nipples. (The mamas have their own barn.)


Then it was time to drive home again. It was a nice reminder that winter is finally over. I am very much looking forward to my weekly trips across town to the market. Last season we were introduced to turnips, kale, and chard, so I can only wonder what new  foods and recipes we will try this year. Now that it's spring, what are you looking forward to? Are you growing any of your own vegetables, or are you waiting for something in particular to appear at your local market?

Frohe Ostern!

Weil wir so weit weg von unseren Familien wohnen, können wir  nicht zu Ostern nach Hause gehen. Also, wenn wir keine Einladung zum Abendessen anderswo haben, öffnen wir unser Haus für einen Potluck mit anderen DoktorandInnen. Gestern Nacht waren wir neun um den Tisch (und auf der Sofa). Auf der Speisekarte waren Schweinefilet mit pikanter Brombeersoße; Apfel-Reis-Salat; hausgemachte Hummus mit einer speziellen Gewürzmischung von Austin, Texas; geröstete Wurzelgemüse; Reis mit Kichererbsen und Grünkohl; pastellfarbene gefüllte oder russische Eier; grüner Salat mit Erdbeeren; und endlich Schokoladenkuchen. Auch eine reizende Pinot Grigio und ein Krimsekt aus der Ukraine.

Das Gespräch war lebhaft, schwankte von Waffenbesitz zu den literarischen Verdienste verschiedenen TV-Shows zu Jazz-Bassist Henry Grimes (der 1968 in Californien "verschwand" und 2002 wieder auftauchtet). Am allerbesten waren die Gäste so begeistert über die Ostereierjagd wie ich, als ich die plastischen Eier Samstagabend auffüllte und verstecke. Jede hatte eine eingewickelte Schokolade (auch aus der Ukraine) und entweder ein Osterzitat oder einen Kalauer. Die Gäste fanden 16 der Eier, die Katze hatte 2 unter der Sofa "versteckt," und ich habe das 19. Montag Morgen endlich gefunden.

Ich hoffe, dass euer Ostern genau so lecker und fröhlich war wie unser!

Unser Herr hat die Verheißung der Auferstehung geschrieben, nicht in Bücher allein, sondern in jedem Blatt im Frühjahr. ~Martin Luther

Ein Mann, der völlig unschuldig war, bot sich selbst als Opfer für das Wohl der anderen, darunter seine Feinde, und wurde das Lösegeld der Welt. Es war eine perfekte Leistung. ~Mahatma Gandhi

Ostern geschah, nicht wann eine Leiche aufstand sondern wann die Jüngern fingen an, Christus in einander zu sehen. ~Jim Rigby

Knock, knock! Who's there? Harvey. Harvey who? Harvey good Easter everyone!

Happy Easter 2013!

Because we live so far from our families, we can't go home for Easter. So if we don't have an invitation to a dinner somewhere else, we open our house to fellow graduate students for a potluck dinner. Last night there were nine of us around the table (and on the couches). On the menu was blackberry-glazed pork tenderloin, apple-rice salad, homemade hummus with a special spice blend all the way from Austin, TX, roasted root vegetables, rice with chickpeas and kale,  pastel-colored devil's eggs, tossed green salad with strawberries, and chocolate cake. Also a lovely pinot grigio and a novel sparkling red wine from Ukraine, Krim.

The conversation was lively, ranging from gun control to the literary merits of various television shows to jazz bassist Henry Grimes (click to find out what makes him so interesting). Best of all, the guests were as enthusiastic about hunting Easter eggs as I was about stuffing and hiding them Saturday evening. Each one had a wrapped chocolate (also from Ukraine) and either an Easter quotation or a corny joke. They found 16 of the eggs, the cat had "hidden" 2 under the couch, and I didn't find the the 19th until Monday morning.

I hope your Easter was as delicious and delightful as ours was! 

A man who was completely innocent, offered himself as a sacrifice for the good of others, including his enemies, and became the ransom of the world. It was a perfect act. ~Mahatma Gandhi

Easter happened, not when a corpse got up, but when the disciples began to see Christ in each other. ~Jim Rigby

I lied on my Weight Watchers list. I put down that I had 3 eggs... but they were Cadbury chocolate eggs. ~Caroline Rhea

Knock, knock! Who's there? Harvey. Harvey who? Harvey good Easter everyone!