A Day of Poetry

Saturday was a day filled with poetry, not the convoluted kind that touches only the brain, but real poems spoken by real people about our shared world. Ezra Pound is dead. Demetrious Jefferson is alive and so are Collie, Maya and Basho.

Julie's Memorial was touching, teary, heartfelt. It was so good to see Wally's family, all grown up, little 5-year-old Collie now a sophomore in High School in Eugene, and taller than certain religious leaders, beautiful, glowing Maya now an actress in L.A., and Basho holding his baby daughter, together with Wally and Julie's kids and many friends, gathered at the school next to Wally and Julie's Inverness home to tell stories about how everyone misses their Grandma and Aunt and co-worker and wife and irreverent Bad Girl.

It was also so very nice to see a few faces from the Old Tiapos, like Hanky Girl and Beth, and also to go get a bite to eat in Point Reyes Station with Big Blogs and Large Pants and Mistress Domin-nik and J-Wacky. Friends have their own poetry together but they have to see each other to keep setting the bad puns in all the right places.

Later last night, The Great P and The Great D went to the San Francisco War Memorial Opera House, home of Rigoletto and Carmen and The Barber of Seville, for God's Sake, to see nothing less than the Grand Slam Finals of the Northern California Poetry Slam Competition. When they arrived in the Opera House, it was already so crowded with the Hip Hop Generation that Plot and Duck had to keep walking up, and up, and up, and up, one stairway after another, until they found two seats at the very tippy-top of the house, from where each poet's face and body were illuminated on a screen in back of him or her so they would be visible to more than 3,000 paying customers!

One Opera Usher said to Plotnik: "I wish we could get half this many people for the ballet."

Plotnik thought: "Try charging $5 bucks a ticket and see what happens."

These courageous kids! One girl was 19, the others 17 and 18, from San Francisco, Oakland, Hayward, San Leandro, Berkeley. Three out of four were women. Black, white, Asian. The poems were all in Hip Hop cadences, but their subjects were all over the map. The audience shrieked in delight each time a poet rang out a particularly meaningful rhyme, or blasted War. A DJ tossed a few beats after each contestant. By the time Plot and Duck left they'd heard thirty poets and each had something unique to say.

Of course, the best performers scored the best. The girl in green talking about her little brother, the big girl in the white blouse talking about why white women wearing corn rows was such an insult to her (huge cheers of recognition from the audience), the big good looking young man from Berkeley recounting the huge psychological distance between San Pablo Avenue and College Avenue, the lovely woman torn between the career in dance for which she longed and the successful academic career she knew she was going to end up choosing.

At Julie's Memorial, Collie recounted how he and Grandma Julie used to play Pirate, by going into Julie's closet, finding some costume jewelry, and then the two of them would bury it in the backyard. The next morning, or the next time Collie came over, they'd go dig up the jewels. What a nice thing to remember. What a rich poem.