T H E D I S T A N C E S and / or C I T I E S

You can teach the young nothing
—Charles Olson, "The Distances"

Cities located near waterways have always been my preferred locales for living in and loitering around. I like to walk about and have something to look at, a nearby waterway always guarantees there'll be a bit of activity of some sort at work. The natural play of wind mixing with changes in light as fog passes through or clouds hover and the bantering cadence of some sort of waterfowl or this or that other creature going about some bit of murky business. There's always seeming to be plenty to observe.

During my early years in San Francisco, a favorite prowl I developed a habitual following of was a stroll north up Polk Street from Civic Center to the bay at Aquatic Park. This walk begins more or less at the city's center, the gold atop City Hall's dome sparkling in the changing sunlight. As you start up Polk you skirt the edges of the Tenderloin district, where the homeless and illicit drug users are the regular habitués. These blocks of the street have historically been cruising ground for male prostitutes and transexuals out for a night in a friendly neighborhood bar. It's much changed these days, tender few of the same or similar bars remain and although the street life is still rather in tune at times, nearly all the once abundant used bookstores are gone and weekends the tech-employed twenty-somethings are about all day long.

The current debate on Polk is between widened bike lanes and the merchant-desired parking spaces not only for their customers but also delivery trucks supplying needed goods and services. Last I heard City Hall wasn't coming firmly down on either side only worsening the situation as a result. As you move along the street the bars become only more alike, resembling the frivolous dozens of others dominating the city these days, catering to an ever young financially upward moving crowd. Of course I too was a young bar-goer when I first took to Polk but my bar scene back then tended towards late night. Now on many a Saturday, especially whenever there's observation of a holiday, such as the observation of St Paddy's the Saturday before 3/17 rather than the day itself or the dreaded Santa/Elf flirt-a-thon Saturday in December, the sidewalks are full of the scantily dressed and drunken, often beginning as early as noon. It rather distracts from one's walking.

In coming years all of Polk will no doubt be engulfed along with the rest of the city in this new social adventure. I'm not overly lamenting it. Just taking note. What drew me to Polk originally was its relative narrowness and seeming abundance of small cafes, coffee shops, eateries, and bookstores mixed in with this or that random shop full of odd bits of knick-knack. It had a decidedly different feeling from other streets in the city, more East Coast somehow. There's a wig store along Polk, just past Sutter aways, into which I'd never been before, but the other week happened to find myself. It caters primarily to drag queens. Not too surprisingly the owner mentioned they were having to move and in the midst of lease negotiations at a new spot over on Jones Street or so thereabout.

A short time after having commenced my more or less weekly habit of hitting up Polk I learned of poet Jack Spicer's time living just off the street and how many an early afternoon he would walk it himself down from his apartment on California Street to Aquatic Park at the end. As has become rather infamously well known and mythic seeming behavior to many a young poet, Spicer would lounge on the grass with a greasy sandwich and perhaps sipping from a bagged beer or bit of brandy while listening to baseball on the radio. I began, like many others would and no doubt shall continue, to imagine myself joining him in like spirit. Afterwards I took up wandering over to North Beach, hazardously aware to avoid the busier tourist-drenched streets near Pier 49. After passing through Washington Square Park I'd find a bar before or after visiting some bookstores, including City Lights along with the many used ones now likewise disappeared from the neighborhood as have those on Polk.

Sidling up to the bar, as in the opening lines of Spicer's poem "A Poem For Dada Day At The Place April 1, 1958" I'd find "The bartender / Has eyes the color of ripe apricots" as I ordered some bourbon and then found myself a table. I'd flip through whatever book I had found as I had rambled about, swimming along with the words, sometimes working out lines for a new poem of my own as I went. Likelier than not I'd soon feel uncertain about the bartender's thoughts, along with those of others drinking around me, how if I were to engage them they'd turn out to be less than understanding, as Spicer goes on to declare at the end of his "Poem for Dada" just like "every bastard that does not cry / When he reads this poem."

These solo afternoon jaunts were my introduction to discovering a path towards writing poems not consumed by my own pre-set concerns and expectations. Floating in my self-conscious reverie I nonetheless began to feel an opening up to experience, guided by forces beyond my immediate control. It was a warm sensation crossing beyond any previous state I'd known. It brought me to an openness towards approaching the writing of a poem. Where, as Spicer describes in his Vancouver lecture "Dictation and a 'Textbook of Poetry'"

But what you want to say—the business of the wanting coming from Outside, like it wants five dollars being ten dollars, that kind of want—is the real thing, the thing that you didn’t want to say in terms of your own ego, in terms of your image, in terms of your life, in terms of everything.

I begin to identify with Spicer's position. It had the feeling of becoming inducted into an order of Poetry well beyond one's self.

This sensibility towards Poetry gathered from my early years in San Francisco remains with me to this day. Since my partner Ava and I now live near Polk just a block and a half down Ellis Street, located a few blocks up from Civic Center, I no longer have to make it a special trip to get to Polk. I'm on the street nearly every day, often in the morning walking down to catch the 5 Fulton bus up to work at the University of San Francisco. So a walk along Polk is no longer a matter of incorporating it into a full day's outing and the street remains as ever a favorite route of mine to get to North Beach via the Broadway tunnel.

Many a weekend Ava and I will walk down to Aquatic Park and onto the pier jutting out in a perfect curve into the bay. I've forever cherished that grandiose 360 degree panoramic view wrapping as the eye moves in a sweeping motion from the West tending North and then East about all the North Bay in one dramatic circular spin: from Presidio to the Golden Gate Bridge onwards to the Marin Headlands, Sausalito, Alcatraz, Angel Island, the bay edges of Richmond, CA, to little city towers of Berkeley, then downtown Oakland's and back cross the Bay Bridge leading the eye over to Treasure Island until landing upon Coit Tower, the hills of North Beach and the Russian Hill neighborhood which looms above Polk as it descends down to Ghirardelli Square overlooking Aquatic park. Here's even a quick video from off Youtube:

The pier has long been losing chunks of cement into the bay due to to natural wear and tear from exposure to the elements. In recent years the city has put up a small black metal gate rail of sorts blocking off access to the majority of the bay-side of the pier. They've also fenced it off in order to lock it up whenever there's fireworks over the bay out of fear that too large of a viewing crowd standing out over the bay might lead to the pier's collapse. Having the gate go up was a real drag as it blocks easy access to the majority of large high backed cement benches, more like mini-bunkers, within which many an afternoon I used to set myself up with a book, some coffee, and perhaps a pocket of whiskey. The gated rail has however proved itself none too long lasting in face of exposure to the salty mist and fog swirling around from off the ocean and bay water. All along it's length the bottom is rusting away, sometimes falling apart in whole sections to leave the bars dangling without an attachment at base.

Ava was delighted to discover this potential material for art works just lying at hand. Much of the material for many of the pieces she's completed in recent years came from off the small plot of land where my parents live in the Sierra foothills, found in long abandoned scrap piles left by the previous owner. One afternoon down at the pier she began gathering a good amount of the rusted metal bits lying about and we went back out again a few weeks later and gathered some more. There's some particularly fine looking square segments from where the vertical bars meet the base of the gate that tend to fall off nicely. We're now awaiting nature to do her part deteriorating away at the gate some more before we go back for more.

From Louise Nevelson's practices in New York City, gathering wood and other debris to create her sculpture:

to the California local assemblages of George Herms:

Locating material for art in such fashion has ready precedence. Not that Ava's particularly aware of it, or pays it much mind. The creation of her art emerges from out a compulsion she just feels well up inside. She always recognizes by how a material looks and feels whether it's right or not for a particular work. These afternoons out on the pier with her gathering these bits of metal have left me feeling terrific, stoked to be interacting with an old haunt in a new way.

In other cities I've lived in bridge walking over a river has always brought me closest to the associations I hold dear with Polk and the Aquatic Park pier. In Boston especially, even though I was really just a teenage transient only living there for a single academic year of study at Boston University. My teenage jaunts across the Charles River first lit manners of perception which I continue expand upon and draw from for writing. Crossing over to Cambridge on one bridge by foot, or more often skateboard, to then return back across another further down, brought my first experiences of looking at a city and city buildings from differing angles, observing how the views altered how the light played against the various shapes and heights.

Walking beside water as a city with all its noises and activity falls away behind, I'm always struck with a bit of giddy wonder at the monumental moment of just being present to bear witness to the vastness of humankind's ongoing endeavor set against the natural order of the land's immensely open geography. Cities test artists against themselves: the individual spirit and the collective spirit; the historical sense alongside that contemporary, pushing upon the imagination.

The poem, the work of art, seeks to give response to the energetic spasm of the occasion. I hold poet Paul Blackburn's The Cities as but one example among numberless others which capture the freshness and intensity of the urban experience. How often when at my walks and other ventures round about many a city have I recalled the closing line of his poem "Brooklyn Narcissus" with its bare insistence of one's self set in grime: "The dirty window gives me back my face."