A Project of San Francisco Poet Laureate devorah major
January Featured Poet: Katherine Harer
Katharine Harer teaches English and Creative Writing full-time at
Skyline Community College and is the Co-President of the teacher's union for the San Mateo Community College District. She has worked with the
California Poets In The Schools Program since 1978, as a poet-teacher and as Executive Director from 1981-1984, and she's been a California
Arts Council Poet in Residence in two San Francisco high schools. For eight years she ran Small Press Traffic Literary Arts Center. In 1995
Harer won the Slipstream Annual Poetry Award, resulting in the publication of a collection of her work, Hubba Hubba. She has new work
in onthebus and The Throwback as well as poems in several anthologies, The Party Train from New Rivers Press, Ladies Start Your
Engines from Faber and Faber, Welcome To Your Life from Milkweed Editions and 100 Contemporary Baseball Poems from Southern Ilinois
Unversity Press. Harer's poetry has been published in four other small press collections: A Radical Kind of Trust (Si Press, S.F. ), Spring
Cycle (Encanto Press, S.F.), In These Bodies (Moving Parts Press, Santa Cruz) and The Border (Bombshelter Press, L.A.) She is currently
working on a nonfiction baseball book about women who played pro ball in the 1940's and 50's. Katharine is one of the coordinators of the Poetry
& Pizza reading series in downtown San Francisco.
Recommended Books:
- Front Lines, Selected Poems by Jack Hirschman (City Lights Books, 2002)
-- Jack and I were part of a small group that put on cultural/political events in the city during the last Gulf War, and it was his activism and
passion that helped to inspire the poem I wrote on graffiti. It's not easy to write political poems that are beautiful even in their anger;
Jack can do this.
- Jazz, a novel by Toni Morrison (Plume, 1992) -- All of Toni Morrison's books are poetic and visionary. This novel celebrates the streets of
New York without ignoring the everyday tragedies that scar them.
- Selected Odes of Pablo Neruda (U.C. Press, 1990) -- Neruda has always
worked to pry my imagination further and further open. He suffuses his odes to common things, Odas Elementales, with a deep-going respect for
the working people of his country while he celebrates and plays among the tomatoes, socks and wine.
- quilting, poems by Lucille Clifton (BOA editions, 1991) -- I love the
way Lucille Clifton whispers intense necessary words into our ears. She knows how to make a few lines count, and she makes us look again at
those events in history, or pieces of our intimate lives, we might rather turn away from.
- New and Selected Poems, 1974-1994 by Stephen Dunn (W.W. Norton, 1994) --
Stephen Dunn makes me want to sit down and write a poem as soon as I read one of his. He is able to appear casual and conversational even
when he is writing about the most tender and difficult subjects. He's my current favorite poet because of his quiet honesty and self-effacing wisdom.
Why I Like Graffiti
(A personal manifesto) by Katharine Harer
Why I Like Graffiti
(A personal manifesto)
Because we're not supposed to do it
because buildings are holy
billboards precious, walls
worth more than gold
because we're not supposed to do it
touch their buildings, climb their fences, hang like a bird
from their roofs
leave our mark
Because it's there for everyone to see
no museum guards to track you, no fish-eyed lady
collecting your entrance fee to another airless palace
of "legitimate" art no cultural dues to pay
to prove you can look and if you're young and the wrong color and lively
you're asked to leave ushered into the street
where you belong
Because it's out there in the breathable air
framed by the sky and the hussle
curved Hebraic letters of tags
peaceful bombings
murals full-scale pieces mesmerizing fences
charm bracelets across eyesore alleys
nonviolent violence
without laying out a dime to the gods of advertising
right under the noses of the civic censors
late at night on a bicycle a backpack full of paint
art where it belongs where we can see it
Because when I look at graffiti I know what I would make
with my spray can nozzle, my paintbrush, my broad-tipped marker
women's faces, all kinds
in repose, hilarious, tragic, divine, girls and crones
so we can see ourselves
not on the oil slicks of billboards singing for whiskey or cigarettes or love
But floating across a vacant lot on Harrison
pressed into the abandoned walls of a brewery south of Market
high-styling an office building
meditating on the financial district, its spilled curbs
and unopened windows, on financiers, laborers
and the dispossessed
real women looking us straight
in the eye
And in spite of the aneurysms of culture
the instinct to close the door turn
up the heat and die peacefully with what I already know
graffiti makes me love the streets again:
wild horses, Malcolm X, whimsical dogs, urgent signs
kids screaming their names
because we're not supposed to do it
make this cemented world ours
Katharine Harer
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