Addison Street: The Berkeley's Poetry Walk

by Robert Hass (Editor), Jessica Fisher

Berkeley is a wellspring of literary and artistic history. As a way of preserving and celebrating that history, the City of Berkley called on former poet laureate Robert Hass and award-winning artist David Lance Goines to design a series of poetry panels that have been installed in the sidewalks of Berkeley’'s thriving downtown arts and theater district. The Berkeley Poetry Walk is a unique testament to the living poetic tradition. Filled with history, poetry, and anecdote, it is a splendid introduction to the history of poetry in the city, with full commentary on each poem by Hass himself. This work makes clear the importance, passion, playfulness, and episodic looniness of one of America’'s most vibrant cities. Discover all those who have lived in or been moved by this from Robert Duncan, Josephine Miles, Czeslaw Milosz, and Lyn Hejinian to Thornton Wilder, Allen Ginsberg, and Kenneth Rexroth, from an Ohlone Indian song fragment to poems about urban spaces, war, music, and of course... love.

Genres: Poetry

284 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 2004

About the author

Robert Hass was born in San Francisco and lives in Berkeley, California, where he teaches at the University of California. He served as Poet Laureate of the United States from 1995 to 1997. A MacArthur Fellow and a two-time winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, he has published poems, literary essays, and translations. He is married to the poet Brenda Hillman.

Reviews

[Keleigh]

The last night I ever slept in Berkeley, after moving homeless up to Sacramento with all my stuff in my car to spend 10 days Vision-Questing on Mt. Shasta, I came across this poem on Addison Street:

Natural History

It takes a long time to make a meadow.
First you need glaciers
to gouge out a lake.
Then reeds grow, the marsh dries, the trees
drop their seedlings.

It takes a long time to have a feeling,
even the ones that happen quickly.

Such a deep gouging out.

So many dead trees to beget
a single live joy that conjures the light
from its litter of fallen leaves.
Look at the broken hopes up and down the trunk.
Each one could have been a branch.

What a terrible distance between heart
and mouth.
And the words fall
like belated raindrops
the day after a storm when you shake the tree,
if you happen to shake it.

—Chana Bloch


I went back to the house on Woolsey Street where I no longer lived and tried in vain to find the poem on Google, so I went back out at midnight, found the poem again, and copied it down on the first page of my first post-Mountain/New Life journal.

Only recently have I discovered that Chana Bloch teaches at Mills College, in Oakland--where I'll be starting grad school tomorrow. If I can overcome my shyness, I'll track her down and tell her how much that poem means to me. And this one too:

Alone on the Mountain

on my birthday

I climb up here only
to feel small again. Blue liquor
of distances: one sip and I start to lose
size, anger, the sticky burrs
of wanting. If only, what if—let the wind
carry it away.
Wave after wave of shadow comes over
the mountain, like some great
migration. Up here
everything's painted the four
bare colors: sky, cloud, rock, shadow.
To be the object of so much weather!
I'm the only one left at the end
of the last act. Everyone has died,
or gone off to be married.
Look how that tree
catches the wind, strains like a kite against
its patch of sky. That's
what I come for.
An important cloud
is making its way to some other mountain, to the sea,
scattering finches like poppyseed.

[Lyn · Rating 5 out of 5]

One day last month, I was walking through downtown Berkeley, when I found a poem on the ground.
I'm from Orlando, where you don't find poems just lying on the sidewalk. Panting tourists, advertisements, strayed plastic mouse ears, newcomers' broken dreams and the metaphorical egg frying, yes, but never poems.
So I read it. Then I saw that there was another one next to it. So I read that. And I saw the long line of them, dozens carved into the sidewalk. I had found, without friend or guidebook, the Addison Street Poetry Walk, one of the publicly funded beauties of Berkeley's arts district.
I almost forgot I had to get on the BART to go into San Francisco for business. I just kept reading them.
And because that made it my special thing, I had to buy the book. :)
Everything I read that day is in this book. It's an exceptionally well-chosen collection of the well-known and the obscure, with lots of gems. And they're all short (they had to fit into those little boxes on the sidewalk...) They all touch on either the landscape or the history or just the mind of Northern California, one of the loveliest places in the world.
Discoveries: The Chinese-influenced lyricist Witter Bynner, and one of the most sensual landscape poems ever, by the great Muriel Rukeyser: "Summer, the Sacramento."
And lovely bits from Yana and Ohlone poems, an anonymous Chinese immigrant, Robinson Jeffers, and my beloved Shakespeare--of course they picked the most Berkeley of his plays, The Tempest.
Even if you know lots of poems, you'll make discoveries, too.