(From Eric’s email list at Bird & Beckett)
Drop what you’re doing if you have any interest in the key beat poets that San Francisco is rightfully famous for having harbored…
Mel Clay will speak at the Glen Park Branch Library this evening, Wed., 6/22, from 6:30-7:30 pm, on the late poet Bob Kaufman. Mel wrote an excellent biographical work on the poet called “Jazz – Jail and God” & will have plenty to say about the poet sometimes referred to as the Black Rimbaud… I found that book in a branch library over in the Sunset back in the mid-1980s and ate up every word…
I can’t recommend this talk by Mel highly enough.
Bob Kaufman was one of the half-dozen most important poets claimed by the “Beat” movement. Absolutely.
And Mel Clay has had a hugely important history as a playwright, actor and theater director (off-Broadway work in the 1950s, a member of Judith Malina and Julian Beck’s famous avant garde Living Theatre in the 1960s, and founder in the 1980s of the Marilyn Monroe Memorial Theatre south of Market — where he wrote and staged no-holds-barred interpretations of “Last Exit to Brooklyn,” “The Stranger,” etc.).
The Glen Park Library is on Diamond Street, a half block from the Glen Park BART station.
355-2858.
Thanks for your time.
I’ll be bothering you with another email about store stuff in a day or two
(including Sunday’s 2 pm reading of Richard Hugo poems by PUS Theatre Company).
All for now,
/s/Eric, prop.
Bird & Beckett Books
(415) 586-3733
www.birdbeckett.com