2026-07-09 Kim Shuck's Poem Jam Celebrates Ecopoetry at the San Francisco Public Library

Good evening. Hello. Nice to see everyone. I'm John Smallley, a librarian with the humanities center here at the main library uh on the third floor where we have tens of thousands of poetry books in 60 languages. Anyway, thanks all for coming. Uh before we get started, I want to say a few words uh on behalf of our community and tell you about a few of our upcoming programs. On behalf of the San Francisco Public Library, we wish to welcome you to the unseated ancestral homeland of the Ramatural who are the original inhabitants of the San Francisco Peninsula. As the indigenous stewards of this land and in accordance with their traditions, the Ramach have never seated, lost, nor forgotten their responsibilities as caretakers of this place. As guests, we who reside in their traditional territory recognize that we benefit from living and working on their homeland. We wish to pay our respects by acknowledging the ancestors, elders, and relatives of the Ramatric community and by affirming their sovereign rights as first peoples. As some of you may know, uh tonight's program is part of the library's everybody's climate program series throughout the month of July. A series that we hope will encourage you to act for a safer, greener, and more sustainable world. So, I'd like to tell you about a few of those programs coming up. This Saturday, we're having our launch at the New Farm 10 Cargo Way in the Bay View. Uh, the new farm will be buzzing with live music, book giveaways, uh, goats, and arts and crafts. We So, we hope you can join us. That's from 11 till 4. Uh, the next day, Sunday, July 12th, in this very room, 1 pm, we have a workshop on climate communications. That's the second of a four-part series. Uh the final installment, the last Sunday of July, there'll be a field trip to a forest in the Bay Area. But to go to that, you have to attend one of the other, you know, second or third Sunday. Uh in the middle of the week, July 16th, we have a short documentary, How to Power a City, about the clean energy revolution that we're in the middle of. On Sunday, July 19th, the third part of the climate uh communications workshop, also a workshop led by Cynthia Calfman, how to find your place in the climate justice movement, which will address how you can do that uh starting from wherever you are. On Thursday, July 23rd, we have the climate scientist Casey King from North Carolina. She'll be giving a presentation, hope after climate catastrophe, lessons from Hurricane Helen. And that's about uh strategies and practices that people there in North Carolina used to uh avoid paralysis and find hope after that event, which did destroy 126,000 homes and kill 108 people in uh 2024. Lastly, we have a lovely documentary on Sunday, July 26th called A Radical Thread by local filmmaker Jean C. Finley. And that's about a kind of close-knit back to the land community in the Mount Shasta region and how they fight uh commercial interests. They're sort of hellbent on environmental destruction. And their same community ethos led this community to create a remarkable 83 foot long tapestry. took many years and there are hundreds of uh artists members of the community who participated in it. So this documentary is about that tapestry also. It's a beautiful tapestry, beautiful cinematography. So come on Sunday the 26th, the director Jean Finia will be here and hopefully some members of that community as well. And hopefully a catalog was just published. I'm having the editor of the catalog come as well. Anyway, so that's uh for the month of July. Uh you may know uh our poetry reading Kimchuk's poem jam happens the second Thursday of each month in this room 6 p.m. So we hope that you will come back on August 13th next month where we will be celebrating um Heather Flesher's latest book which is called I'm drawing a blank. [laughter] >> Anyway, her >> that's not what it's called. Her latest book will uh be featured next month, August 13th. Uh and what else? Uh that's about it for my announcements. After today's program, if you don't mind, I put some QR codes above the coffee table. You'll find uh coffee and cookies there. Also, flyers and uh library newsletters if you're interested in our events. Anyway, after today's program, u you can capture the QR code and give us your comments and suggestions about today's program or about the Everybody's Climate Series. To find out more about SAPL events in general, you can always visit our website, sappl.org, visit the events calendar there. So, sorry about the long announcements. Uh, now I'm going to turn the microphone over to Kim Shak, poet Low Emmerida of San Francisco and host of the longunning poem jam series. Please give a warm welcome to Kim. [applause] Yeah, please do do the QR code thing. I know when people ask for that, it's sort of one of those things we don't all love doing, but uh when they ask, they kind of mean it. And this is the first time they've ever asked here, so I feel a little bit like I'm going to get a grade. It would be good if you filled out the thing. Um, [clears throat] so there were four people supposed to read tonight and two of them had cancelled. Um, one of them is um, Eileen Cassinetto. So I brought one of her anthologies, her achop poetic anthologies to read from. Um, her work is incredibly important. This one's the nature of our times, something she did in collaboration with Louisa and Gloria. Um, the work that they do is key to letting people know what's going on. Um, there are too many great choices in here, so I promised myself I'd just open it up, but then now I'm flipping through. Let's not do that. This is bird birding by Richard Jones. I do it to say the names. Plain capped star throat. Blackshouldered kite, black crowned knigh heron, olivesided fly catcher. Some names are a philosophical conundrum. Great knot. Others an insult. masked booby. In woods, silent at dawn or kneedeep in a quiet marsh, it's hard not to imagine thunderous rock bands, black rail, California thrasher waiting through golden feathery prairie grass or perched like a hawk on a cliff high above the roing sea with my binoculars. Childhood nicknames float back to me. Surf Bird and Pee-Wee. At twilight, sparrows and martins return to the white birdouses that punctuate my backyard. The pink sky quitted and undisturbed, except for a pair of darting, hungry bats. There's nothing for me to do but persist. From the canvas bag hanging from my shoulder, I take out my checklist and add a few names of my own. Insomniac grouse, oneeyed loon, whiskey drunk warbler, bedum bitter bluebird, crazy old coot. [clears throat] I like it when people in poems take animals seriously. And I've actually gone so far as to at one point write an essay about people who always ask me why I always notice the birds. And the answer, of course, is because they're there. Um, people talk about nature quite often as though there's some fence around the city that prevents it from also having nature. But, you know, I have some pretty intense relationships with some crows. Um, and also the hummingbird that I consistently irritate by being in my garden. Why are you here? [gasps] [clears throat] We also get in our yard we get um at certain times of the year you can hear frogs and um we get coyotes and there's a skunk and there's some tree rats and if if you don't know tree rats do a weird thing. We have a lemon tree and the tree rats don't like the yellow part of the rind. They like the white part of the rind. So, they peel the yellow part off and leave it in a little pile under the tree. And they eat [clears throat] the rind and they leave the lemon naked hanging from the branch. And the first time I noticed that, I was out in the yard and it was a pretty warm day and it had warmed up the lemon which had swollen and then burst. So there was like it was sort of spurting juice out of these little holes [laughter] that it had created for itself. >> It's bitter. The white part is bitter. Way bitter. Really, really, really bitter. This is [sighs and gasps] by Joel Allegretti. Choir of flies. As morning's enveloping light nests in the trees that gable this country byway, so they convene in their buzzing canonical hours above, around, and in the mound of ochre fur and putrifying meat that unites with the decomposing foliage. The reek of slaughtered stag calls them to convocation as if an olfactory steeple bell. They locate nourishment in the trachea, mate in the mucosa, deposit eggs in the viscera. This ransacked carcass was once a noble buck. Hilltop centurion antler stately as a laurel crescent. Not a study for the camera's retina or pointless brush dabs, but a doicile from maggots. That's all. That's all presumably that observation because we all sort of wind up some kind of way like that. Um, this is by Marjorie Maddox, the witnesses after the 2018 wildfire in Kuru, Washington. And the photograph Kuru witness Kuru fire by Karen Ellas. [snorts] Near the confluence of Long Alec Creek and the Kettle River, the Curu watches its namesake town of 100. As residents stare towards the west, inhale fear. Smoke rewrites the sky where the curlu once flew. Flames attack its map and habitat. Ridgelines pulse with what is singed. Feathers, pines, mountains, horizons stre with regret. and the burnt promises of those not there to witness. The incineration of branch, the contagion of spark, the long slow burn of loss. Oh, curu and curios obscure enough to hide once within these safe acres. Even you grief has found even you. So, this is about to just delight me. I will probably read a little bit more later if um EK doesn't walk through the door soon. Um but this is going to be the last for this set. This is by me and for once in the recent times I think mine is the most cheerful of the poems in this array. [laughter] I don't know about anybody else. Has everybody else kind of been feeling a little funky? You know, I mean, [clears throat and laughter] not for nothing, but I remember at one point in the 90s writing a poem about how it was that people could get pissed off at waiting at a light because it's such a little thing compared to what's going on everywhere else. Well, at this point, we are everywhere else. And I've been in a funk. So, it just made me really smile to notice that this poem was not depressed. May that moment come back to me again. [laughter] Frog song. Climbing the waterfall because we're halfway between city kid and the kind of rural that knows train tracks. So, it felt like the wrong way up a slide and a bit like praying to the creek all at the same time. Because intersectional means a few different things less binary than kaleidoscope biome burying beetles and big museums and fishing in a poisoned watershed. When we went to look at the ruin of dad's hometown, there were no frogs by the pond. Not one. Now I know there must be frogs somewhere, but they're not where I expect them anymore. The Hawk and I both knew, even if we'd never met, but who knows? It could be our families go way back. I'm related to most of that abandoned town through my dad's aunt, if the turtle story is true. Related to most things along the Neo Show some kind of way. It's hard how we can't be who we really are sometimes. Not outside at least. But I might float a few words down this river, even if they swapped out the bridge. And I swear the cicas are singing a different note. But my heart still beats like frog song. A memory I will hold and use to pump my own blood to share in poem. I will whisper it quiet. We'll see if it floats. If it winds up in Grand Lake, if it still sings back. So, does say something about what I've been writing lately, that dead frogs are actually more cheerful than usual. But hey, um, our next poet is somebody that, um, oh, how to put it? [clears throat] We know each other intensely, serially, and not regularly enough. So, we've read together a bunch. Um, I I I would say we know each other in sets. So, 10 minutes at a time for what about 15 years now? Yeah. Jennifer Hagawa is an incredibly talented poet who uh um gets invited to do really cool things and I'm always delighted when I find her at events. And you should be delighted, too. and you should read her work and um we should listen to her now. Please welcome Jennifer Hagawa to this microphone. [applause] Oops. Same Kim, I feel I just know you so deeply. Yeah, absolutely. And sets it's almost uh the poems do extra work I think um to help us uh I guess connect on a on a different level even if in short sets. So um thank you for inviting me and thank you everyone for being here and I'm just going to read um a few few poems. Um, the first one is is from a book called Lica's Field Guide to Bonsai Living. It came out in um 2020. The list of retired hurricane names. At some point, you have to decide. Will you let folks use your river like a road? Soon the map of you looks like a sweet loaf cut up with a dull knife. The levies of your body will tire and you'll destroy the one protecting memory to save the one about to breach at sleep. On Charbanet Street, all of the women can tell the story of the water, of floating to the ceiling, house dresses ballooning up to their ears like jellyfish. From the rooftops they called out to swarms of swallows, tossed against the sky like a plate of beans. I climbed your levy and people honked from their cars, toaster oven, curtain rod, and a dead calf on your banks. According to the registry, you're no longer free. If you ran away, they could arrest you for stealing yourself. Thank you. This one's called Flaws. He glowed wonder when he saw the ground giving them up. Waxy skins peeled back revealing brown gleaming in borderland sun. He thumped the globes for answers. heard rustling in the lowh hanging mosquite and in the stillness in between leaves loaded the heart's acknowledgement. For this he thanked, grasped, and plucked in a good way, so happy he would have floated off if the antler palm hadn't snared his shoelace and escorted him back to his truck. At checkpoint, uniforms smashed everyone with hammers, looking for kilos of cocaine growing in gourds. Flaws in the mind are replicated on the land. Skins cracked, seeds shivering. Flaws in the mind are replicated on the body. Guard said, "Stop your crying. It's just gourds. He said, "These are the hearts of the deer. Bodies poised and muscular. Listen for them come for you in the night. Metal totem worring with the flawed focusing of glass eyes upon you. So accustomed to the sound of surveillance, you suspect it is the tune of existence. Thump trump thump. This is the sound of velvet grazing against fresh concrete. 2,000 miles bleeding. Thanks. Thank you. more than a white mountain. We'd never looked more unlike ourselves. Small heathens building a snowman in the belly button of a god. My mom is wearing a knit cap with a vigorous pompom and a sweater that makes her look like she's covered in popcorn. I'm in a turtleneck and mittens. I'm wearing mittens. My dad looks most like himself, wearing his same old windbreaker, the color of deli mustard, because not even freezing temperatures will make him admit that nature's nature is stronger than his own. We have our hands deep in snow. This is the last time my mom will smile out of joy. From here on out, smiles are born of relief. Dad looks triumphant. He his gaze surveying the stark landscape as if it were the surface of the moon. Our snowman has rocks for a face and looks more like a giant mound of greatened dicon than a stack of three styrofoam balls like on TV. Our technique is off, but I've never felt better finally doing something that I've seen only white people doing. The sun is sliding down the face of sky father and my mom says she's getting cold. We shovel some snow into the bed of my dad's truck as if to say, "This time will not melt." Drive down the mountain, past the military camp, barren lands, claw into forests. Palea, honey creeper, sings out colonizers. alien starts to wear off or return. Back in mango land, the hot pavement cooks up surplus sweet bodies, bursting skins open. Mom pulls off her knit cap. Dad unzips his windbreaker and tugs at the ribbed collar of his white t-shirt, calling back the sanity of seale life. Look at my mittened hands. What's the thrill of being unable to grasp anything? Ma now spread tall in the distance. The snow we dug our hands into. White cape draped over muscled shoulders of creation. Roll down window. Peel off soggy mittens. Toss them out the window. the first and certainly not the last concession. [applause] Sweet. Thank you. Um I'll I'll I'll read a few more from uh Naomi Anom uh a biography of infinite desire. Um this came out in 2025. Um, tombstone read mama because they forgot her given name. They entered the forest to find a longlost grave. Father led with a machete guided by an aunt with magnetic grains between the eyes. Rusted out car body. Pile of green glass bottles, tombstones of missionaries, one a child. Scales of magnitude, bodies given time and space disappear. But everywhere the child came through the ki trees, ashes to lashes, dust to lust. They sang it to scare the big time redeyed shadow stealer away. Bottle brush and mosquito punk. They scrub through epochs of moss. Glow of molten rock seep between branches to illuminate the true name. Such monomthical sounds made sluggish blood flow free again. Who here thinks they're smarter than spirit? who here is not related to the volcano. [applause] Um, when the future looks like a forest, she said to her lover, "Are you really a tree or do you just play one on TV?" Yeah. When Watiasa painted its likeness, the thing became human and so ancestral tree matter flows through her sympathetic system. Methusela pine, Cyprus of Abaru and Langanger. Now you nonclonal agents from whom she learned to fight or fly. Trees churn deep soil proceed along underground rivers. Slow grazing cellulose buffalo. They have sharp voices sound like thick paper bags flicked open. Their rings, their mouths. Trees telescope through millennia. Show up like old light. branches, tickling scars. Even she forgot she hid deep inside the hard bark of her body. I I think um I'm going to read a new poem. So, thank you for for this, Kim. It prompted uh me to try to write something new. Still rough, but let's let's go for it. Let's see here. It's called Enerito, Maine. Here and now, one can eat Taco Bell on a beach, not transported from the inland. But I mean, right here, ordered and purchased, hot out of dual platon grills and rethermalizers, trayed like some holy goods, and ready to be walked just a few yards out to the simulated wood tables coated in that whisper of sticky sandy film that comes only from the mouth of the sea. Waves roll up the shore in their endless crawling dance, knowing they shall eventually destroy what is now just out of reach. The air is all joy with the shouts and giggles of young women in hijabs playing tag with salt water. Here it feels like everything is a side, always components of a larger system. But one will be fooled every time. An enturito is a man. A crunch wrap supreme is a man. A chalupa is a main character set against a surf pounding for so long it has beaten mountains crystallin. The time it took to prepare a beach swallows the blip it took to design neotexmex for the anthroposine. Corn tortilla, tectonic plates, emulsified cheese sauces, fundamental binding forces. Just enough meat to call it meat. Carbon biomass. Just enough heat to melt an ice sheath that triggers the co-evolution of tuido corola tube and the bycoled blackbird's beak. Once were velociaptor. An article says dinosaurs may have been covered in feathers, covered in finely graded cheddar. We just don't know. Reviews say to come here. People see whales. One might witness an orca waiting for a gordita. Or in the last gulp in a plastic cup, a pod of humpbacks moving with purpose and instinct down the coast of time. Dreaming of their once slick feathered cloaks. Moving toward light, moving toward flight, but slowed by the seditive power of artificial flavors served in the most primal of places. Thank you. [applause] I think these are your glasses. >> [laughter] >> I know about the glasses problem. I can actually be looking for a pair of glasses with them on my head, a pair in my hands, one clipped to the front of my shirt. I'm still going, where are they? Um, thank you for the laugh. I think we all kind of need one. I know I need one today. Our next reader [gasps] is the delightful Yuk Keith who is um the kind of friend that you want on the team when the zombie apocalypse comes and you have to fight them off. Um, and she's doing really heavy lifting tonight because she just came from a class and dashed over here in order to fulfill my requirements and I really appreciate it. So, a gigantic applause for EK Keith. Please welcome her to this microphone. [applause] >> Hi, everybody. It's nice to see you all here tonight. Um, I really love that it's eco poetry year. It fits in with what I write about a lot. So, um, you know, this is Kim's reading and she flattered me once very much by asking me for a poem to publish in a beautiful little book, which I think you can check out at the library here. It's called this wandering state poems from Alta. And I'll let you make the connections as we go through the poems. Colonized American Daughters. English has left me speechless in at least three other languages. My mother tongue ate up all the words that might have been mine. If you can't say it, you can't think it and you can't do it. What's left? All that's left. A few family keepsakes, some quaint old trinkets, a recipe or two, self-loathing, a desire to fit in. This is how wisdom gets lost and never comes home. And then I think Kim had something to do with this anthology as well. The city is already speaking. The sound of Cay Ventiatro um sort of from this is a preandemic book but like stuff stays relevant. Peace, love, and understanding. It's easy to photograph war, harder to show peace, because peace looks like birthday parties, picnics at the beach, waiting for the bus, and another day at work. The problem with peace is that it's nothing special. Peace is ordinary, subtle as crossing when the light turns green. And the rhythm of your feet becomes part of the pattern of the crosswalk. Yellow and black, yellow and black, yellow and black. Peace. The opposite of love is ego. And neither of us have anything in the game. So, let's ruin our friendship. Let's drink cheap beer on a first date that lasts at least 7 years. Maybe sometime we'll need some sleep. Maybe sometime, but not now. I'm wearing one Batman sock and one with blue stripes. I never got the hang of matching except when I'm with you. Love harder times coming when respect isn't mutual. Power usurped by men in expensive suits. Bamboozled, doubletalked and flim flammed. We stand cardboard in our hands. We the for the by the comes the revolution. Understanding [applause] And this is my book, Ordinary Villains, which you definitely can check out upstairs. I really love that people can check out my books at San Francisco Public Library. It's super cool. [sighs] [snorts] So, here's a love poem for you. It's everyone's favorite kind of love, narcissism. The shadow of the Lorax plays on the walls of Plato's cave where Christ was buried. And on the third day, Cisphus rolled the rock away and invented religion to fuel old feuds with folks who might yet be friends. The world is small and getting smaller. an unlikely oasis in space. I am you. Turns out all the myths are true. We are all gods at all times. And of course, we see ourselves in every drop of water. It is us. >> [applause] [snorts] >> Okay, leaning into the love poems tonight. [sighs and gasps] [snorts] This ordinary morning demanding impossibles. The spaceships are crumbling, falling from the sky. It's been raining for days and I can't help but hope for the sun. [snorts] The audience is always right. Light is particle and or but wave. Who am I to think I can define who I am? Like the light. It's the fact that returns. I'm not the center of the universe except when theoretically I have to be. The spaceships are crumbling and the weather is beautiful here. Sun behind clouds. I'm trying to think of a way to tell you I love you. I'm trying to think of a way to tell you how I feel without using the word love and I failed again. So what if I can if I can only offer you disappointment? I am like the light. My behavior changes depending on how I'm observed. How can I help it when you look at me like that? [applause] And then here's something here's here's some a mighty fresh poem with an awfully long title. Hiking from the Pink Triangle on Twin Peaks on the wathed trail down to Glen Park Canyon to the park. June 2026. That hummingbird is chasing a small hawk. They are small but very territorial. There is nothing futile about challenging a big problem. That hummingbird chased that hawk off the branch where it perched all the way across the road. An ego tone. We have so many problems these days, but if the hummingbird can chase away a hawk, so can we. Thank you everybody. Thank you Kim. Thank you San Francisco Public Library. [clears throat] I probably should put these on. I'm going to try to find a poem by looking it up, which is always a little bit fraught. And while I'm doing it, I'm going to tell you a true thing about what's up with my life. I am getting more and more like a hermit as time goes on. I don't want to leave the house. I talk myself into coming to these readings even though I know when I get here I'm going to love it. Even though I know what I'm going to get because I have booked them and I know these poets. And it's been getting really difficult. And I I have to hope that it has to do with the uh idiot politics, but I suspect it might not. Good. I found it. Um I wanted to read as kind of a final gesture an Eileen Cassinetto poem because she couldn't be here. Um [sighs and gasps] she and I have been feeling the same way about leaving the house. Although I think considering the political situation, it's probably harder for her than it is for me. It's been really hard for me to watch, though. This poem's called In Half Moon Bay. There are all these halves at the edge of the sea, like half a heart of shore, briefly cradling a sea star that has bravely lost its arms. When its stone coral mouth is already drained of seaater, its spine of honeycombed lime would be the last to go. At low tide, the feisty and starry flounder leaves tracks in pursuit of ghost shrimp while they shy. And the snowy clover wades in and out of waves, not playing but foraging for sand hoppers. Its fortune tied with the tides like sand and moonshine. But count on the bread to still rise on century old bricks six days a week like goodwill or good fortune inside a wave. I think poets actually may be some of the most uh the people who suffer most from imposttor syndrome because Eileen always tells me I just don't know if I'm as good as the rest of you in this reading. And you can tell by that poem I just read, yeah, at least [laughter] possibly better. The point of the story and the point of me mentioning that is that I think the only way forward in this time of defend trying to defend what we can of nature trying to defend what we can of our neighbors standing with people grouping together the only way forward is community I am grateful that you are all here I am grateful that a lot of you show up on the regular I really appreciate it I would love it if you gave yourselves a and [applause] and also respond to the QR code thing. Um, thank you Mike who is the AV person standing behind the screen back there who makes this all audible and makes it possible to listen to us again later. Thank you, John Smallley, who has been my partner in this since the beginning. Um, putting these together. [applause] Another round of applause for EK Keith and Jennifer Hagawa, please. [applause] Yeah, I think the only the only survival tactic is opening our hearts to one another. And uh and I'm glad that you did that. Have a blessed month. until next time. Um, on the subject of Heather's reading, she told me who the three people were, and right now I'm remembering that one of them is Cassandra Doll, who is phenomenal, and you should definitely not miss Cass coming here. Um, and, uh, Colleen McKe, who is also spectacular in very different way. and one third person who I'm going to kick myself for not remembering because as I recall this is the closest person of the three to me and I am just not remembering the name right now >> for the >> for the duration Heather wrote one of Heather's earlier books is called Another Crazy Transwoman and um I had one of those I'm stupid about the internet moments when I was trying to figure out where to buy it cuz I looked that up online. Don't look that up online. [laughter] Just give that a pass. That's a morass you want no part of. Anyway, she's spectacular. I love her dearly and I'm glad she's coming up to the city to do the reading because she doesn't make it up here all that often. So, I hope to see you all next time. Take care. [applause] Have you