If you could teach your soul to speak
“Poetry, at its best, is the language your soul would speak if you could teach your soul to speak.”
I went to San Franciso in August
I went to 1) see the Ruth Asawa retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and 2) visit my friend who lives on Henry Street
This friend who lives on Henry Street is a friend I’ve known a great many years. We went to City Lights Books the first night and - gasp - up the stairs to the POETRY ROOM. Like a love starved person, I have recently been seriously coming to believe these things did not exist any more. (Books, poetry, the cool air coming in off the bay.) I found this book of poems by Jim Harrison and was nearly in tears to be sitting in an old school indie bookstore reading his words.
My friend lives in a beautiful neighborhood in a rent controlled apartment and keeps some of my past work in the open, like they are treasures. On one of the bookshelves: this poetry choose your own adventure handmade book I constructed long ago called ‘tree’ (look how artfully it blends with the other elements of decor) and this collage postcard tied to the top of a hand bound one poem book that was never opened, just placed like that on the coffee table.
I had a day on my own to wander around and again nearly in tears as I went into more random bookstores containing poetry books and stores with a great variety inks and Japanese papers and well curated home goods. Swooning, so inspired.
The Ruth Asawa exhibit was the luminous center of the trip: to walk through these rooms filled with her lifetime of work. Most notably, she transformed ordinary wire into suspended, looped forms -“drawings in space” - that hold light, shadow, and the biomorphic rhythms of nature. These sculptures and her other works were extraordinary. That she was an Asian-American woman in San Francisco made this even more personally meaningful to me.
