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Poets David Gitin and Jack Marshall—both long involved with poetry in the Bay Area, and long acquainted with each other—will read their poems at 7:30 p.n. Monday, March 21 at Moe’s Books on Telegraph Avenue.  

David Gitin—cofounder of Poets’ Theater at the Straight Theater in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury, and past participant in music shows (with Charles Amirkhanian) and poetry programer on KPFA—is author of eight books of poems, including two by Berkeley’s Blue Wind Press (This Once and Fire Dance) and his new selection, Passing Through (Linehan Press, in Monterey, where Gitin lives and teaches), his first book in 15 years. 

This will be Gitin’s first Bay Area reading in a decade. The reading is part of the Monday at Moe’s Poetry Series organized by Owen Hill. Admission is free.  

Gitin’s work has been widely praised by older contemporaries, including Robert Creeley, late longtime Berkeley resident Larry Eigner, John Cage, and Allen Ginsberg, who said of Gitin’s poems, “Maybe the clearest sort of writing anyone can do.” 

Gitin characterizes his poetry as lyric (“the blue/rain the/silky descents,” from “In The Wrists”) spurning not only the attribution of his poems to various schools, but also the cliche of dubbing his brief poems “minimalist.” 

“The trouble with the whole ‘gang’ approach to literary history is that it leaves too many people out,” he says. “Jack Marshall, for instance.” 

The poems in Passing Through range in mood from elegiac (“the door/slopes of light/your body/a delay/in glass”) to wry humor (“chuckle down/fear//year/after year//smile/like a porpoise”); both are complete poems, titled by the first two and three words, respectively. 

Gitin went to university at Buffalo, where he met poet Charles Olson, but he majored in philosophy. His advisor was Marvin Farber, student of Edmund Husserl, founder of phenomenology—an interest he shared with poets Carl Rakosi and George Oppen (who appointed Gitin his bibliographer). Rakosi and Oppen are two of the poets (along with Louis Zukofsky, Bunting and Charles Reznikoff) in An ‘Objectivists’ Anthology, edited by Zukofsky, which Gitin discovered through reading Pound. Trained as a pianist and a violinist, Gitin has spoken of his conflicting ambitions in working with words or music—something he also shared with Rakosi, and with Marshall. 

Marshall, another longtime friend of Carl Rakosi, read a poem about music at Rakosi’s 100th birthday celebration at the San Francisco Public Library in November 2003. After Rakosi’s death last year, Marshall wrote a poem, “To My Friend,” including the lines, “If we had to do it over again,/we agreed, we’d be composers.” 

Marshall’s poems seem more discursive than Gitin’s, and longer. “One of Jack’s poems is as long as seven or eight of mine, at least,” jokes Gitin, “I’m reading first!”) They also tend to be autobiographical. 

His prose memoir From Baghdad to Brooklyn, Growing up in a Jewish-Arabic Family in Mid-Century America, will be published by Coffee House Press in October. Yet Marshall talks about a memoir being “all fiction, whether called fiction or nonfiction; it’s what you inherited; you choose on the run what you’ll explore—as much to do with desire as recounting actual facts.” 

He says, “Poetry’s something else; it creates a reality of its own, independent of what happens. I like that quote from Wittgenstein: ‘To create a language is to create a form of life.’” 

Marshall offers what he calls “a very small definition of poetry: precise perception and feeling propelled ... a continual transformation. I’m drawn to the way lines change sinuously, speeding one perception to another.” 

In his poem “The Lie of Health,” he writes: 

From a height, the sea 

right now looks like all windows 

thrown open at once. 

Any second now birds, strewn  

breadcrumbs on shore, will rise, mass. lock 

together in fluid flying jig- 

saws tight as an Escher. 

Perfect 

fit of having no ties, being the weather. 

Marshall has travelled and worked in many places. His first book of 10, The Darkest Continent (1967), was written, he said, after “working as a seaman on a freighter going to Africa, up the Congo, stopping at many different ports ... a voyage to origins ... I wished Rimbaud had written after he’d gone to Africa ... there’re things in my book about the Watusi, Rwanda 30 years before [the massacres]—it all keeps looping back,” 

Marshall, who has taught writing at Iowa and SF State, will read at Moe’s from his collected poems, Gorgeous Chaos (Coffee House, 2002). 

In the book, from a poem called “Angels II,” he writes, “Winter run-off babbling on/at the edge of an ocean vast enough to get lost in .... /You don’t need to be in it/to get lost in it’s way of making many things return/major that were once/incidental.” He will also read more recent poems, “about what’s going on politically, more straight on, angrier than those in Gorgeous Chaos,” he said. 

“Poetry creates an alternative to the way things seem to be, attempts to make something new out of what’s been given,” Marshall says. “Any line would contain a whole ethos, a whole world encapsulated in a single line ... no beginning or end—the center is everywhere.”