Each month, the San Francisco Public Library Web site, www.sfpl.org, will feature selected poems reflecting the theme of War and Peace on Our Streets.
To submit a poem or for more information about the project, see our News Release.
Also see: Past Featured Poets
September Web Poems
October Featured Poet: Dan Bellm
Dan Bellm lives in San Francisco, and teaches with California Poets in the Schools. Two collections of his poetry appeared in 1999: One Hand on the Wheel,
chosen to launch the California Poetry Series from Roundhouse Press/Heyday Books, Berkeley, and Buried Treasure, published by Cleveland State University as the winner of its
annual Poetry Center Prize. His poems have appeared in Poetry, The Threepenny Review, Ploughshares, TriQuarterly and other magazines, and his translations of fiction and
poetry from Spanish have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies. He is currently at work on a third collection of poems, related to the annual Jewish cycle of weekly readings from the Torah.
Dan Bellm is currently reading and recommends:
- Open Closed Open, by Yehuda Amichai, and Unfortunately, It Was Paradise: Selected Poems, by Mahmoud Darwish. Israel’s greatest poet (who died in 2000) and Palestine’s greatest poet were close friends – and their work is the best key I know of for really understanding what it is like to live in that terribly contested land. Beautifully translated, endlessly rich.
- Begin Again: Collected Poems, by Grace Paley. Better known for her short stories, Grace Paley is also a wonderful poet, a national treasure, and a goddess.
- Elegy, by Larry Levis. Magnificent last book by a California poet who died young in 1996.
- Trans, by Hilda Raz. A mother’s very moving exploration in poetry of her changing relationship with her transsexual child.
- Deepstep Come Shining, by C.D. Wright. A strange, surreal and very readable dream diary of a poet’s trip through her native Deep South. Someone needs to do one about San Francisco -- maybe it will be you!
October Featured Poem
from Delle Avenue (a long poem)
The world as it is, the world as I imagined it --
what do you dream, what do you imagine --
the world transformed, the world as it is,
where I turn a corner one hot summer morning
into a little avenue --
the shapes of houses, the shapes of thoughts,
melting together a little in the humid air --
what do you imagine, what do you wish for, what do you dream --
if not a home just a place I might afford to live --
the world I dreamed up, the world in front of my face --
the world transformed, the world as it is --
a line separating the two like woman and man, white and black,
grownup and child, straight and not --
the city is split, the world, split, our imaginations, split --
what do you imagine, what do you wish for, what do you expect --
working for next to nothing, not expecting much,
expecting love in a theoretical time to come,
childlessly caring for children all day and organizing a union,
knocking on doors with the union paper
like a missionary with the truth --
there's the world as we want it, and there's the world we've got --
timid survivor out to change the world
and everything changes
but the world doesn't change very much --
horny, starving, now and then a man in my bed
who leaves in the morning, what do you expect,
wanting to love, not expecting much --
what do you imagine when you are working, what do you want --
just to change our childhood,
just to dismantle the world and start over with the way
the spirit and the mind are fed --
the real world, the world we never had --
and one summer morning I turn up a little avenue --
woman leaning on her window sill
to check the day's sky
says you're a nice boy, I can tell --
loud little TV blaring the telenovela out the corner store,
black and white kids hollering over stickball,
actually playing on the same block,
guy on a stoop offering me speed under his breath --
the world as it is, melting alongside a somewhat faster world
in his mind --
an island in the city, a little shabby, a little avenue set apart,
a little beautiful, a little unsafe at night,
a little place for rent, two rooms, plank floors, brick walls,
ascetic, charming, cheap,
a little bathtub facing a couple of little bullet holes
out on the fire escape --
the world as I imagined it, the world as it is --
the neighbors are painters and dancers, Little Sisters of the Poor,
houseful of gay boys in a punk band,
a mom who puts on plays with the kids out in the street,
a mom from Puerto Rico running for Congress --
what do you wish for, what do you imagine, what do you want --
just to remake the world, starting with our street --
and I see a shy boy peeking from behind an upstairs curtain,
the veil of separation between worlds --
I know you, child --
what do you imagine, what do you dream --
I know the world is split, the city is split, our imaginations are split --
tell me a story,
tell me the way we close our eyes one morning and reopen them
at the center of the world,
the world transformed, the world as it is,
the way a person comes to know another,
the way a person changes to someone new,
the way a story springs out of the heart all at once in many languages,
fashioning a heaven of words among us in the air --
what do you dream, what do you imagine --
just to make the world as real as it is, and ourselves as real in it as we are.
Dan Bellm
