Book Review: It’s night in San Francisco but it’s sunny in Oakland, by Timeless, Infinite Light

It’s night in San Francisco but it’s sunny in Oakland
Timeless, Infinite Light, July 2014
ISBN-13: 978-1937421052
$25.00, 240 pp.
Reviewed by David James Miller

To encounter poetry from the Bay Area is to encounter poetic history, from the poetry of Robert Duncan and Jack Spicer to that of Leslie Scalapino and others. Which says much about Timeless, Infinite Light’s ‘anthology-not-anthology’ It’s night in San Francisco but it’s sunny in Oakland. As the editors, Emji Spero and Otis Pig, write in their introductory note: “What gathers here is a snapshot of a poetic moment. This book is a candid flash of the ever-evolving politics, relationships, and forms that make up this particular experience of poetry, right now, in Oakland.” While poetic history still hangs over the Bay, …but it’s sunny in Oakland retracts from this history, tracing the trajectory of a particular moment with Oakland poetic activity at its center.

With 60 contributing poets, the moment this collection documents is one that follows hard after Occupy Oakland, in which several poets in this anthology were participants, the friendships between these poets, and their expansive poetics on display. Where Bill Luoma’s contribution spans several pages—documenting the violent police attack on a sleeping camp of Occupy protestors, other poets’ whereabouts in the camp, and Occupy’s shared language of information and connection—Sara Wintz’s contribution is a single, explosive, heartbroken quatrain:

i feel despair
how to fight it
all
poem for you

Michael Cross, publisher of the great Oakland-based poetry press Compline, contributes lines 201-278 from The Katechon—a long-form poem tying together languages of violence, politics, religion, social concern, and poetic labor—which reminds us of the need for a “horizontal organization rather than this vertical socius” in social and political activism against an increasingly violent pro-corporate, anti-social institutional presence.

Likewise, Ted Rees’ tightly-condensed poems remind us of that similarly ominous presence: the “wraith [that] whirs in New York” as in Oakland. Rees’ poems crackle and hiss, incandescent:

I wrap a misdivision tight around, as if a new grammar
could shield a melee of pelargonium and shiatsu,
a green floating the room rasping. The throat’s minimality
pleads for stone and spiderweb, wet-vac cracklings.

Emji Spero, one of the editors at Timeless, Infinite Light, contributes a series of journal-based pieces chronicling the activities, readings and reading materials, and the relationships shared between many of the poets in this collection, the seemingly minuscule goings-on of the Oakland poetry community, and Spero’s place in them. Likewise, the anthology gathers so many more incredible poets now active in the Bay, poets whose diverse, expansive work deserves much attention: Brittany Billmeyer-Finn, David Brazil, Brandon Brown, David Buuck, Samantha Giles, Carrie Hunter, Elaine Kahn, Sara Larsen, Cheena Marie Lo, Steve Orth, Alli Warren, Maya Weeks, Laura Woltag… Too many amazing poets to mention. This says much about the importance and joy in reading Timeless, Infinite Light’s collection.

Oki Sogumi, whose great chapbook Underglazy was recently published by [Brenda Iijima’s New-York-based] Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs, contributes a piece that perhaps best describes the gathering of writing in It’s night in San Francisco but it’s sunny in Oakland. Sogumi writes of “the beat of blood [and of] life which greets you with fury and heat,” closing with a line that’s “[f]orever jagged sketching our seismic here and nows.”

Which it seems is exactly what’s happening in Oakland.

*Note: reviewed exactly one-year from the publication date.

David James Miller is a poet, editor, and publisher. His books and chapbooks of poetry are: CANT (Black Radish Books, 2015), As Sequence (These Signals, 2012), and Facts & Other Objects (JR Vansant, 2011). His poetry and critical writing may also be found in: The Cultural Society, LVNG, Moria, The Poetry Project Newsletter, Jacket2, Drunken Boat, and elsewhere. He is the editor of Elis Press, a publisher of innovative poetry, and SET, a biennial journal of innovative writing. He lives with his family.