Yeah, just like the subway on time, wow.
We have our vocal coach back here, Nancy, thank you, thank you.
Well, welcome to the 2PM edition of the 19th annual Petaluma Poetry Walk, 19 years, that's incredible.
A day set aside for poetry.
I did see a quote or a poem by Emily Dickinson I thought might kind of spur our thoughts
on this special day.
Emily Dickinson wrote, had this one day not been, or could it cease to be, how smitten, how superfluous, were every other day.
And so I'm glad, you know, Jerry and her crew have created this special day for us.
My name's Dave Setter, I'm a civil engineer and a poet.
I live on the east side of town across the tracks.
And yeah, so we're all, we're all glad to be here.
Thank you, thanks to Apple Box especially for sponsoring not just one, but two, two sessions of the walk.
So thank you so much.
It's going to be my pleasure to introduce three poets to you today, Joyce Jenkins, Gene Powell and Kim Shuck.
Do you pronounce your name Shuck or Shuck?
Shuck, good, good.
And I think we'll just go in that order if it's okay with our, yeah, okay, with our panel.
So Joyce, I guess if you don't mind, you'll be first, I'm going to give a brief introduction here.
So most people know Joyce Jenkins is the editor of Poetry Flash, which is the literary review and calendar.
Among the poetry community, it's simply known as The Flash.
So whenever you hear The Flash, it's kind of like when you hear The Walk, you know exactly what it is if you're a poet.
The Flash is one of the main producers of the Watershed Environmental Poetry Festival, which is coming up Saturday, the 27th in Berkeley.
And I don't know what edition is that in? Is it 14th or 19th as well? 19th. Amazing, yeah.
The Flash received the Litquakes Barbary Coast Award in 2012.
Joyce herself received the Penn Oakland Reginald Lockhead Lifetime Achievement Award in 2006.
Her poetry has appeared in many journals, including Parthenon West Review, Zizewa,
and The Place That Enhabits Us, poems from the San Francisco Bay Watershed, published by our own 16 Rivers Press.
So please join me in welcoming Joyce Jenkins.
Thank you. Thank you so much.
I hope some of you can make it now that you're in the poetry groove.
I hope some of you can make it to Watershed. It's a wonderful day.
We have Kay Ryan and Ann Waldman and Dean Rader, and it's going to be fun, and a jazz band standing up for the earth.
A jazz band standing up for the earth. It's worth coming just to see that.
Okay, I'm going to start with my own kind of We Are Nature Berkeley poem.
Peyote poem two. Each day dawns as a seed, night inside the day, pearl inside the orchid, the smooth wall inside the cave, seabed slick with moisture, the sharp scent of oxygen made by the algae and the mud mixed with pigeon scat,
the wild parrot's pirouette across the sky from tree to tree, wheeling and screeching their homage to free air and the pull of tides.
Every step we take a wonder, the ground is strewn with microscopic miracles, little broken mirrors reflecting sky, one vibration, one oscillation, one EKG of shoreline, of star nursery nebulae cloud, our minds dancing on the same rope line,
up and down like a rodeo lasso, then flat on the floor. Inside the sexual oyster, we swoon.
Okay, I'm going to do a piece about Detroit where I grew up. It's called Joy Road, which is an actual road that runs through Joy Road.
No organism can afford to be conscious of matters with which it could deal at unconscious levels, Gregory Bateson. In summer, the song sings itself, William Carlos Williams.
Joy Road is Two Mile Road, part of the 1785 Detroit land ordinance. It runs from east to west.
Memory explained, sweet honey poured on wounds to seal out air, promote healing. A breeze from the window threatens to blow out a strobe like candle.
It gleams through thick night, flickers the roadway faintly, rhythmically, far away stars, ghost ships, ancient internal pressing.
We drive on and on from pillar to post, ponging miles and miles of gasless dark into our future, joined in our fears, driving a cardboard car nailed to the stage.
I love you. Ran out of gas on a west coast stabbed by moonlight, as bright as the night, custer attacked, tree moon shadows, silver unstable ground, rocks and carrion rear over the road, dead deer draped the highway, lungs of the world, hacking, hacking, redwoods, redwoods.
Who can tell what to do in such circumstance? Lives layer like years of translucent wallpaper. The clock runs by us, stopping at the horror, I tell you, and yet we breathe.
I can't tell you now why the radio plays or my nerves still bother to transmit sensation. Take joy to the airport. The road to joy is joy.
You are not here. Rocks are no color in the fog. It's all just a careful bowl of soup, trip flung into air, electricity, an eternal surprise.
It's joy road. The road to joy is joy. The turning globe, gash of earth covered with angel wing. Who can tell how vast the shadow behind night clouds? How deep the silent ocean trench breathes sea?
What lights the unknown cavern, the posthumously phosphorus genius brain and its green formaldehyde bath? A shroud, a body bag made out of light.
Above the silent roadside porches, vacuum tubes sewn dormant in attic dust, weight to combust, longing for what?
He tells me about joy road. His high school was on joy road, the one he was afraid to go to, except when he slept on its snowy roof in the triangle exhale of the heating vent.
Hopes, fish and chips, dope house, joy road, heroin industries run by the neighborhood's finest. The clinic where his mother worked, where his little brother took him, blasted nose and head, raging cocaine sores.
He picked up pizza and pierogi for the kids, his brother and sister, followed the dotted line east to danger, then west to freedom in a circle around the cul-de-sac.
Make it easy for the same cop who waits for you at both ends. Put the toolboxes in front of the door, keep your medicine on the glass coffee table.
The high cost of living ain't nothing to the cost of living high, says Hepatitis C, in a wide brim Panama with a feather.
Always make sure your shoes are shined, said his grand-pop on joy road, his pop-drawn bam through the window of Grandie Ballroom, home of big band dancing, then big brother in the holding company.
Janice Joplin weeping as she held the note while Poppy played the horses, almost lost the house.
He was a proud door-to-door salesman. You grandson got the gift of tool and dye, and grandma wore her green mink, green bathrobe over her clothes.
You strung her canned ham like a ruby on a pendant, awarded for safekeeping to a new family member at Christmas every year.
Tell me about being afraid to go home as you drive past the play-by-play lounge.
Standing under a streetlight, fury rose off me like steam. You brought me to your pal's drunk mother's garage, and she kicked us out.
Your eyes dead, no apology, no response. Your spirit still curled up on the high school roof.
Baby harmonica, wedding ring, swinging from a fine gold chain. Never thought you owed me. I was wrong.
No sidewalks in car land, but liquor on the corner, joy riding like a dew drop on a blade, ice skating on a chlorophyll pearl.
Roads wrap around it from past to present, east to west, from there to here, like copper wire, making a battery, sending out energy, a beacon.
Stunned breast, pops unbidden out of halter top on the way from the reaching cooler.
I'm seventeen. The cops think I'm a professional streetwalker, that is.
Crews up, shine a light, ask the price. It's joy rogue. The road is joy.
Bus line, endless wait, sitting on a curb at the corner gas station. Innocence lost on the way to the bridal shower.
Never made it, just as well. The wedding, a total disaster. Teenagers making out with partners chosen by roulette.
Parents' marriages melting down in the hissing cauldron of the shape-shifting sixties.
I never got back to you. I never found you. If I leaned you step back again, your eyes haunted,
furtive, step back into darkness, untouchable behind the wall, behind the veil, hiding to sleep on the roof behind the vent.
It's warm air, marking the small space of safe. No one would find you safe and calm, lonely but safe, the stars.
Little marionettes, our strings were pulled. The forces set in motion, pushed us apart.
A huge magnetic field, polarized and blind as a one-eyed storm.
Dope house in the sky, joy rode. The road to joy is joy. Drifting through lush suburban park,
to grayed red brick of city, feathery greens and fennel in the licorice air.
I don't know if we were married. I don't remember the past. Better I should think of you in summer,
when others have gone to bed. After the golden light lifts the hills. Somewhere, gravity thrashing.
You are tossing your head like a fine young colt.
So just one more short one and thank you so much for your patience and listening.
And this is the scroll. You remember, Kerouac wrote on the road on a continuous roll
and locked himself in the bathroom to do it. Only quiet place, I'm sure you could find.
This is about in Tosca's, before it went she-she. The scroll was laid out for sale on the pool
table. It was being auctioned by Southbees. The scroll. Kerouac's roll of typing paper.
His original road trip through American autumn recreated as he hunched over bathroom tiles.
Majestic pack tossed on its back. Unfurled heart at rest. 50 years later, under plexiglass at Tosca's.
Traced in graphite veins with the soft gray pencil, Kerouac crossed out the part about
Lucian Carr marrying the African princess, ten kids, and the part about playing the horses with
his father all crossed out. The novel we know on the road begins with lost love. First thought,
best thought, its spontaneous true prose begins. After the death of my father or words to that
effect, lost the real trigger. The terrible death, what he saw, what I saw, worse than what we could
experience ourselves. We wish it were us than it is, then we take it back in the pit of night.
That was the mystery that Kerouac sought. A rakish Buddha with Catholic taste. Scroll,
the scroll, tracing carbon veins. Years later, he's loaded. Stands at the beach. Big sir,
its amber parchment festooning his arms. Doves diving through.
Thank you, Jerry and Bill and everybody, Bill Bartonau and Jerry for keeping the Petaluma
portrait going. All right, great. So we have a little bit of a Detroit connection as we are
about to hear.
