Join us for the culminating event of San Francisco Poet Laureate Devorah Major's City Reflections project. Devorah Major, Gail Mitchell, Leticia Hernandez, Matthew Shenoda and Dan Bellm will read their poetry about San Francisco's neighborhoods on Tuesday, April 6 from 5:30 - 7:30 p.m. in the Main Library’s Latino/Hispanic Community Meeting Room.
April Featured Poet: Kim Shuck
Kim Shuck is the daughter of a career military Cherokee boy from Northeastern Oklahoma and a Polish potter girl from San Francisco. Early contact with family elders and outstanding late 60s and early 70s arts programs in the San Francisco schools helped to form her belief that a major component of art making is teaching. In the process of paying for that belief she has worked at everything from frothing espresso to writing math curriculum. Kim is raising three children who range in age from 13 to nearly 9. She maintains several teaching projects with the San Francisco Unified school district, including one at Sherman elementary and one at Alvarado elementary. Her teaching at San Francisco State University, acting as faculty advisor for the Native students' organization also at SF State, work on a show in process called "Sidewalk Indians" and a handful of writing projects help to round out her time. Shuck is very proud to be on the board of directors for California Poets in the Schools in this, their 40th year.
Recommended reading by Kim Shuck
- A Certain Lack of Coherence, by Jimmy Durham
- Nest of Freedom. Poets in the Schools Statewide Poetry Anthology 2002
- Perversions of Justice, by Ward Churchill
- Storyteller by Leslie Marmon Silko
April Featured Poem by Kim Shuck - March 2003
1.The storm's edge thins to nothing over the bay.
Caught by water temperature-
New winds
Lack of interest.
What could a map be anyhow?
Catalog of rivers, trees, and silted throughways
Or a list of instructions
From there
To
There.
Navigation can require so many senses at once,
I'm easily amazed when I get anywhere through intention.
All around the world children are throwing rocks.
I slip two pebbles into my mouth
And consider my options.
2.
In green light I watch the centuries burn.
How expensive fear can be.
There is talk of precision
As they torch the schools
The teachers
The students.
There is talk of standing together
And we are all more isolate.
The bus can't get through.
There is talk of inconvenience.
Four men are stopped on the bridge,
Arrested,
Held without phone call
They are questioned.
One had a fish.
The fish is confiscated.
3.
I wake this morning in
Fog and rain
Remember my pebbles and
Spit them
Into my hand.
What window would I put a pebble through?
I've always liked expanses of glass.
One rock is transparent,
A trapezoid
The other
A flattish oval
And brown.
So which rock do I throw,
The healing stone
Or the one
That can tell the future?
