East Bay Poetry Summit

method of loci
To write about the East Bay Poetry Summit is to feel like the ancient poet Simonides
trying to remember the identities of all the partygoers after the banquet hall has
collapsed on their heads.

Unlike Simonides, however, I have not invented the third note of the lyre, nor have I
invented four letters of the alphabet, nor have I invented the form of victory poems,
and also unlike him I am not trying to reconstruct the faces of the dead in that
glittering moment before their ruin.

I have been trying, in the manner of Simonides, to build a memory-palace to recall

the faces of whoever is the opposite of what Simonides had to remember (the dead).
The problem is to say “the opposite of the dead” is only the living, and whatever we
were doing seemed more than “life.” And while the opposite of the fallen is the
“risen” or “ascendant” or “transcendent,” who wants to be up the clouds with the
saints and obedient idiots?

As I told someone the night of some party in some starry darkness, that for this
heaven in life, we will not escape hell.

NOT IN HELL YET, I remind myself, though no longer in that heaven

and then I think -- what is it I must remember? What is the opposite of crushed?

Unlike Simonides’ partygoers, we weren’t disfigured by architecture: we, did,

however, all look a little unusually animal with a moment of soft life in all of this
hard one. And what kind of memory palace does one make then for this heaven-to-
deny-us-heaven -- the “East Bay” in its moment of poets?

Is it a memory palace in the shape of what poet Lindsey Boldt called a “temporary
awesomeness zone?”

“tomorrow I will join the poets”

I kept walking around green California wondering what the inner life of the
Californian is like, wondering how they get anything done without freezes,
wondering how the geraniums could do that, wondering how the verbena could do
that, wondering how the 4 o’clocks could do that, wondering how the lavender could
do that.

I sat outside my friend and host Laura’s place and wondered how the bees could do
that (be a million bees) (in the purple flowers). Later I would think this of the people
in California: how do they do that, the hundred and fifty names of the people of
California who I should, and if I were a Simonides, would, tell you, how does bill
luoma juliana spahr tisa bryant jen hofer joshua clover david brazil sara larsen alli warren
brandon brown oki sogumi wendy trevino kevin killian andrew kenower jasper bernes chris
chen brian ang jack frost erica stati michael nicoloff sam giles rob halpern do that?

I walked to Oki Sogumi’s place through many startling contrasts of Oakland but
wondered about plants the whole time. We were locked at first, but that was a good
thing, because once in, how do you leave? I was in the seductive perfect place full of
sun watching the machines crush scrap metal and going over the political score till
Jasper Bernes picked me up for hamburgers and crisis theory, which Tim Kreiner
taught in a crowded room at the Public School while 8 to 11 “hackers” had
“cocktails” nosily outside of it. After that, there was a party at Wendy Trevino’s full
of not-poets or poets&commun/arch/ists.

At the party there were words on the visualizer projected on the wall like "fuck the
police" and "fire to the prisons" and "never be alone again" and "long live the
commune" and “electro-communism.” I stood in marvel at the words moving to the
music when this person came up to me and said "you are Anne Boyer" to which I
always am tempted to answer "unfortunately," and he said "how is the poetry
summit?" to which I said "I don't know yet. But tomorrow I will join the poets." The
person, Ian, who likes to read some of our poetry, said something like ‘tomorrow I
will join the poets' is such an optimistic thing to say. We both then wanted
"tomorrow I will join the poets" projected on the wall along with "this is what a
communist party looks like" and "death to the pigs."

Later my new brilliant poet friend Maged Zaher remarked that no one would ever
say “tomorrow I will join the painters” or –

And as he said, we poets don’t have much, but we do at least have this.

And I knew that if the poets had tomorrow, it was the thing I wanted everyone to
have/ that we could all be them.

the places I saw dancing occur

These were the places I saw dancing occur

1. at karaoke
2. at the communist party
3. at woolsley
4. at that bar (twice, and in two to three different places)
5. on the roof at buuck’s
6. on the porch at buuck’s
7. in the yard at buuck’s
8. on chairs at buuck’s

The songs we danced to included Sade (reluctantly), Prince’s Kiss, MIA’s Bad Girls,
Prince’s Kiss (again), and Missy’s Work It. The songs we sang included My Favorite
Things, It’s a Hard Knock Life, Me and Bobby McGee, and Let’s Get it On.

And all of this (the dancing and everything like dancing, to include the food, the
drinks, the poetry, the singing, the softball, the embracing, the gossiping, the
analyzing, the laughing, the charm, the caring for each other) happened in a
structure which was made by the people, only, with no institutional support, no rich
patrons -- so all the sofas, beds, car rides, cups of coffee, drinks and food by the
people, and all the sound systems, living rooms, back yards and free schools by the
people, and all the kind emails, crying eyes, singing voices, dancing by the people too
-- the poetry also.

There were also the people weeping and the people embracing and the people in little
orgy clusters and the people keeping each other safe and the people making each
other laugh and the work which like Bhanu Kapil’s and Dolores Delorante’s
threatened not to collapse the building on our head but raise the building into the
future (which is the future of women and girls) so all of the house on Woolsey, the
hundreds of people inside and out of it, would always there, in the future (which is
the future of women and girls), ahead of ourselves, remain. And I wrote this then,
on Facebook, that after that reading --

“of course the cops had to come because the world had exceeded its quotient
of allowable beauty, but then seeing a mason jar, one of them broke into a
mason handshake, as if under some breton-ian spell, and though the party
was forced inside, that mostly meant walking into a living room in which
many of my favorite poets were all slightly head-banging to black sabbath and
staring at what appeared to be an invisible screen”

There was a kind of extraordinary generosity and beauty and cheer and cunning like
in the poetry of Maged Zaher and Sue Landers and Frank Sherlock and John Coletti
and Jenn McCreary and Matt Longabucco and Anna Vitale, and there was so much
wonder of spending time with (insert every name I cannot reconstruct), and there
was a moment a couple days later in which we all sang around Buuck’s piano till the
end.

a small and interesting disaster

I kept saying we must have a disaster, but that it should be a small and interesting
one, with which we could leave with as little injury as possible. Like many people, I
was hoping this was not a disaster of a floor collapsing, and not a disaster of a fiery
inferno in which the best minds of our generation would turn to ash, and not a
disaster of a person falling from a height. It was not a disaster of
weight/fire/gravity/drunkenness. Instead it was a “disaster as poem.”

This disaster was the now semi-infamous cop-apologist poem by a person I didn’t
know or know of-- a poem so painful that throughout the audience, we stang and
ached with boredom and anger and pain and wtf and bored wtf and bored anger and
bored pain and feelings of hurt or confusion for our friends and the world that
anyone would do this to a community of people when so many had experienced
direct violence at the hands of the police/ had experienced indirect violence at the
hands of the police. Every cop apologist is a racist in quasi-humanist clothes. Yet we
sat there, watching this person say these things to us as a “poem,” protected by the
conventions of “poetry.” All of us (but Joshua Clover, who always bravely
consistent, booed) only whispering among ourselves as if we were merely arts
patrons, letting -- in our contained whispering with who we were next to, and even
lukewarmly clapping that she was through --our friends down.

We fell into moments of despair about the un-fettered cop-apologist outbreak

later. Later I thought that we should have done something not just for each other but
also for this thing “poetry,” which if we want to be important, to be more than an
entertainment, must be understood to have stakes important enough to risk social
embarrassment. We were worried and disappointed in our decorousness and
ourselves and wondered how it had happened.

What the reading of the cop-apologist became, aside from our disaster, was, like any
disaster, the thing around may forms of sociality began to coalesce. That we didn’t
react loudly was the source of our worry. We worried worry in small groups and
large, and the worry also became a source of clarity and a school for the study of
future action. Soon out of the worry and clarity came our jokes, and our jokes
became our practice (at saying what needed to be said out loud and in a group) so the
next morning it was unsurprising to find one of the poet softball teams named “Fuck
the Police,” or the group photo in which we practiced it for next time by saying FTP
instead of cheese. Out of our jokes and clarity and plans for future action and
softball team came later in the night our dancing (a dancing made of women,
mostly/with a few exceptions strangely non phallic/ and this moment in which
Jennifer Manzano said to someone while we danced “We are mothers!” as if it was
so marvelous, that here even mothers could be allowed the ecstatic moment). Out of
our dancing together came some beauty and planning, and so to the little wound that
cop-apologist person made upon the community of poets, the community of poets
rushed to the site of it and began to try to fix itself.

And we know what to do now – which is to always behave (in poem & in action)
with the contra-policia poetics of Miguel James:

“My entire Oeuvre is against the police

If I write a Love poem it’s against the police
And if I sing the nakedness of bodies I sing against the police
And if I make this Earth a metaphor I make a metaphor against the police
If I speak wildly in my poems I speak against the police
And if I manage to create a poem it’s against the police
I haven’t written a single word, a verse, a stanza that isn’t against the
police
All my prose is against the police
My entire Oeuvre
 Including this poem
My whole Oeuvre
Is against the police.”

I will never write a word/ read a poem/ sit in a crowd/ go to any city again
without that poem/ will ever do anything but what is against the police.

the landing
On the way home from the summit my plane was caught in a violent, tornadic
thunderstorm and could not land and which made all the passengers feel as if we
were about to die. Again and again we failed to land, and were in terror, and in the
terror we all made friends. A woman next to me sang hymns, and when we finally
landed all the people clapped, but not for the singing / for not dying.

My daughter, upon hearing the story of the plane ride, pointed out that at the very
least the plane ride created a sense of community through what was common
between us (the rough ride). And so, then, too, in the poets’ feelings about the cop
apologist poem, what was common became more so and what we learned that we
held in common is 1) no more bad poetry and 2) no unnecessary decorum and 3)
fuck the police.

I had never been on a plane which tried to land and failed at it so many times, almost
down to earth, then pointing its nose vertically and immediately rising and circling
over the Kansas City. I thought the plane wanted to leave the storm chamber of my
city and go back to the green clutch of poets. I would say finally to my own city (job,
family obligations, landlord, etc.), “sorry, it was physically impossible to land -- the
earth and air repelled me: this home is no longer mine” and through this become one
with California, which so charms me, and where I think I would become an entirely
different, and happy, person.

The storm system my plane was caught in produced two tornados. The first of these
was near my paternal grandmother’s girlhood farm in which she was subjected to a
number of brutalities and horrors, the second of these was in the small town of
Bennington, which was the only physical place I named precisely in the Revolt of
The Peasant Girls – a piece about a rebellion of girls in rural Kansas which I read for
the first time at the summit. Could it have been that in California we poets changed
the weather in the Kansas of my poem? Could it have been my poem and the poets
who heard it who summoned that very precise storm to bring havoc to the place my
poems wished to bring havoc? I later saw a photo of the black fierce twister later
over the green fields of Bennington, which was precisely what my girl-army in my
poem needed but lacked in the moment of the girls’ battle against the gym teachers in
Bennington’s militarized Ford F150s.

It is possible we poets had charmed even the heavens even over a tiny patch of my
girlhood’s earth. And I liked this revenge of the possible.

All weekend a small conversation about charm ran through us like a thread, like how
do we have the charm in our poems, how with this charm poetry becomes immortal,
how do we have the charm in our poems and our persons, how in a time with
uncertain futures the charm in our person is coequal to the charm in our poems
(#nofuture means #noassholes -- no time to waste only perfecting one charm or the
other: we must charm hard), how do we have both charm and devastation, how do
we have both charm and ruin and anger and ferocious imagination and angular or
angry or glittering language, how do we have charm with the right kind of softness
but never the wrong kind of softness like giving up to the scheduled horror of capital,
how do we have charm in a city we can never leave or must always be leaving. And
then, everywhere this weekend, the charms met each other, the charm in poems and
the charm in poets and the charm of city and community and poetry and politics and
landscape coequal and emerging and mixing into new charm/ tomorrow. I wanted
to be a fierce and large cat, to dress in, what my friend Laura and I decided, was an
“inner tiger.” I wanted, when I read, to bleed a river of gold for the poets of the
summit to thank them, to earn my way, and even if it was possible I did leave the
room flooded in bloody gold, looking --even to those who didn’t know this was my
plan --like a large forest animal, it wasn’t return enough.