Introduction:
One Door Closes
Put me last.
Call it the cabooseāthe final car in a train that you donāt want to miss. Maybe youāve run just fast enough to catch up with it and hop aboard as the train pulls out of the station. You grab the end ladder, the one behind the back wheels, and then you are on itā¦but just barely. It was like that when I joined the Berkeley Poets Cooperative. I was on that last car. Iād missed the wild and crazy sixties, the seventies, what I thought must have been the cool, Telegraph Avenue street poetry days. They were history. The year was 1984, and Iām well aware of how fortunate I was to catch the tail end of the Co-opās incredible ride.
Did I mention that I was a zombie at the time? Well, at least that is when I began writing about them. I was wandering through the post-apocalyptic ruin of my still-young life, having lost my newborn daughter. She died in my arms in the hospital. I was living in the East Bay, in Oakland, after dropping outāfirst from the fashion industry, then from the art worldāto start a family. Cruel joke, and the last time I tried that. The only thing standing between the absolute end and me was some volunteer work I was doing for The Hunger Project and a blank book that my husband had wisely given me. I had writers in my family. My grandfather was a Welsh journalist in pre-war Shanghai. My aunt was a screenwriter. One of my uncles was an American war correspondent, and my mother would have liked to have been a poet or maybe a novelistā¦if she didnāt have her hands full with the four children, whom she seemed to like a lot more than her writing. I was encouraged to write, and I loved doing it, but only for school or for pleasure.
In 1984, it had become something more than that. The pages of that blank book would become an empty wasteland I would first puzzle over, then use as the space to create a map back. Iām not sure what provoked me to call up the people who organized the Berkeley Poets Cooperative. Iām certain my hand shook as I dialed the number.
āHello?ā
āHi, this is Gail.ā
āIs this the Berkeley Poets Co-op? I was thinking ofā¦ā
āYes, come on over. Weād love it if you joined us.ā Gail. Does she know that I will always love her for that?
Not everyone was as welcoming as Gail. It didnāt matter. Gail is generous and generative enough to mother a huge tribe. She and Charles, the Co-op founder, lived together, and although they werenāt married at the time, it was immediately clear that these two were very much in love. That love permeated their poems and filled the space around them. To me, tottering as I was on the verge of disintegration, it was manna. They made it a comforting and colorful space, as did Carla and Jamie and Gerry and Elise and Chitra, too, when she briefly joined the group.
Every week I would bring some horrid little poem to the meeting, and the other poets would chop it to bits. I liked that. It suited my frame of mind. I learned to ignore the less than pleasant people in the room, and I did overcome my fear of the BrucesāHawkins and Bostonālong-time members whom I found both brilliant and intimidating.
Fireflies after thunder
for Lowry
Fireflies after thunder:
lights winking on as if
life scattered kissesādandelion-lightā
into the dark cloud damp,
and they have stuck there
on a flypaper of shadow,
on a moment that, like a shade drawn,
counts itself down.
And the moisture rises up,
a handās heel pressing into my cranium.
Fireflies follow, their flickering lightsā
Hatchlings, a contagionātouch of life and death
that I now carry inside me.
I can see why the Co-op thrived for all those years. In general the sessions were thrillingāfull of risk and dread and elation. Charles and Gail were the perfect hosts. Charles is a fantastic editor. Any of us could volunteer to work with him on the BPCW&P anthologies, which I did. I sometimes think of that first experience after all these years of editing books. Charles is a genius. Everyone was opinionated. Not a lesson was wasted. I still donāt understand why more people didnāt seize the opportunity to work with Charles on those projects.
By the time Charles and Gail moved the Co-op to Dana Street, Iād decided to pursue a graduate degree in creative writing at San Francisco State University, so I started studying language poetry with Barrett Watten, contemporary womenās poetry with Kathleen Fraser, and memoir with Michael Rubin. Anne Riceās husband, Stan Rice, was department chair at the time. Stan was a poet and an artist, though I also took a short story class with him. For my oral exams at the end of the program, I chose John Ashbery, whom I interviewed; William Shakespeare, whom I could not possibly interview; and Yukio Mishima, whose work Michael read and studied just so that he could serve as my examiner. I did well. I earned the degree. Not long afterward, Michael died, and I realized how sick he had been when he tackled Mishimaāa complex, darkly driven writerāfor me.
In 1990 the Berkeley Poets Workshop and Press published two chapbooks: the reason for nasturtiums by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni and my first book, The Impossibility of Redemption Is Something We Hadnāt Figured Onāthe last to come out from the Co-op before Gail and Charles moved north to Nevada City. I switched short...
