Clearly Meant reading & interview series featuring Maw Shein Win

 

My supervisor at the Claremont Branch asked if I was interested in doing any library programming. I said I could do a poetry reading series. It had been a few years since Poetry & Pizza ended and I was ready to get back into the hosting business. 

Poetry & Pizza was a reading series in downtown San Francisco sponsored by Paul Geffner, owner of Escape from New York Pizza. Paul is a poet himself. But he didn’t feel like he knew the scene well enough to invite good readers, so Paul asked his friend Clive Matson and Clive recruited Katharine Harer and myself to help run it. Poetry & Pizza took place once a month and we coordinators shared out the calendar. I booked four readings a year, two poets per. It was a good scene. Money was raised for charity (all door donations went to a charity of the readers’ choice). Pizza was eaten. Poetry was thrown against the walls and windows. And some of it stuck. 

The Claremont Branch is a small library and the events room is also small, so I needed a program that would tend to be small. One poet. No open mic. The Bay Area literary scene is crazy active. There are a lot of good poets out there. But what would make this new series different? An interview and discussion with the poet. There were plenty of opportunities for poets to address an audience. But not much interaction. You had your turn and gave way to the next person. 

For the first poet I wanted someone who was ambitious and active, with a local following and happy to chat. Of course I also wanted to be a fan of their poetry. Maw Shein Win was the first person I asked and she said yes. Since the reading on October 3, 2015, Maw has gone on to being El Cerrito Poet Laureate, has published two full length poetry collections, and has been a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley, among other things. Active and ambitious, no? 

A poet’s reward is typically a few ahs and a round of applause. But for this I was given a budget. Guest poets got paid! 

Gathering an audience for a poetry reading can be tricky. If there’s no open, poets looking for audience for their own work won’t show. Much depends on the poet. Do they have a fan base? Friends? Copious relatives? Over the course of four years our audiences ranged from a room exploding 70 to a friendly and attentive one. 

I had never conducted interviews, and I can seize up when on the spot, but I like talking about poetry and there are always a few questions I have about it so I figured I could string enough of those together to fill twenty minutes. I announce that the poet will read for 20 minutes, sit for an interview for 20 minutes, then participate in an audience discussion for the remainder of the hour. As I assure the poets, it’s not an interrogation, it’s a conversation. Occasionally the interview or the discussion can be hard. The poet needs to be talkative! But the hour usually flies by. 

At Clearly Meant the poet gets paid. The poet’s work is listened to. The poet is taken seriously as an authority. I think of Cleary Meant as a small town series, friendly, focused on locals (so far most of the readers have been actual users of the Claremont Branch library), and low key. 

A month before each reading I produce an 8-page promotional chapbook which is made available free at all Berkeley Public Library branches. So I get to be a publisher, too.