Previously Unreleased Video Selected From SF Poetry Center Digital Archive Includes Akilah Oliver, Diane di Prima, Al Young, Raúl Zurita, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge

An epigraph by Akilah Oliver (1961–2011) opens an essay published yesterday on Open Space, "Getting Love Right," by Elise Ficarra. "Just a little time, to get love right."

Oliver was among the few voices who resonated for Ficarra as she took on a curatorial project for San Francisco State's Poetry Center--others included Diane di Prima, Al Young, Raúl Zurita, and Mei-mei Berssenbrugge. Selecting from the Poetry Center Digital Archive "was a matter of chance divination," she writes. More from this piece, which features rare video, audio, and thinking through time:

We hear and see the static: video images flickering and breaking down, sirens careening through a poem of roses, a camera stuttering the poet’s words — residue of our shaky, human being-ness. One is forced to think about time. How it loops and folds in on itself. How it is all now again.

Diane di Prima calls forth mythic and political time from when she took up residence in San Francisco in 1968 — “the diggers had just been digging” and poets were reading on the steps of City Hall and from the backs of flatbed trucks. Al Young brings Mexican folk song and political satire in the black oral tradition with O.O. Gabugah “out to smash your bourgeois ass,” as if today were echoing 1974. Mei-mei Berssenbrugge in 2014 invokes the sacred space of no time, speaking from the old McRosky Mattress Factory on Market Street, closing the distance in consciousness between people and plants: both “have in their cells particles of light that can become coherent.”

And then there is intimate time — a time of the body, a time of the body and its passing, a time of memory and “disremembering,” a time in which Akilah Oliver says, one might “realign the possibilities of identity” from “a political or conceptual concept of blackness,” a time in which “this victimization shit is not stable, and the victors either,” a time when Oliver was with us in February 2010, one year before her passing, revealing to us the many ways in which those beyond us live through us asking, “am I now the dead person?” Oliver reminds me that we are in time, of time, and that we need time, “just a little time, to get love right.”

As footnoted, the video clips featured there are all from “unreleased” videos, "a small selection out of approximately 5,000 hours of original recordings housed in The Poetry Center’s American Poetry Archives at San Francisco State University."