San Francisco International Poetry Festival

I have just spent the last four days going to the San Francisco International Poetry Festival. Which included the best poets from all over the world...Russia, Israel, Italy, France, The Philippines, Ecuador, Palastine, Wales, Austria, Sweden, Haiti, Zimbabwe, Bangladesh, Vioetnam, Nigeria, Mexico China, Nicaragua and USA. Jack Hirschman of S.F. put this showing together with S.F. Library and Friends of Poets, and many others. It was a feast of poetry so rich that you were left wondering if you could digest all of those words. I told my sister, I felt like I had not only eaten not just a piece of rich cheesecake, but the whole pie. I didn't hold up to the very end which was a closing party at 7:00 o'clock the last night.
I enjoyed so much the documentry on Jack Hirschman on the first night that, they said, had been six years in the making. It was called THE RED POET. It is a must see when it come out at theatres. This movie made me think there should be millions of men like Jack Hirshman to make a better world. They touched on the many areas of his life and left you wanting more.
The second and third night, at The Palace, each poet, of over 25 poets, read in their own language and the poems were displayed in English on the large screen behind him or her. Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Diane DePrima, current poet laureate of S.F started the reading the first night. There was many different subject, styles and deliveries... from shy, beautiful voices, humorous, antimated, angry, sad, touching, indignant to the final booming deliver of Jack Hirshman. As I said, a feast of poetry.
During the days poets read at libraries in North Beach, Richmond and The Mission and on the forth day they had what they called a Poetry Crawl going from Kerouac Alley, to Cafe Trieste
to Beat Museum changing poets every two hours. I spent most of my time at the Beat Museum where my sculptures of poets, Harold Norse, Lawrence Farlinghette, Jack Micheline and A.D. Winans are displayed. Jerry, the owner introduced me to so many people, that I can't remember all their names and he invited me upstairs to eat with the poets. I am going to add my head of Robinson Jeffers to my heads of poets there. Everyone needs to see Jerry collection of wonderful Beat memorabilia in North Beach.
Someone else will have to tell about the poets closing party. I am sorry I missed it now, but I had to go home, rest and digest.

This is one of the poem Jack read. When I told him how much I like it, he got it right out and gave it to me for my sister, Gerry. Somehow I heard this poem as being against abortion, but it is really about the children in the Middle East. I guess it is because my sister Gerry is always yelling passionately in much the same way about the aborted children. I should have known a man would not go up against pro-choicer like that.
I still love the poem... Very strong. And it could be about an aborted David.

THE CHILDREN

allover will remember
their legs their arms
the amputated spaces
will be nothing branded
into their little souls,
never to forget, Israel,
you shattered their vessels
with your gunfire, shit on
the word, said fuck you
to the fetus in the womb.

You not they pissed on
your own wholly unholy
tetragramaton, its letters
a fraud and a fake
I wish I could feel you
hand grenades in you mug.
I want to stuff dead children
into you eyes, lovers of learning
lies.

May selah be broken
in your mouth, may amen
never find chapter and verse,
may your food turn into
the gangrenous limbs of the
children you've felled
those little trees of sparks.
You've killed David over
and over, you star of death.

O aliyah, how low!

O victory of defeat!

O stones growing in
the clenches of fists
enraged,

against you,
you rattler of bones!
---Jach Hirschman