Nathaniel Tarn Reads in the Bay Area: 50 Years of Poetry

Poet Nathaniel Tarn, among the finest of living poets, celebrated his 80th birthday recently, and is reading in the Bay Area this week. Sunday, Oct. 26, he'll read at 3 pm at Meridian Gallery on Powell St. near Union Square in San Francisco ($5), in association with the San Francisco Poetry Center; Monday night at 7:30, he'll read, then converse with Owen Hill at Moe's Books on Telegraph Ave. in Berkeley (free)--and on Tuesday, Tarn will appear at a special event for the Borneo Project, an organization dedicated to the preservation of rain forests and advocacy of aboriginals' land rights, the only venue where he'll read the title poem of his new collection from New Directions, 'Ins & Outs of the Forest Rivers,' written while traveling a few years back in Borneo. The poem's also an elegy, dedicated to Saging Ani, a friend of the Borneo Project, who died suddenly on the trip. For information: joe@borneoproject.org

At the Poetry Center at SF State last Friday, Tarn read some of the poems from 'Ins and Outs ...' which show the most recent metamorphoses of his style--a style which can, by turns, convey some of the finest love poetry of our time, something more than nature poetry (cosmologic might be a better word) and social-political satire, besides self-reflection, or refraction of the present state of the world through the self. Afterwards, he genially answered audience questions at length, telling about his "sentimental education" concerning America and encountering (and publishing) postwar American poetry (Charles Olson, Robert Duncan & other contemporaries), his career as an anthropologist and his present "confirmed agnosticism" after a lifetime of studying Eastern religions (coming in part after reading Nietzche). "If I had been more a French student," said Tarn, whose parents were French & English, and who was evacuated from London to Cornwall during the
Blitz, "I would've had 'philou,' as they call it, a background in philosophy ... a few years ago, I picked up Spinoza & went on from there ... Nietzche, a great writer in the way few philosophers are, said that life may be miserable, but it's all we have; we have to love it. I've reflected sometimes that if we'd committed ourselves to life, to the world--realized that this is it, all we've got--maybe less of the destruction we've witnessed would have resulted. Maybe."

In cities, where the noise by day is overwhelming,
birds have evolved in time to sing by night, thus
to be heard by other birds. That is what we birds
are doing now, that once were poets of the day.
We sing at night, all hope on standby, but we ARE
heard by our own kindred . . .

(opening of part three, "Ascending Flight, Los Angeles," from 'Ins & Outs of the Forest
Rivers')