Clearly Meant presents Judy Bebelaar

On February 27, 2016 Judy Bebelaar was the second poet in the reading series. My supervisor at the library had asked me to brand it. I stared for a while at the name of our branch library, the Claremont, and it resolved into Clearly Meant. Because what else is poetry but what is clearly meant? 

I became acquainted with Judy through Katharine Harer (one of the poets with whom I worked on the Poetry & Pizza series). But the Claremont Branch is also Judy’s local library, so when she walked in the door one day to ask about some book or other, she moved up my list of possible readers. Getting local writers was a priority. I was already thinking of Clearly Meant as a neighborhood series. I knew other poets who lived nearby. A resource to take advantage of!

I ask the guest poet to provide enough poems for a chapbook, which I put together and make available free at all the Berkeley library branches for the month leading up to the reading. I prefer the poet give me poems that they can talk about during the discussion period. It’s nice to have the option of talking in depth about a poem, especially one the audience is holding in their hands. 

Judy was eager to talk about a project she’d been working on for some time, a book about the teenagers she knew in the Peoples Temple. 

And Then They Were Gone: teenagers of Peoples Temple from High School to Jonestown by Judy Bebelaar and Ron Cabral was published in 2018. Recently Judy emailed me wondering who she could talk to about a presentation at the library. I posed the question to my supervisor. My supervisor said, “This is something you’d like to do?” I hadn’t thought I was going to be doing any programs during our covid days. My poetry programs were on hiatus, both Clearly Meant and the monthly Poetry Circle. Why not? I said. Might as well do a zoom. I’ve participated in a zoom poetry reading or two from home. But I hadn’t hosted anything. 

So I got the in-house instructions for librarians on how to do remote programming, and Judy and I put her talk on the calendar. April 16, 2021. I think it went well.

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.