As painting is to New York, poetry is to San Francisco: It's sort of our 'Mother Art.' " said Joyce Jenkins, editor of Poetry Flash, the local poetry calendar and one of the country's primary poetry news sources.
As April's National Poetry Month ended, booksellers in the Bay Area were celebrating surprisingly substantial sales of poetry titles; many connected with readings by a stellar lineup including several laureates, a revolutionary, a Beat diva, a child prodigy and of course, the Irishman.
Seamus Heaney and former U.S. poet laureate Robert Hass read to an audience of several thousand at the Marin Center in an event originally organized to celebrate the work of Nobel Prize—winner Czeslaw Milosz. While Milosz was too frail to travel, both poets read from his work and regaled the audience with musings on the existence of God and potatoes.
Book Passage of Marin, co-sponsor of the event, sold nearly 400 poetry titles that evening. Heaney's translation of Beowulf (FSG) was the evening's bestseller, selling 145 hardcover copies and 60 in paperback. Other titles by Heaney and Hass sold around 50 copies each, as did moderator Jane Hirschfield's new book, Given Sugar, Given Salt (HarperCollins).
In a decidedly different venue, Central America's populist muse, Ernesto Cardenal, former Sandinista and onetime minister of culture for Nicaragua, made his first U.S. appearance in 10 years at the San Francisco Women's Building. Sponsored jointly by the Poetry Center at San Francisco State, the Mission Cultural Center and Modern Times Bookstore, he drew an enthusiastic, mostly bilingual crowd of more than 350. Modern Times Bookstore was on hand to sell more than 100 copies of Cardenal's works both in Spanish and English translation. At the reading, Cardenal read (in Spanish) from his autobiography Vida Perdita, which has yet to find an English-language publisher.
Beat diva Diane di Prima drew more than 100 fans to the cramped aisles of City Lights, where she launched her new book, Recollections of My Life as a Woman: The New York Years (Viking). This powerful account of her artistic coming-of-age, as well as the creation of the new American art scene of the '50s and '60s, may not be a poetry book, but it's certainly a poet's book. More than 50 copies of the $30 memoir sold at the reading, which, according to buyer Paul Yamazaki, is a huge sale for his often cost-conscious clientele.
While di Prima retains the crown of local poetry matriarch, it was a maiden muse who made news. Nine-year-old Sahara Sunday Spain, an Oakland native , wrote and illustrated If There Would Be No Light: Poems From My Heart (Harper San Francisco) The hardcover poetry collection, illustrated with Spain's pencil drawings, sold more than 50 copies at each Bay Area bookstores she appeared at throughout the month.
Reader's Books in Sonoma hosted Spain at a reading in which children under 12 were invited to read their own poems. Nearly 60 people attended the event, including teachers and students from several Sonoma schools where the book has been used in classrooms. Reader's Books embraced Poetry Month with several events and a special Poetry in the Window project that brought a new poem—blown up to browsing size—to the front window each day. "We look forward to choosing poems for this event each year," said event coordinator Kathleen Caldwell. "We then feature the books the poems come from on a special sale table, along with the chapbooks of local poets."
Among other innovative events was a Poetry-for-the-People-Reading at A Clean Well-Lighted Place for Books on April 3. Participants were asked to share their favorite poem—by someone other than themselves—and briefly explain why it was a favorite.
"The whole idea was about getting away from the notion of my book of poems and your book of poems," said Wendy Sheanin, the store's event coordinator. "It was about the idea that poetry belongs to all of us"
