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The sidewalks on both sides of a block of Addison Street in downtown Berkeley feature 128 cast-iron plaques on the Berkeley Poetry Walk.
Natiive1204, Native220566 / Native1204
Somebody should write a Bay Area almanac — the swing of the seasons and the small rituals of the year. Winter is for holiday lights with rainy days and long, chilly nights; spring is for city walks and street trees in bloom; summer for mountain hikes, fog and boats. I like fall best: warm October, the colors, the clear light of autumn.
For years, I had my own fall ritual — football Saturdays in Berkeley. It wasn’t only football. It was the bands, the pageant, the walk through the Cal campus to the stadium. I’d ride BART usually. If there was time I’d roam Berkeley a bit, have a meal, sometimes a drink, perhaps a trip down Telegraph Avenue to see what’s happening. Everybody knows about Berkeley: the politics, the protests. Herb Caen called it Berserkley.
That wasn’t fair. Berkeley is full of surprises. One is a city block full of poetry — Addison Street from Shattuck Avenue to Milvia Street. Half Price Books is at one end, the marvelous Berkeley Hardware at the other. In between is the Berkeley Repertory Theatre, the Aurora Theatre, the Freight & Salvage community art organization, a big public parking garage and the Berkeley Poetry Walk.
The poetry walk has verse and song on 128 cast-iron plaques embedded in the sidewalks on both sides of the street — everybody from Country Joe McDonald, who gave the town music, to Bishop George Berkeley, who gave the town its name. “Westward the course of empire takes its way,” part of a verse by the eminent bishop, is at the Shattuck end of the walk. In between is everybody else: Shakespeare, Rainer Maria Rilke, Gary Snyder, Robinson Jeffers, Gertrude Stein, Ina Coolbrith, Alice Walker, Allen Ginsberg, Li Po and more than a hundred others. A whole city block of poems.
The poetry walk has been there for nearly 20 years, but I just discovered it, the way European explorers “discovered” places that were already there, like California.
There are songs from Native Americans on the sidewalk.
From a Yana song:
See! I am dancing! On the rim of the world I am dancing!
And part of an Ohlone song:
Go home fog. Pelican is beating your wife
Next to that is this, written by a woman leaving her native village for Alta California in 1776:
Farewell San Miguel, splendid with your harvested fields
Where Angela de Trejo leaves her misty eyes
Then a sense of the new place. Ina Coolbrith wrote of golden poppies:
This fair land … Brimmed with the golden vintage of the sun.
A verse by Buson:
The spring sea rising
and falling, rising
and falling all day
A snippet of Gary Snyder:
Angel Island. The sailboat slipping barely west …
Or a bit of Robinson Jeffers on Carmel Point:
The extraordinary patience of things!
This beautiful place defaced with a crop of suburban houses —
How beautiful when we first beheld it
You might like “Moment” by Hildegarde Flanner:
I saw a young deer standing
Among the languid ferns.
Suddenly he ran —
And the going was absolute,
Like the shattering of icicles
In the wind.
Or the last verse from “Cotton in a Pill Bottle” by Dean Young:
I love how the fog lies down in the air,
How it can only get so far from the sea.
No Berkeley scene would be complete without a protest. This one from “Notebook” by Denise Levertov:
Everyone knows... what all shall know
This day and the days that follow:
now, the clubs, the gas,
bayonets, bullets.
The War comes home to us …
这是诗的一个繁忙的街道,去(n poems. The other day some of the poems were covered up by garbage cans, one or two by wooden barriers with “No Parking” signs, a third by a parked scooter, and one called “Aftermath” by fallen leaves, so many that the author’s name was covered up.
The poetry walk was a civic project at a time when downtown Berkeley was in decline.
Robert Hass, who was born in San Francisco and later became poet laureate of the United States and a Berkeley professor, selected the poems. “Urban spaces are full of language,” Hass told poets.org, the website of the Academy of American Poets. There was so much poetry, he said, “People could walk the street every day and still keep discovering something new.”
和一些老:哈斯挑选了一条线Shakespeare for a plaque outside the Berkeley Rep:
We are such stuff as dreams are made on
Carl Nolte’s columns appear in The San Francisco Chronicle’s Sunday edition. Email: cnolte@sfchronicle.com
