We would love to hear about local poets who are the shakers and movers of our community, whether they are running a reading series, publishing other authors, teaching or working to build bridges. We are particularly interested in the unsung, unknown, and unpublished, those poets who are active but not drawing the attention of mainstream media.

Lucille Lang Day:
Poet, Scientist, Publisher, Mother, Grandmother, Wünderkind

The title of one of Lucille Lang Day’s books says it all: Wild One. With an adolescence that might have fated her to lifelong poverty and intellectual frustration, the independent spirit and ambition of this Oakland poet forged an incredibly rich life, one to put up against any of your Renaissancy dudes.

Wild One she was: the circumstances of her early life are described with relentless candor in her 2000 book of that name. Married in Reno and pregnant at age 14, she dropped out of school, worked shit jobs, divorced and remarried, then divorced again. She was the “phone girl” at Chicken Delight on MacArthur Boulevard in Oakland, where she took orders and stapled lids to paper plates for take-out meals, not trusted with anything as responsible as handling the food or making change. She went on welfare and returned to school with her mother’s help in rearing her two daughters. Any of these events might have triggered a lifetime of dependency and depression.

I danced on the slanted cellar roof
to make it rattle, and when Uncle Dick
yelled, “Stop!” I climbed the fence and ran
toward the creek, cutting through backyards
and hiding between houses. “Geronimo!”
he called, following with long strides,
“Come back!” I slid down the bank, grabbing
at twigs and horsetails, and crossed quickly,
balancing on stones. One foot on the trunk
of my favorite oak, I pulled myself up
into scaly branches, as Uncle Dick,
hands on hips, approached the creek.
“That child’s a wild one,” he said,
shaking his head. . . .

Something stirred: Day knew she was a writer. Not that she would one day be a writer, but that she was one. “I had no notion of going to school to become a writer.” Inner knowing at a young age results from passion, a word too often, and too simply used, for it denotes strong feeling certainly, but also the strong feeling that springs back from suffering. Resolve, resilience, and passion are qualities of “survivors,“ which Day surely is although this is not how she presents herself. To the contrary, as Director of Berkeley’s famed Hall of Health, as sole proprietor of a small publishing company, Scarlet Tanager Books, and as the author of several books of poetry, Day is a model of success. She is artist and scientist, as well as mother, grandmother, and wife. These accomplishments arrived well beyond her teen-aged pregnancy.

There is something about Day that is reminiscent of Dorothea Lange’s photographs of Depression-era women, migrant farm-workers whose fragile appearances belie an underlying strength. In Day, the strength has been nurtured by an inner stream of self-confidence and grace, an enviable assuredness about what life can hold.    

Day had to drop out of junior high school and didn’t complete the work for her diploma until she was past 17. A biography of Madame Curie inspired her to study the sciences. Eventually, with the help of scholarships and grants and her mother’s willingness to care for her young daughters, Day earned a Ph.D. in science and mathematics education from the University of California Berkeley, but she never lost sight of herself as a poet. Infinities, published in 2002, introduces you to the science-lover that she is.


In her most recent book, The Curvature of Blue, Day develops her inventive segues between science and art and expands to include her interest in social justice, history, and spirituality. For this book, she uses a “collage” technique to incorporate “found” language from science journals, newspapers, the Bible and other literature, mixing in imagery from nature and social experiences.

“I wanted to explore the arc of personal moments more intuitively than logically,” she says.


Set theory says there is
an infinite number
of infinities of different sizes,
but as each leaf curls
and one by one
the petals let go,
I wonder if omega might equal one
and the stars might slow
and dim like fireflies.

No! Let the universe
shrink to a pinhead,
then explode in flames
where possibilities bloom
endlessly again
among blue-striped roses
in new time and space.

In 1999, Day launched Scarlet Tanager Books because she saw the need for small presses that publish poetry and had learned a lot about how to put a book together. To date, Scarlet Tanager has published twelve books: ten are poetry, including a recent work by Zack Rogow (reviewed in this issue).

At Scarlet Tanager, Day has been a one-woman band, finding authors, helping them edit their books, coordinating with typographers and printers, and handling the promotion and distribution of the books she has selected. A labor of love, but definitely a labor, she is taking a break from her heavy production schedule; for now, she is not reviewing manuscripts. Instead she says she wants to focus on her own work and spend time with her daughters and grandchildren.    

At 61, with three grandchildren to cherish and a memoir, poems, essays and stories to write--all on top of a full work schedule--it is understandable that Day might want to take off one of her hats for awhile. I predict it will be back on before long.

By Jannie M. Dresser

Publications by Lucille Lang Day
Books
The Curvature of Blue (2009)
Infinities (2002)
Wild One (2000)
Fire in the Garden (1997)
Self-Portrait with Hand Microscope (1982),
    Winner of the Joseph Henry Jackson Award for poetry as selected by Robert Pinsky, David Littlejohn, and Michael Rubin

Chain Letter (a children’s book, published in 2005)

Chapbooks
God of the Jellyfish (2007)
The Book of Answers (2006)
Lucille Lang Day: Greatest Hits , 1975-2000 (2001)

Scarlet Tanager can be found on the web at: http://www.scarlettanager.com/books.

Poetic Couplet:

Judy Wells and

Dale Jensen

"I hold this to be the highest task of a bond between two people: that each should stand guard over the solitude of the other. . . . a wonderful living side by side can grow up, if they succeed in loving the distance between them which makes it possible for each to see the other whole and against a wide sky!"    --Rainer Maria Rilke*

Inside the front door of the home that Judy Wells and Dale Jensen share in Berkeley, there is a small cardboard cut-out of a black and white Jack Russell. Puppy contemplation is in the works. When they met nearly 20 years ago, both poets were past 40 and childless-by-choice. Wells says “I’m not sure two poets living together with kids is a good idea unless they have good jobs, nannies, and a housekeeper!”

Two poets domestic-partnering? (I’ll no longer use “marriage” until the state applies its privileges equally.) The very idea courts disaster.  Emotionally sensitive, prone to melancholia, prone to substance-use/abuse, impracticality, navel-gazing: dang, got my number! But Wells and Jensen have forged an active creative and social life that seems to include “loving the distance between them" as Rilke prescribed.

Both are Bay Area natives. Jensen was born in Oakland in 1949 and attended Castlemont High School; Wells, a second-generation San Franciscan, grew up in Martinez where she attended St. Catherine’s and Alhambra Union schools. She is the elder of the pair, born in 1944. Between them, they have published 15 books and chapbooks, founded and supported literary ventures, coordinated and hosted several Bay Area reading series, and participated in perhaps as many as a hundred more. On a daily basis, they do all the things one must to sustain sanity and social dependability, with an added emphasis on nurturing their writing practices.  “Living with another poet isn’t just about poetic inspiration,” says Wells, “but includes paying the bills, caring for the house, planning the future, and sharing our books.”

Both started out in pursuit of an academic career. Jensen was well into a Master‘s Degree in Psychology at the University of Toronto but was dismayed by faculty in-fighting; he got his degree and got out, finding work in a factory for awhile, then settling into a 25-year career in the Social Security Administration. Wells was a French major at Stanford, then completed a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature at the University of California Berkeley. She was part of a group of women in the 1970s who pushed for a Women’s Studies Department and more gender balance on the faculty. For the past few years, Wells has taught in a Master’s Program at St. Mary’s College in Moraga, but prior to that she spent years as one of the Bay Area’s “freeway flyers,” part-time instructors in local colleges who work with few benefits, limited representation, and no job security. It inspired her 1991 prose and poetry book, The Parttime Teacher.

Wells and Jensen were fully ensconced in their separate yet bifurcated careers--making a living and living to write--when they first met, at a poetry reading of course. She was coming off a 5-year relationship and wasn’t looking to hook up with "another poet who needed a ride."Jensen was running a reading series at Oakland’s Coffee Mill. Their mutual friend Carla Kandinsky assured Wells that Jensen was not only nice but owned his own house.

Jensen asked her to go see Japanese filmmaker’s Akira Kurosawa’s expressive, autobiographical 1990 film "Dreams." He was looking for someone who was  a writer, or who had a strong interest in poetry. "When you write, you don’t want to be disturbed," he says. He needed a partner who "understood that writing was a priority that had nothing to do with finances." The initial spark led to cohabitation in 1992 and a civil union ten years later.

"Dale and I write in such different ways,” Wells says. Her poetry is in a lyrical and narrative mode while Jensen’s stems from Surrealist/Dada movements, avant-garde and Beat influences, poets he had begun to read in grad school, such as the more accessible Allen Ginsberg, Michael McClure, and Gary Snyder, arriving finally at William S. Burroughs and Patti Smith. Jensen quotes Andrew Joron who has called this experimental group of writers and writings “otherstream.” Wells was inspired by the breakout of  feminist writers in the late 1960s and 1970s, and by poems like “Daddy” by Sylvia Plath and poets Anne Sexton,  Susan Griffin and Judy Grahn. When Wells first heard the type of writing that Jensen was doing, she thought “Oh, my God, what is this?” She didn’t understand it though she says she grew to appreciate it, while Jensen claims that his writing “has gotten more rhythmic because of Judy.”

This difference in writing styles and their critical underpinnings and practice has meant that there is less competition between them than there might have been if they were both pursuing the same literary magazines. Instead, they enjoy the fact that they have introduced each other to writers and have gained appreciation for how the other works. There‘s even a symbiotic affect that spurs on their work: “When I’ve got a reading, and Dale’s sending stuff out, it makes me want to send stuff out, and makes him want to be doing a reading,” Wells says, noting that she was raised in a large family where “there’s always a little looking over at what the other person is doing and saying, ‘maybe I could do that too.’”

Jensen is one of several coordinators of the reading series at Berkeley’s Nefeli Café. This past weekend, both participated in the Berkeley Poetry Festival, and while they often perform in the same venue, they do not do so as a couple.

Jensen writes daily, spinning out poems that may or may not come together in a longer piece. He frequently employs a “cut-up” technique pioneered by British/Canadian writer Brion Gysin in
The Troubles focused on the 1980s and Twisted History explored ideas about history. Wells, on the other hand, works project-by-project, creating poems for a particular manuscript; she excavated her Irish Catholic heritage in Everything Irish (1999); Call Home (2005) dealt with childhood themes, the loss of her mother and relationships with siblings. Most recently, and under the influence of her academic curriculum, she published (1916-1986) and others; the poems are not always themed until he begins to put a book together. His book Little Lulu Talks with Vincent Van Gogh, a collection which posits dialogues between the cartoon character and some of the West's great thinkers and artists.

Since completing his most recent book Oedipus’ First Lover, from Beatitude Press,  Jensen is working on a “non-literal autobiography.” Explaining that his life wasn’t characterized by the traumas and exploits of the stereotypical poet--“I wasn’t a junky, I didn’t live in Sudan waiting for the waters to subside, and I never got into hang gliding"--he is instead exploring the emotional realm of his life using  playful techniques such as knocking off prefixes of words, paring words down to smaller suggestive units of sound, and using spelling tricks to jolt readers and listeners to hear language in a fresh way.

Wells is working on a family history project that will undoubtedly work its way into poems. She is transcribing 150 letters written in the 1860s that were passed down from her ancestor, woman of English descent from Massachusetts who came to California in 1864, married a rancher and started a family. “Since we don’t have the letters that Phebe Dickinson wrote, I have to recreate them.” And, yes, Wells discovered in doing family research, that she has ties to that other Massachusetts Dickinson.