The BERKELEY POETS WORKSHOP AND PRESS welcomes poetry submitted for publication on its website, http://berkeleypoets.com.

By email, send poems to submitpoetry@berkeleypoets.com.  MS Word, RTF, and plain text are acceptable formats. Send no more than three poems.

By pony express, send mail to:

Berkeley Poets Co-op

293 Glorietta Blvd.

Orinda, CA, 94563.

Fourteen Hills The SFSU Review

Fourteen Hills is the literary magazine published by the Creative Writing Department at San Francisco State University. The current issue is Spring 2009, Vol. 15, No. 2, under the editorial expertise of Lusina hachatryan, Christopher Hayter, Anhvu Buchanan, Charles Rech, Holli Hardy, Amy Glasenapp, Tera Ragan, Neale Jones, Daniel Lichtenberg, Fernando Pujals, Chelsie M. Santillan, and with Matthew Clark Davison serving as faculty advisor. 

You can acquire the zine by visiting their website at www.14hills.net or sending a $9 check or money order to Fourteen Hills, c/o the Creative Writing Department, SFSU, 1600 Holloway Ave., San Francisco, CA 94132. It is also distributed by Small Press Distribution, www.spdbooks.org.

Berkeley's literary engine that could

Small Press Distribution celebrates turning 40

Inside Small Press Distribution's amazing warehouse (photo taken by Geoff Huth)

There is a "Poetry Trading Post" just inside the offices of Small Press Distribution in west Berkeley. Drop by, write a poem, and Laura Moriarty, the organization's deputy director, will invite you to select a book from the wall display . . . for free.

Wait a minute! A poem as a medium of commercial value? Bite me until I awaken, let me fall on the thorn and bleed! But know that this is strictly a tantalizing loss-leader. Just beyond the calmly churning front offices where handsome young men like Clay Banes, sales and marketing manager, Brent Cunningham, operations director, and Zachary Tuck, customer service associate, work quietly in cubicles (yes, women work there too, but being straight, I didn‘t notice them as much), there stands a warehouse with perhaps the largest poetry collection ever gathered in one place.

For those who are finding it excruciantly difficult to locate interesting new poetry titles, SPD is Shangri-La, Mecca, the Holy Grail, and Dante’s Beatrice all rolled into one. People make pilgrimages here from all over the country, indeed the world, and all this time it was right in the Bay Area’s back yard.
  

Geof Huth, a New Yorker originally from Burlingame, recently returned to SPD. “I went in search of poetry, and found it. SPD was filled to the rafters--in this case, literally--with poetry, and poetry of all kinds.” He left with dozens of books, many of them discounted. “Most bookstores,” he says, “hardly carry poetry titles any more, but Berkeley is a poetry-buying mecca.” He sends his good wishes on SPD’s anniversary and thanks them for carrying one of his own titles.
    

On Sunday, April 5th, from noon until 4 p.m., SPD hosted a free and open-to-all 40th anniversary party at their 7th Street office and warehouse, to celebrate their success and to promote their latest goal: getting younger readers hooked on poetry. The “New Lit Generation” readers were featured, including high school students Alex Espinoza and Andrea Lopez, as well as better-known writers Clark Coolidge, Norma Cole, Graham Foust, Tennessee Reed and Erica Lewis. Before the readings, guests could scope out the floor-to-ceiling bookstacks, make discounted purchases, and eat cake.
    

SPD is the nation’s only exclusively literary nonprofit book distributor. Forget your Amazons and questionable Nobles, and put www.spdbooks.org on your toolbar and Delicious bookmark it. Even you, oh single buyer, can purchase directly from The Source. With between 400 and 500 publishers in their stable, 60% of SPD’s titles are books of poems, with the remaining volumes of a more literary--dare I say, intellectual?--bent: fiction, criticism, memoir, and the unclassifiable and rare, such as the two Edmond Jabes books that Zack Tuck was able to quickly find for me. Universities, libraries, teachers and students, independent booksellers and “jobbers” (large book wholesalers such as Blackwells and Baker & Taylor) have learned they can do one-stop-shopping from the twice-yearly SPD catalog and website.
    

While the demise in publishing and independent bookstores have taken some toll on SPD--according to Moriarty, sales have dropped about 15% compared to a 30% drop in the overall book market--she adds cheerily that “fifteen-percent is the new up.“ SPD’s sales are supported in part by universities where literature and poetry continues to be nurtured in English departments and creative writing programs. “Our survival is good, strong,” Moriarty says, because of how the literary community “feeds on itself.” Octavio Paz wrote years ago that poetry has rarely been a mass-supported phenomenon; instead, it remains vibrant and alive due to communities of impassioned and devoted followers who will always seek it out. SPD makes that seeking easier. “Poetry is the genre that the large, commercial publishers most routinely ignore,” says Brent Cunningham, operations manager, “so SPD sees it as the genre most in need of our support and services.”
  

Founded in 1969 by Peter Howard of Serendipity Books and Jack Shoemaker of Sand Dollar, the institution is supported by nine employees, 10 directors, and a number of invaluable volunteers and interns. Jeffrey Lependorf serves as executive director, Moriarty as deputy director. Many of these behind-the-scenes people are poets and writers themselves; Moriarty recently published Ultrtavioleta and has been writing and selling her own books for 20 years.     
    

SPD partners with organizations such as the Council of Literary Magazines and www.abebooks.com to share resources and expand their reach. "New Lit Generation" aims to cultivate readers between the ages of 17 and 25, and a “New Lit Guide” is available to teachers and book-buyers who want titles that appeal to the next generation. The “Poetry Trading Post” visits schools with suitcases full of books to trade for a young poet’s creative work, and some of those poems make it into SPD's twice-yearly catalog.

In addition, to the emphasis on younger readers, SPD is proud of its track-record in making available books by a broad mix of writers from various ethnic and cultural backgrounds. A short perusal of their catalog reveals titles by writers as diverse as Sesshu Foster, Yakov Azriel, artist Chiura Abata, Stephen Kessler, Wafaa Bilal, Leroi Jones, Carol Snow and Stacy Szymaszek.
 

The public is invited to come to Berkeley this coming Sunday to celebrate SPD’s success and lift a glass to its next 40 years. If you can't make it, drop by on some future date, write a mini-masterpiece and turn it in for a free book of poems: there are few places where you could do better and to the extent that you can, it’s because of organizations like Small Press Distribution and their dedicated and friendly staff.

SPD’s mission is to connect readers with writers by providing access to independently published literature; allow esential but underrepresented literary communities to participate fully in the marketplace and in the culture at large through book distribution, information services, and public advocacy programs; and, to nurture an environment in which the literary arts are valued and sustained.
 

Article originally published by Jannie M. Dresser at www.examiner.com, April 5, 2009.

Talent + Teaching + Torah = Albany Poet Mark Taksa

Mark Taksa will read with Oakland poet Rose Black and Poetry Flash editor Richard Silberg on March 4, as part of an ongoing series at Oakland’s First Hebrew Congregation, Temple Sinai in Oakland, 28th Street and Webster. The event takes place at 7:30 and is free, open to the public, and wheelchair accessible.

Mark Taksa met his lovely wife Jan when he arrived for an interview at John Swett High School in Crockett many years ago. She offered him a cup of coffee in the faculty lounge while he waited. Now retired, the couple devote themselves to art and writing, to their family, and to their Jewish community as members of Oakland’s First Hebrew Congregation, Temple Sinai, where he has been involved writing liturgy for the Brotherhood Shabbat program and participating in a poetry reading series, sponsored by the Brotherhood at the Temple.
   
Mark is also the key coordinator keeping the
long-standing Berkeley Poets Workshop going along with Ted Fleischman. Meetings are held at Mark‘s home in Albany every third Thursday of the month and are open to Bay Area poets. His affiliation with the BPC goes back to 1978.

    While still a social science, civics and English high school instructor, he earned an MFA at San Francisco State University. He has published ten chapbooks since 1986, including several that have won awards in national contests. He continued studying poetry in classes taught by Charles Entrekin at John F. Kennedy University in Orinda.

    He has come a very long way from his origins. Born in San Antonio, Texas, where his father was stationed for his military service, he moved with his parents to Manhattan when he was a child; soon after, the family fell apart. His mother was institution-alized in Bellevue Hospital for mental illness and Mark became a ward of the state.

He spent most of his childhood and early adolescence in the Queens County Shelter for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, then four years in an orphanage. At age 16, he matriculated out of the Ottillee Orphanage and had to find work and shelter on his own. For a time, he worked as a messenger boy in New York and attended night school; eventually, he joined the Air Force.

   Taksa started to write as a young man. “There were lots of artists in my family.” His father was involved in political theater in New York, his mother was a painter, his aunt, a ballet dancer, his grandmother, a writer, and his Croatian grandfather was a playwright still quite famous in that country.

  
The Torah at the End of the Train, Taksa’s latest chapbook, won the 2009 Poetica Magazine Annual Chapbook Award and was subsequently published. The poems reflect an imagination that was stimulated by a recent trip to Israel and by his deepening connection to Judaism.

    “I can’t say I had a large theme like ‘truth’ or ‘justice’ in mind,“ Taksa says, “but I wanted to explore my feelings about practicing Judaism and what Judaism means in a world that is mostly not Jewish,” he says. “I wanted also to analyze the feelings of someone living within a particular zone.”

    His poems are often sparked by an image that may ultimately drop away as the poem grows. He cites “The Musician and the Lost Piano” which was triggered by a story he heard someone in his choir recall; the singer’s parents had been in a concentration camp. Taksa also remembered hearing or reading about Jews during the Holocaust who were allowed by the Nazis to take some of their personal property with them as long as they could carry it. The poem expands beyond an opening image of a musician seated in an apartment, listening to ambient street sounds beyond his balcony window until he hears:

Boots march from the plaza and climb to the apartment.
Light dies. The musician hears the voice
that, in a life as dead as a cat stiff in the rainy gutter,
dressed in the uniform that stopped traffic--
and then stopped visiting to sing.

Hard as its boots, the voice told the discarded player
he could escape with the piano, if, before noon,
he proved it was his by playing it.

In the end, however:

All things were cold that morning.
No one helped carry the piano.
   
    Taksa’s poems are exemplary in the “show-don’t-tell” school. He cites the Imagists, such as Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams as influences, along with T.S. Eliot, William Wordsworth and Elizabeth Bishop. Later, he came under the sway of Wallace Stephens, Rusell Edson, and George Oppen.

    “I try to develop a story that carries meaning,” Taksa says, “while using my imagination to create something new with language.” Although the poems take seed with a personal experience, a brush with another person, something overheard or witnessed, the poetic imagination soon takes over.

   “I don’t feel I must directly state what started the poem. I learn something about my own feelings and my understanding of the world,” Taksa says, as the poem progresses, with imagery being the dynamic force.

    Taksa says he is not trying to be obscure in the poems he writes. In fact, he works to make the poems as under-standable, yet as imaginative as possible. But, he also does not  expect that everyone will understand his poems. “Poetry is difficult; if it is too easy, it’s not poetry.”       

--Article by Jannie M.Dresser