North Beach, San Francisco's Steady Diet of Poetry

San Francisco Chronicle columnist Carl Nolte divulges a few of the secrets behind the North Beach branch of the San Francisco Public Library's Tuesday poetry night circle. The weekly event, hosted by Jack Hirschman, honors a featured poet and then invites local poetry lovers to share their own verse. A pizza party, sponsored by the San Francisco Friends of the Public Library, follows. Delightful! Or, as Nolte writes, "Tuesday is poetry night in North Beach, a place that could be a poem in itself." Let's jump in there: 

North Beach is still the heart of San Francisco as it imagines itself to be — a district of big streets, small alleys, restaurants, bars, and a sense that something interesting is around the next corner.

North Beach is also full of memories from a time when the word on the street was always in Italian, and old families made red wine in the basement. Starving artists lived on Telegraph Hill, and you could eat a big dinner for a dollar. Stanton Delaplane remembered it best. “The days were full of sunshine,” he wrote.

The Beats came in the ’50s, and North Beach was packed with coffeehouses, ideas, art and words. It was the time of City Lights, Ginsberg and Kerouac. Even the waiters were poets.

It’s not news that San Francisco has changed, and North Beach with it. But the San Francisco Public Library still believes that North Beach is “the historic literary epicenter of San Francisco.” And so every Tuesday evening at 6:30, we have poetry night at the North Beach branch library. The Friends of the San Francisco Public Library sponsor it. In the best tradition of poetry, it’s free.

A celebrated poet is usually featured. Last week it was Bob Anbian, a man Dusty Dog Reviews calls “a genius ... or a Vesuvian.”

Read on at San Francisco Chronicle.