Hello, this is the San Francisco Overmight Portrait Podcast TV show with John Rose and
Clara Sue.
And in my segment we're having Margot Waddell and in Clara's segment we have Kim Shuck.
And Clara will go into more detail with Kim and her segment.
And Margot Waddell is at the moment a local poet in San Francisco.
She started out as a dancer performing as a principal dancer with the North Carolina
State Ballet.
She graduated from Princeton and Georgetown University.
A few years later she moved to California and began the single life here.
And she has read her poetry with the, featured with the Bay Area generations.
What is, what is exactly, I've seen it here and there, the Bay Area generations.
What is that?
Bay Area generations features poetry teams who are spanning multiple generations.
And so Stephen Coppell, a very well respected poet, invited me to contribute to Bay Area
generations with him.
And so we did a poetry segment together for Bay Area generations.
Okay.
And she's also read at Sacred Grounds and she's also been on Stephen Coppell's special
edition with us earlier, and she often reads about, writes poetry about romance.
And do you have anything you would like to add about your poetry or anything you would
like to say?
Absolutely.
Some of my greatest influences were Emily Dickinson, Victor Hugo, and...
I'm a big fan of Victor Hugo.
His novels and Esmeralda.
But I mean, Hunchback of Notre Dame, I love that story.
I'm a big fan of his poems, which are very personal, very introspective, and really touched
me in a way that I think dramatically influenced my life.
I can actually look into that because I wrote a chapbook that was entitled, Letters to Esmeralda,
The Lady Who Was Kidnapped in the Hunchback of Notre Dame.
And so, it's a lot different from the movie.
I mean, they butchered the whole plot in the movie.
And it's a really sad plot because in the end, Esmeralda and her mother meet and they
die in a confession booth.
Oh.
Do you remember that?
Wow.
It's really scary.
What an ending.
Yeah.
But anyway, anything else or?
Let's go on to poetry.
Okay, so we're going to fade from this shot and then Margot will read her poetry.
Healthy Christmas recipe.
Christmas trees create instant holiday feelings.
They're a perfect recipe for good cheer without calories.
This professor, my English literature professor told his freshman students, go have a lot
of sex because after college, it will be harder to get.
And ladies, sad as it may be, you'll never find men better than these.
Then he set us to read John Dunn's poem, The Flea.
Even in the 16th or the 17th century, this is a true story.
If you haven't read The Flea, I recommend it highly.
Flight of Fancy.
If you see written here a bit of our life or conversation, remember this interpretation
might just be a momentary flight of fancy.
Then again, it could be what I really think.
I guess you'll have to ask.
Juicy.
I like this color, you said, as you took a second bite of a juicy plum and its juices
dripped over your thumb and down your wrist.
Sensuous.
Your eyes caught mine and we both smiled knowing delicious.
I never learned to share.
You saw Christie last night.
You went out with Darlene.
You kissed Laura on the couch.
Then you and Audrey were seen and you wonder why I refused your ring.
One ring is not big enough for all your mingling.
Show me state.
I'm now from Missouri.
It speaks more to me as the state where people say, show me.
Then maybe I might believe what you say is true.
A welcome compliment.
A welcome compliment from him to me.
I don't know whether you have really good taste or if everything you put on just looks
great.
Confidentially.
He told me, confidentially, I want to be with a woman who loves me as I am, but I hope she'll
want to change me just a little as nobody like someone whose affection is too easy to
win.
Business plan attraction.
He thinks my business plan is sexy.
That's romantic if you live near Silicon Valley.
Random.
I can still hear my friend's voice telling me, we think we make choices, but actually
love is random.
Good fences know and enforce your boundaries by making a safe space for yourself.
You can let others know the borders and the rules so they can be good to you.
Good fences make good neighbors and good friends too.
Religious seduction.
Religiosity is seductive.
What have you to lose?
You could gain happy immortality.
Who needs moral integrity?
But some religions offer no such promise.
Only a sense of connection to relatives you loved.
And perhaps that is better.
Life spirit, the tree across the street undulates dancing to the music of the wind, rain thrilling
each leafy fingertip, branches like arms and hips swing to a complicated rhythm with choreography
mesmerizing.
Who says it has no spirit?
The life inside is evident.
Spring, pretty pink spring flower fits on my fingertip so perfectly formed you can't
tell which is the back and which is the front of it.
Its fragrance is sweet like strawberry cotton candy, its shape like a double-sided rose.
Ballerina, a girl of 13 finishes a performance of astounding virtuosity, a star among adults
on the ballet stage.
Afterwards, she is a child in jeans.
When praised for her extraordinary talent, she looks inward and says quietly, it's God
who moves through me.
Classical ballet, dance of the skeletons, girls and women unearthly thin, visions of
beauty and grace except the hollows where their eyes should have been, macabre sound
as the music plays a dance of self-starvation.
Becoming today I became a German teenager in love and a matador's Spanish wife, next
a signet and then a fairy taking flight.
How can one woman be all these in a single life?
See you in ballet class tonight.
Dirty ballet, ballet is dirty, a teacher says, then the gentle music starts to play.
I grin and ask another dancer, how can he say that something so beautiful is dirty?
He smiled.
You see smiles and beauty, what you don't see is the arguments backstage.
The fierce competition and the pain.
I'd like to close with a poem from another poet, Harold Edward Seek, remembering Alan
K. Seek.
You never forget the big ones that got away.
Thank you, Margo, for your poetry.
Stephen Gopel had some poems that he had pulled out of Poets 11, an anthology put on by Jack
Hirschman when he was poet laureate of California, I'll try to hold it up, maybe I'll electronically
zoom in later, but it's actually one of my favorite poems he has here, which I haven't
read in so long, and it's sort of a love poem, so I'm reading it since Margo was reading
romance poems.
I'm going to read this one, and it's sort of based in Yalapa, Mexico in the 60s, and
the poem is called Mexico, and here is the poem.
Every step you take to the rising tide is followed by the lines of waves which create
new lines across our two souls and across the unified universe that is in us and is
made up of our genuine actualized bodies dancing in these lines and waves on the sand.
We merge with God there at the rising tide where your statue of an image comes and goes,
but the beauty of you by the tide will never disappear from my mind no matter how fleeting
life is.
We sold each other's hearts, but just like thieves we gladly took from each other.
You act like you are unconscious, but secretly you know the universe is below you, above
you, and the rows and lines of waves splashing at your feet, making your soul dance, giving
your reasons to go on.
You and your small figure do not disappear down this strange shore.
But stay frozen in the actuality of wind, sand, and wave line in the beating hot sun
where you learn God's name and felt him breathe as the wind.
Thank you, and Clara will have Kim Shuck next, thank you.
Hello, this is Clara Sue, co-hosting with John Rhodes for the San Francisco Poetry Open
Mike podcast and TV show, and today my guest is Kim Shuck.
Hi, Kim, welcome to the show.
Hi, Clara, thank you for having me.
So Kim, you are, you do more than poetry.
You are a weaver and you're a beat worker, and tell us more about what you do, because
it seems like, you know, I went on to your website and it seems like you were doing all
kinds of arts and crafts and, you know, as well as poetry.
Yeah, my main degree is in textiles, I've got a Master of Fine Arts degree in weaving,
so, but that was really just the dot at the end of a really long sentence.
I did a show at the De Young Museum at one point, and people kept asking me how long
I'd been beating, and since I didn't know, I went and asked my parents, and they don't
know either, so, forever, since before you were born, possibly, so I make regalia, traditional
native dance regalia, for different things, I used to do a lot of powwow regalia, which
is more social, and now I do more ceremonial material these days, because that's what people
are asking me to do.
There are many Native American poets in the Bay Area, that you know.
There used to be more, but yes, there are plenty.
I'm never quite sure exactly how this goes, but we're one of the three largest urban centers
for Native people, San Francisco Bay Area, and we're either the largest, most diverse,
or I think we're the largest, extremely diverse population of Native people anywhere in the
country.
Minneapolis is less diverse, and the greater LA area is larger, but we've got more different
kinds of Native people here.
That's very good to know, and I know before we were talking a little bit about that there
are a lot of women poets who are very active in the Bay Area, and you said that you really
haven't seen that kind of activism in other parts of the country.
So, just the incredible power of women's voices in the San Francisco Bay Area, it's just off
the top of my head.
For a long time we had Paula Gunn, Alan, Judy Gran, Carol E. Sanchez, Avacha, DeVora, major.
I mean, they're just incredible activists, and one who we recently lost, Mama Quattro.
Oh, she passed away.
Oh, I had no idea.
Oh, wow.
Yeah.
So, I mean, the tradition of women carving space out for themselves in this community
is pretty strong.
Yeah, and you are a strong voice in the community too.
Well, thank you.
So, we look forward to hearing your poetry.
Thank you.
And we should start now.
Because mosquitoes are part of a big story, spiders will trap them.
The wolf spider on my window sill runs the walls.
She runs the walls for the sake of story.
The hummingbird makes her nest, a nest for two eggs from spider silk and lichen.
She makes it in the bay tree.
This is a place of orchards in the creek, and just there, there, the plum tree is growing
lichen, growing lichen.
Strawberry Creek, 118 years reading, whispering bedtime stories, unfamiliar itikaiile.
Narrowed memory, creek tucked in under, finding the places to press culverts.
The creek groping, ushdiweyu.
Tucked under, obscured, amaish.
Songs and buildings, the colonized creek is homed, but unemployed.
Sudatatsui, twining curls on the back of the neck of the bay, atsuya, press their cheeks
just there, press the basket of their keel bones to the gadah, can feel the fact of
an ally.
They sing to her in gurgling, kahada still speaks accented English, words broken off
and light enough to be taken in this way.
She remembers a thing then, forgets it again, there were minnows like stars.
Today I'm burying words in jars under the bay laurel, snugged between the plum roots,
word preserves in jars for quieter times.
I'm burying her words for when her words run thin or stop.
She knows some things, so I'm saving them, nothing like the poems of summer abandon because
that's a thing to find each for each, because wonder is a practice, a prayer, or whatever
you like to call it, but these jars now, they're a real thing, maybe a recipe for beans or fish
or biscuits that no one else can follow, something very time and person specific, like any good
religion.
There are these days when I wear you more surely than the handed down strands of coral
stolen when I was still a child, and the visions get clearer in these smaller days.
The butterflies have made it up this far, I tell you the rain brought you out this morning
as we approach your birthday, it would have been 98 of them this year.
I found another box of your treasures in the closet as every shovel full of exploration
finds more of you and they've strung the holiday lights again, well look out the kitchen window
tonight and we'll look at what used to be your city.
Perching with the ravens, we are all mesmerized by the rain, we slip rhymes and off rhymes,
we're woven membrane, we're variable netting, this country is a road film, a skipping stone,
we can't pretend that wishing on the snap of bone is a thing like planning in this rain,
my hair curls at the ends and the artificial hatreds and fears grow slick make footing treacherous,
my hair curls at the ends, the harmonies of this place can puddle or run away, I'm watching
the rain with the ravens and we each have our own opinions.
I think I'll end with this one, which hazels spit their seeds for distance and I took handfuls
of powder dry dirt and found them there, gathered some and put them in a hollow walnut shell,
their shiny mahogany coat, the scar of a white hylum, sympathy that can teach you to bloom
in winter can call the water, thank you.
