The Church of Poetry

From a chapter in The Church of Poetry, by Dane Cervine

POETRY: Think Global, Report Local

For a town the size of Santa Cruz, California, there’s such a wealth of poetry you’d think it was the
gold rush all over again. Situated ninety miles south of San Francisco along the Monterey Bay coast,
few know of its poetic riches outside of this regional enclave. There’s no CNN of Poetry to report
on this, no Anderson Cooper with a 360-degree-view of all the hot spots, poetry tornadoes,
hurricanes of words as he stands in the literary torrent with his orange storm suit, hoody,
microphone. I suspect there’s poetry going on everywhere, literally everywhere. There’s a renaissance
sweeping this world by Word. Where are our reporters?

Jeffrey Brown has worked for the PBS News Hour for more than twenty years, and is currently their
Chief Correspondent for Arts, Culture, and Society. His essay, entitled Reporting Poetry, appeared in
the March 2014 edition of Poetry magazine. We may have found our correspondent, one of them at
least. Through his reporting, I discover that poetry is happening in the Bibliotheque Justin Lherisson in
Carrefour, outside of Port-au-Prince, Haiti. For ten years now—since the latest earthquake, amid
rubble, in Creole and French—these “crazy artists” have come to “meet one another, read their
works, hold classes in writing and painting. Occasionally one of the island’s literary stars will come
for a workshop”. Jeffrey listens, like a good reporter, hears references to “the quake, cholera, hunger,
death, but also to pleasure, fellowship, drinking, and love, love, love.” He asks the reader, “What
happened that day in Carrefour? In one tiny corner of Haiti, men and women gathered together to
tell their histories, their lives, their hopes and joys, anger and sorrows. Poetry happened.”

Poetry happened. Poetry is happening, along with the sense of community it engenders. In places as
diverse as the West Point military academy (where officers in training wrestle with the pathos of war
and peace through the study of poetry); or a high-security Arizona prison (where inmates—white,
Latino, black, former gang members, skinheads—gather to write and listen to poetry). Now, this is
not new-news. But it is ill-reported on: that poetry is occurring in so many diverse
venues—classrooms, bar-rooms, great outdoor no-rooms. Even in other countries, especially in
other countries. Sometimes in secret, given repressive regimes that, ironically, often have the richest
of poetic histories.

An example of this irony was reported in the June 2013 edition of Poetry devoted to landays, a folk
couplet, “an oral and often anonymous scrap of song created by and for mostly illiterate people: the
more than twenty million Pashtun women who span the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan.”
Poetry survives, is kept alive, even by those never allowed to learn to read—because it keeps them
alive. Why isn’t CNN reporting on this? Or the local newspaper?

Robert Bly, so instrumental in bringing a rich vein of Latin American, Middle Eastern, Russian,
Chinese and Japanese poetry to our ears, describes (with a reproving nod toward his American
audience) how you could climb into the backseat of almost any cab in, say, Mexico or Iran, and ask
the cabbie to recite from memory his favorite national poets, and he would. Not here.

But this poetic state-of-affairs seems to be changing—not in terms of Americans improving their
memorization skills, since our attention spans seem to veer towards the microscopic (except for the
potent Spoken Word slammers). It is changing by the sheer number of citizens returning to poetry in
this country, after the long drought since the 1800’s when poets were still a traditional, and integral,
part of the national conversation. Adrienne Rich describes the erosion of the participatory tradition
in the Arts—of living room and parlor recitations—in favor of the professionalism of the poet. The
average citizen lost confidence, as well as invitation, to be involved with poetry in any meaningful
way. So despite the chortling and high-brow derision today toward some of our new far-flung
poetics, it seems this renaissance of poetry is now in full swing.

But we could sure use some more air-time, which is so often bullied by war and beer advertisements.
We could use more reporting. And with the burgeoning billions of human beings increasingly linked
together across this globe by the neural-network of the internet, it may make sense to promote
poetry globally by reporting locally. The current richness and diversity of modern poetics is
happening not only in the proverbial ivory towers—as beautiful as they are—but in the small towns
and out-of-the-way places across this interconnected globe.

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Which brings me back to Santa Cruz, California, our little poetry town—an example of what could
be reported-on if Andrew Cooper, or Jeffrey Brown, were to bring their flashlights and microphones
here.

A friend from work was cleaning out his garage, and knowing I was a poet, decided I might like
some of the old poetry-event posters he’d tucked away from the “golden era” of Santa Cruz poetry
in the 1960’s and 70’s. Of course, I gave him a hard time about such nostalgia—like Woody Allen’s
film Midnight In Paris, it is too easy to miss one’s own golden era by longing only for past ones. Still,
to know something of one’s history is to learn something about one’s self, town, and culture.

So, I unrolled a large poster yellowed like old parchment, announcing a Santa Cruz Poetry Festival as
a benefit for Americans In Mexican Jails (AIMJ), held at the large Civic Auditorium on November 25,
1974, featuring the likes of Gary Snyder, Allen Ginsberg, Charles Bukowski, Laurence Ferlinghetti
and others. It must have been a dandy. There were other treasures from his garage, posters for:
Diane Di Prima at the Kresge College Library at the University of California, Santa Cruz, for 50
cents; a large “Poetry Reading for Dr. Timothy Leary” at the Civic Auditorium, featuring a wide
array of readers that included Morton Marcus, Ferlinghetti, Ken Kesey, Paul Krassner. There were
also broadsides from Green Horse Press entitled, The Trees by Michael Gorman, Bermuda Triangle by
Mark Bristow, North California by Gregory Hall, and more. The posters and broadsides rarely had
more than the day and month listed, though all were from the 1970’s—as though the decade were
the arrival of poetry-heaven itself and needed no other temporal orientation.

Morton Marcus’ large literary memoir, Striking Through The Masks, chronicles from his vantage the
rollicking poetry scene in Santa Cruz during these decades, and beyond. A Cabrillo College
professor and community arts organizer, Marcus includes glimpses into the escapades of George
Hitchcock as publisher of the Santa Cruz based Kayak, begun in 1964 in his rambling three-story
house on Laguna Street. Poets such as W.S. Merwin, David Ignatow, Mark Jarman, and Ray Carver
would engage in “collating parties” to piece the unusual magazine together— sometimes printed on
target-paper from an army shooting range—then mail Kayak out to poets that included international
subscribers in Europe, India, Thailand, and Australia. Marcus began teaching at Cabrillo College in
the 1970’s, and quickly helped organize a poetry series that became somewhat famous, attracting not
only poets from the larger San Francisco Bay region—such as Michael McClure, Diane di Prima,
Jack Gilbert, Ray Carver, Robert Hass, Gary Soto, Al Young, William Everson—but also a “veritable
roll-call of the best American poets of the last half of the twentieth century”, such as Robert Bly,
Charles Simic, Galway Kinnell, Allen Ginsberg, all appearing for a “pitifully small fee”.

Marcus followed this series with readings in downtown Santa Cruz after realizing how many first-
rate and emerging writers lived in the area. Anyone who read “received a meal or two and all the
wine or beer they could drink”, a deal he’d worked out with the owners of the three restaurants
where the readings were held. It was a time of “extraordinary creative energy” in Santa Cruz. Joseph
Stroud was also teaching at Cabrillo, whose later books were praised by W.S. Merwin, published by
Copper Canyon Press, awarded the celebrated Witter Bynner Prize, and a Lannan Literary Award for
Lifetime Achievement. Stroud and Marcus collaborated on readings and events around California,
including the staging of a day-long benefit in Santa Cruz after the 1989 earthquake, called The Great
Santa Cruz Word Quake Benefit that included sixty Santa Cruz writers. The Poetry Show, which they co-
hosted for many years, was started in 1985 at a local community radio station and has continued
through the years in one form or another.

Stephen Kessler, poet, award winning translator, organizer and entrepreneur, also settled in Santa
Cruz and founded a small publishing company called Alcatraz, and in 1986 became the founder and
publisher of a weekly newspaper named The Sun. Stephen staged a number of important readings
featuring dozens of poets; one, called Bombs Away, was a protest against nuclear proliferation;
another celebrated multicultural literature. All drew hundreds of people. After leaving to spend some
years in northern California, Stephen has returned to Santa Cruz to again be part of its literary
fabric.

And then there is Gary Young, a celebrated poet as well as artist and fine printer, who bought
George Hitchcock’s original home in the Santa Cruz mountains. Originally an apprentice to William
Everson at the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC), he continues to pursue life here as both
poet and printer, publishing many books and garnering many awards.

Robert Sward settled here in the 1980’s after ten years in Canada, following the Iowa Writers
workshop. His books continued to be published by Black Moss Press in Canada. Joseph Stroud,
already mentioned, continued to influence local poets immensely, eventually having several books
published by Copper Canyon Press. Another Cabrillo College professor, Joseph McNeilly, helped
found Hummingbird Press, along with Len Anderson, which has gone on to bring a startling range
of Santa Cruz poets into print.

Although the national heyday of poetry in the 1970’s waned a bit in the 80’s and became more
private in the 90’s, Santa Cruz poets continued to write into the new millennium. Along with those
mentioned already, they include Ellen Bass (The Human Line; Like A Beggar; both by Copper Canyon
Press), David Swanger’s Wayne’s College of Beauty (John Ciardi Prize – 2005), along with work by fellow
UCSC professors Charles Atkinson, Tilly Shaw, and others.

Of course, the “City on a Hill” that is the University of California, Santa Cruz, has played its part in
poetry’s regional life here, though national poets such as Nathaniel Mackey (editor of Hambone
magazine and a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets) have often kept a low local profile.
Gary Young, a lecturer at UCSC for many years, has been very active in both the university and local
poetry communities. The Living Writers Series and student-sponsored venues continue to provide a
diverse array of literary and poetic opportunities.

Adrienne Rich, a renowned national poet who settled in Santa Cruz in the 1980’s, continued to
lecture and write here, though also keeping a relatively low local profile, except for judging the
annual National Writers Union poetry contest and giving periodic readings, till her death.

In many ways, the local Santa Cruz poetry landscape has been nurtured not by academia, but by a
number of talented and committed poets leading a wide range of writing groups and workshops.
While the previous history includes a lot of men, women have been no less prominent in nurturing
the local, and national, poetry landscape in the region. Ellen Bass (a current Chancellor of the
Academy of American Poets) is certainly among them, but the list includes Patrice Vecchione,
Maude Meehan, Amber Coverdale Sumrall, and of course, as is the case in Santa Cruz, many, many
others not mentioned.

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In the new millennium, all you had to do was scan the Poetry Santa Cruz (PSC) website for a wide
swath of readings, poets, activities, and workshops. Len Anderson, a fine poet, student of Joseph
Stroud, retired physicist, and co-founder of Hummingbird Press, is also one of the founding
members of the non-profit that, along with arts critic Dennis Morton and the PSC Board, hosted or
co-sponsored more poetry than one could hope to attend—yet people did! The mainstay was the
monthly reading series at Bookshop Santa Cruz (one of the best independent bookstores in the
country), which featured poets from across the country, who often offered a day-long workshop,
and read their work during a radio interview by Dennis Morton. As is the way of things, Poetry
Santa Cruz retired its operations circa 2020 when the pandemic hit, and the founders retired. But as
is also the way of things, new poetry leaders and venues sprung up in their place. More about this
later.

Before the pandemic, there was also the Poet/Speak Open Mic with featured readers at the Santa
Cruz Library; the annual Maude Meehan reading (featuring such luminaries as Jane Hirshfield); the
Morton Marcus annual reading (with recent appearances by Billy Collins and Naomi Shihab Nye); or
the annual High School Poetry Contest— there is always something happening. Workshops by Ellen
Bass, Amber Coverdale Sumrall, Robert Sward, Patrice Vecchione, Carolyn Brigit Flynn, Danusha
Laméris, Magdalena Montagne and her Community Poetry Circle in Watsonville, classes at Cabrillo
College and the University of California, Santa Cruz.

To catch my breath for a moment (adjusting my storm-vest and shaking my flashlight), before the
pandemic there was also The Lost Poets’ Salon monthly at The Bagelry, the Community Reading
Series at the Porter Library, A New Cadence Poetry Series at the Felix Kulpa Gallery, and the
periodic Flor-y-Canto co-hosted by Cabrillo College in Watsonville with featured readers,
performers, and open mic spots. Of course, if you don’t want to stay in Santa Cruz, you could follow
Ellen Bass around the world (literally) as she hosts poetry workshops in Mallorca, Tuscany, British
Columbia, or Big Sur. Or follow Amber Sumrall south to the Camaldoli Hermitage in Big Sur for a
more monastic experience.

Yet another example of Santa Cruz’ diverse approach to promoting poetry has been the annual
Celebrating The Muse reading designed to bring women’s voices front and center. This event has
continued post-pandemic, with new leaders rising to lead it. The very first Muse event was organized
by Gael Roziere and Patrice Vecchione in 1982 as a benefit for the National Festival of Women’s
Theatre.  A few years later Patrice and Amber Coverdale Sumrall began coordinating the series, joined
by Dena Taylor when Patrice moved on to her many other endeavors supporting poetry in the region.
The event proceeds have benefitted numerous organizations serving women in Santa Cruz County,
including Matrix, the Santa Cruz AIDS Project, Women’s Crisis Support, WomenCARE, and
Cabrillo College’s Fast Track to Work program.

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For those who, at this point, are too tired from just listening to this litany of poetic possibilities to
actually attend anything, local residents can always sit in their poetry armchairs and listen to one of
the longest running poetry shows in the country, called, yes, The Poetry Show—hosted for many
years by Dennis Morton (and other co-hosts) on KUSP 88.9 FM (the show was then podcast and
found a new home at KSQD when KUSP finally shut its doors). As a personal aside, I’ve
appreciated Dennis’ commitment to teaching poetry to youth incarcerated in Santa Cruz’ juvenile
detention facility, located in the redwoods up Graham Hill Road. For years, Dennis chose some of
the best youth poetry to send my way for inclusion in an interagency youth report I’d write to the
Board of Supervisors in my role as director of child, youth and family programs for the county’s
Mental Health Department (my other job for over two decades). Poetry in Santa Cruz keeps finding
a way to weave itself into the community.

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With so much going on, Santa Cruz was, oddly enough, slow to establish a formal Poet Laureate
post; finally doing so a few years back with Gary Young holding the first position, followed by
David Swanger, Ellen Bass, Robert Sward, Danusha Laméris, David Sullivan, and as of this writing,
Farnaz Fatemi. By the time you read this, the list, if we’re lucky, will be longer. David Sullivan and I
worked with the Santa Cruz library system and the county to transition the poet laureate selection
process from Poetry Santa Cruz to the libraries, as they’d already done in the city of Watsonville.
New generational energy ever welling-up from the literary watershed.

Indeed, new literary efforts continually sprang to life in Santa Cruz, such as the non-profit Santa
Cruz Writes. Founded by Jori Post, Karen Ackland, and Julia Chiapella, the organization sponsored
the on-line phren-Z literary magazine for local writers and artists, as well as an increasing array of
activities that includes a Young Writers Program, support for local writing groups, the annual
Morton Marcus Poetry award, and much more.

With Jori’s death, some of these activities found a new home at The Catamaran Literary Reader,
founded by Catherine Segurson and located at the Tannery Arts Center. Catamaran itself fosters a
regional and national presence which includes poetry, fiction, essays and full color art from
contributors both local and global. The Tannery also hosted Sam Amico of Middle Earth Editions,
who early on worked with Catherine to produce limited-edition letterpress broadsides of work from
Catamaran, such as poems by Billy Collins, Gary Snyder, Robert Bly, and others.

And already, the local landscape has shifted again—as I write to update this essay—with the
founding of new organizations like The HIVE which has filled the gap left by Poetry Santa Cruz
(and the pandemic) sponsoring live in-person readings again with poets from across the country,
including a range of evocative podcast interviews aired on KSQD. The Writers of Color collective is
bringing new voice, geographical presence, and cultural diversity to all regions of the county, along
with Viz. Inter-Arts, the Xinachtli Journal, and more; the University of California at Santa Cruz is
again offering diverse poetic events along with Cabrillo College; the annual Morton Marcus reading
is securely ensconced at the university and supported by a wide range of local supports. Catamaran,
with the help of Catherine Segurson and Elizabeth McKenzie, sponsors its annual book award and
conducts a week-long writing retreat each year. Things continue to blossom and spread like
gorgeous and unruly wildflowers.

It was auspicious to me that this year, as I attended my first post-pandemic Association of Writers
and Writing Programs (AWP) conference held this 2023 in Seattle, I was waiting in the San José
Mineta International Airport for my flight when I ran into one then another of local Santa Cruz
poets heading there too. And what a talk we had, just waiting for the flight—then later, and all
through the conference when I attended one of the group’s workshops entitled Rhizomatic Literary
Communities: From the Local to the National. The organizer Roxy Power headed up a panel of diverse
local writers including our poet laureate Farnaz Fatemi, Victoria Bañales, Catherine Segurson, and
Dion O’Reilly. They embodied some of the very story I am telling fragments of here, but through
the marvelous metaphor of the rhizome. I culled the following description of the word from
Wikipedia. Originally a term in botany, philosophy—of course—has appropriated it:

In philosophy, a rhizome is a concept in post-structuralism describing a nonlinear network that connects any

point to any other point… Rather than narrativize history and culture, the rhizome presents history and culture

as a map or wide array of attractions and influences with no specific origin or genesis, for a rhizome has no

beginning or end; it is always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo. The planar movement of

the rhizome resists chronology and organization, instead favoring a nomadic system of growth and

propagation.

In a rhizome, culture spreads like the surface of a body of water, spreading towards available spaces or trickling

downwards towards new spaces through fissures and gaps, eroding what is in its way. The surface can be

interrupted and moved, but these disturbances leave no trace, as the water is charged with pressure and

potential to always seek its equilibrium, and thereby establish smooth space.

Rhizomatic thinking is open ended, has no central structure, and is constantly changing.

Which is apropos for contextualizing the very history
I’ve attempted to muster in this essay. Despite any
story’s tendency toward a linear narrative, the truer tale
involves this rhizomatic process which might better be
depicted in image than word. Perhaps like this:

Well, the image doesn’t exactly look like gaggles of
poets, but in a way it does if you’ve a gift for
scraggly imagination.

In botany, the term rhizome
perhaps presages the human substratum of the literary
landscape too.

In botany, a rhizome, from Ancient Greek ῥίζωμα (rhízōma) 'mass of roots'

from ῥιζόω (rhizóō) 'cause to strike

root') is a modified subterranean plant stem that sends out roots

and shoots from its nodes. Rhizomes are also called creeping rootstalks or just rootstalks.

Rhizomes develop from axillary buds and grow horizontally. The rhizome also retains the

ability to allow new shoots to grow upwards…

If a rhizome is separated each piece may be able to give rise to a new plant…

In this spirit, the very essay you are reading now is simply describing one “mass of roots” shooting
out nodes, rootstalks, axillary buds, growing horizontally in inclusive ways with no one particular
group vertically managing the evocative spread. There’s always a new or hidden node that springs up,
tells its own tales.

For instance—thank the gods—there is also a new community of performative and spoken-word
poets in Santa Cruz that initially began to hang around venues such as The Art Bar (renamed The
Dead Cow) in the Tannery Arts Center, venues in continuous poetic flux—like a rhizome. The
Tannery is a joint project of Artspace Projects Inc., the City of Santa Cruz, and the non-profit
Tannery Arts Center at the historic Salz leather tannery site, providing affordable housing, art,
display and performance space. The Art Bar & Café was initially the brainchild of poet Kevin
Devaney, who helped rejuvenate the art-of-the-typewriter by busking poems in downtown Santa Cruz
on his vintage black typewriter. There was a poetry “Word Church” every Monday night with
featured Spoken Word readers from near and far, as well as two sets of open mic opportunities for
the early and late set. They also helped sponsor Santa Cruz’ Slam Team, led by local poetry divas
Queen Jasmine & Raggedy Andy, to a semi-final finish at the 25 th Annual National Poetry Slam held
recently in Oakland, across the bay from where it first began a quarter century ago in San Francisco.
Now that’s something.

After a welcome stretch at the Food Lounge on Center Street, the Word Church moved to the
MacPherson Art Museum (MAH), was often hosted by my son Gabe Kittle-Cervine. Gabe, inspired
by Kevin Devaney, is also an aficionado of the old black Royal typewriter, which his Uncle Stan
found for his birthday in Cincinnati, and which Gabe has taken-to like an ole’ Beat throwback. This
evolving poetry scene and others are often filled with new poets banging away on old typewriters.
What a marvel.

Which perhaps offers me a way to end this meditation on poetry’s recent global and local
proliferation, by bringing it home to the personal: raising a son who, all by himself, found poetry on
a sleepy morning in high school English class when, yes, Allen Ginsberg’s famous poem “Howl” was
dropped into his brain like an atom bomb. He’s never been the same since, much to my delight, and
finished a road trip round California’s public spaces with film-maker friend Jake Cushner, to
document this intersection between poetry, a typewriter, and the world. Appropriately, the film and
photo installation is entitled, Writing A New World, which premiered at the Tannery’s Radius Gallery a
few years back. You can see a marvelous early collaboration between these two, entitled “I Write
Because I Must” – a four-minute film highlighting Gabe’s early typewriter exploits at the Harvard
Square subway station in Boston – by typing-in the title on YouTube’s search function and looking
for his name attached. You’ll see another poetry-smacked young man huddled over a typewriter,
writing poems on the spot just for you. Another bit of poetry-news reporting well worth the look.

Of course, you can now track many of the poets and poems and activities mentioned in this essay by
doing the same: climbing on-board your favorite search-engine, even without a hoody, flashlight, or
microphone. Social media, of course, has now deepened and broadened access to the very poetry
landscape we both celebrate and love to rant about. In a way, it may be the very solution to the
“problem” I posit as the beginning of this essay, in a rhizomatic kind of way.

Perhaps this new generation will be both poet and reporter in this evolving world-space. Which is
just about everything we can hope for, as poets: to be a part of, and engaged with, the given world.
Whether it hails from Haiti or Pakistan, West Point or prison, East coast or West, or the vast
Midwest, even little Santa Cruz. Stay tuned.