As part of poetry month, Susan Cohen (a fellow poet) and I are orchestrating a reading of poems about Berkeley at the North Branch of the Berkeley Public Library on the afternoon of Saturday, April 25. Gathering poems for the event, I wanted to include something by Robert Duncan, who was a romantic and powerful figure in the poetry scene in the Bay Area in the sixties. Here he is with Denise Levertov, another poet we’re including., along with Ginsberg, Spicer, Robert Hass, Brenda Hillman, Chana Bloch, and others–hard to narrow it down to 20 poems.
Duncan held dawn readings on Mt. Tamalpias and was part of the legendary Six Gallery reading in San Francisco. Larry has a large broadside of his most famous poem, My Mother Would be a Faconress. But this quieter, mysterious poem of his is one of my favorites.
Often I Am Permitted to Return to a Meadow
as if it were a scene made-up by the mind,
that is not mine, but is a made place, Continue reading “Poems of Berkeley”