The only good thing left in San Francisco is the North Beach First Friday Poetry Crawl.
It is 2024, and someone hollers rhapsodic into a microphone as a saxophone squeals and a crowd of artists and their admirers snap their fingers. It could be 1964 or 1981 or sometime in the seventies or nineties or last year or next year. This is the persistence, the resistance, the perennial insistence of literary community in the Bay.
The North Beach First Friday Poetry Crawl is a story in four parts.
It begins at City Lights, the bookstore, publisher, and literary habitat for humanity. In an alley adjacent to the shop, Ferlinghetti’s promise of great conversation is inhabited seventy years later, where poet and public still convene to tow the promise and politics of the underground out into the open.
Molded by curators (and Better Ancestors features) Carlos Quinteros III and soledad con carne, the City Lights First Friday Reading Series—which could have long-since calcified into InstitutionTM, which could have existed indelibly within its history of beats and belletrists past—has been brought into the multifarious present. The narrative of this city and City Lights feels shifted: suddenly, the Bay is Fresno, Vallejo, Hunter’s Point. The language is all brown everything: foo, medicina de música y poesía, sonnets about skateboarding and laments for burnt lumpia, diasporic cadences and born-in-the-moment pidgins of emigration/immigration.
It’s still Kerouac Alley, yes. Jack’s spirit of seeking, of spontaneity, of a certain urban spirituality now breathes through a ceremony of passed rope led by Angel Dominguez, in Joseph Rios repping the 559, in Neblinas del Pacífico bringing beat and heat and rhythms of rebellion.
Is it possible? For an hour, there is a sliver of North Beach that acts as a balm for white nonsense. What a coup. Thank you, soledad and Carlos.
Chapter two: gather ‘round at Golden Sardine, a slim dual-story bar of riesling, baguettes, and volumes of verse. It’s officially one of the best wine bars in America, but it is also a poetry bookstore, but it is also a small press, but it is also one of those Third Places that the world insists vanished several lifetimes ago.
Here, Andrew Paul Nelson and Caitlyn Skye Wild somehow erected something new that feels old. The semiotics of tinned fish were wildly different not so long ago—and wine is the color of tangerines now—but boozing and banqueting together over words is timeless.
“It’s not a place to read Dante or something,” Nelson once said, and I have yet to hear Dante on their old-school over-sized mic. What have I heard? I have heard stories of werewolves and disability, of dank-fueled hallucinations, of Black bodies brought to healing by magical realism and medicine women, but no, no Dante. I buy a book of poetry about fuckboi MCs, and a book of poetry about containing/exploding oneself from the space of the car, and book of poetry by Bob Kaufman, because San Francisco.
Yeah, it’s San Francisco so our access to gods is laughably de rigueur. In a corner in a humble room of books and bottles: Barbara Jane Reyes, Kim Addonizio, James Cagney…are they aware? These casual local deities, do they know their own incandescence? I don’t have the courage to gush to their faces, or, rather, I know anything I muster will contain the vapidity of over-eager foppery they’ve heard before, so I slink away to Part Three.
Chairs and such have been set up outside of Macchiarini Creative Design, a small shop of trinkets and jewelry made by hand, the way all things were once made. This next reading series is constructed and carried forth by Jessica Loos, and is one in which racket is clearly welcome and uproar is the order of the evening.
The lineup veers from song to poetry to song again. A chanteuse who may have been plucked, actually, from Nights of Cabiria regales the rows with Italian serenade after which Darius Simpson exhorts us (emphatically, fervently) toward liberation.
The next month a cancionero floats through Argentine folk before closing with a cover of Elvis’ “Blue Christmas.” After that, a poet meanders through printed pages, losing and finding her way in a piece that appropriately ambles through the wonders of entropy.
Loos herself is all splendor and spectacle. When she’s on the mic, she rattles a tambourine as high in the air as she can thrust it. She shouts. She growls. Her poems are trance-like admonitions of injustices and imperialisms large and small.
Where is it that politics live? When city halls have failed us and courtrooms serve primarily to grant power to power, philosophy and action unfurl from the margins: from a half-street behind a bookstore, a watering hole named for the Black American Rimbaud, a gallery of jewel and metalwork, a parklet shadowed by a phallic pillar of white.
That phallic pillar marks the denouement: Coit Tower Poetry Club.
“Have you been to Coit Tower Poetry Club??” I spent the next day breathlessly asking baristas and buskers after my first time. “The vibe is so right.”
The vibe is so obscenely right. At this point in the night there are slurs and stumbles and no microphone. With weeks to go until the solstice, there is also no light. The sun slid past horizon hours ago and so we strain to read under scattershot castings of fluorescence from bordering buildings. The audience and the performers are one and the same, see, tapping in and out of the pavement stage. Each month, a poet is plucked and centered: we will all read from their words before an open mic pops off to close out the Crawl.
Poets flop themselves across lawn and concrete. Everyone’s body language is loose, sprawling, open. Everyone’s language language is loose, sprawling, open. This is poetry from the mare’s nest, doused in mess and abandon. No one’s mawing about their chapbook or a recently signed contract. This is poetry read from bullet journals, phone screens close to shattered, and memory. I’m too clean for this, I think. I wish I were dressed way shittier.
Books are tossed around. Modelos are passed around. Some know the featured poet and have come prepared to read. Some (me) open a page at random and let the gods guide her tongue. Tonight, it is Will Alexander and his language is that of a polysyllabic mad scientist chipping away at oppression with mysticism and metaphor.
“Psychedelics with a thesaurus,” someone shouts with appalling accuracy. Few make it through a poem without at least a minor stutter. It’s only fair: creosote, alloestrophas, rupestral, and hendecasyllabic are a hard ask even if endless lagers weren’t being crushed.
Stutters and stumbles don’t tamper the applause, which is constant and free-flowing. There is praise enough in the world for us all, it says. We are all saints, we are all anointed ones anointing each other. Smith out some words with us, the vibe says. The vibe says: come, be immoderately merry, and bring your whole preposterous self.
Why lie? Smoking is sexy. At Coit Tower, poets light their sticks of nicotine with insouciance, one after another after another after another, with a recklessness I thought was lost to another age. I decide: if you’re not sucking down infinite American Spirits, you’re not doing poetry. Here I am, suddenly finding romanticism in the sordidness of stale smoke. Here I go, descending the steps back out into Little Italy, hoping to lure it along with me; off I flit, hoping that like the words of writers who write to write, it will loiter, last, linger for some bit yet.
Poetry for the sake of poetry. No competition, no professionalism, no propriety. No prizes. But, yes, some measure of glory. The glory of language, the glory of introspection turned declaration, the golden glory—promised, inhabited, extolled—of community.
There are an infinite number of good things left in San Francisco. One of the absurdly good things left in San Francisco is the North Beach First Friday Poetry Crawl.
The North Beach First Friday Poetry Crawl is a part of North Beach First Fridays; the Poetry Crawl returns February 7, 2025 and begins at 5pm at City Lights. For more on upcoming readers and events, follow City Lights Booksellers, Golden Sardine, Macchiarini Creative Design and the Coit Tower Poetry Club.
Thank you for this Mukethe! Looking forward to seeing you at the Tower again. Next month Aimé Césaire. Bravo, bravo
yas négritude always & forever, i will mos def be posted, cheers, cheers<3
the write up lifted me into another space – from past to now and 1st friday to come…