I was profiled in the Chronicle as a poet when I was 20 (back in 1988)
This is me in 1988 at the age of 20, in the San Francisco Chronicle where I was profiled in an article called “The Bay Area Is Still A Magnet for Poets” by Carlos Vidal Greth. “Thirty years after the Beat Generation held literary court in North Beach, young poets still flock to the Bay Area seeking a spiritual home.” was the subtitle of the May 16, 1988 article.
The segment about me begins by discussing my poetry teacher at a free program for the homeless and marginally housed at Central City Hospitality House in San Francisco’s Tenderloin.
The article says:
Jack Micheline, who lives in the Tenderloin, is one of the unofficial “professors” the emerging poets study. His book “River of Red Wine,” published in 1957 with an introduction by Kerouac, helped set the tone for the Beat Generation.
“San Francisco has always been a refugee camp for poets,” said Micheline, 57.
He worries, however, that younger poets fail to reach a wide audience.
“I tell them if they want to be heard, they should go into a bar and jump on a pool table or read their work on a Muni bus,” said the Bronx native. “Poetry gets in your blood like a hurricane. You’ve got to let it out.”
For 20-year-old writer Sumiko Saulson, however, poetry has been the calm eye in a stormy life.
Saulson said because her mother was in prison and her father was a heroin addict, she had to raise herself and her younger brother, a “Hare Krishna punk studying to be a heavy equipment operator.”
She migrated from Los Angeles to the Bay Area two years ago because she imagined it would provide a congenial environment for her art. Flat broke, she landed in a fleabag hotel in the Tenderloin.
The Tenderloin was an unlikely place to launch a literary career. Yet in the last two years, she has attended writing workshops at Hospitality House, a homeless shelter and cultural center, and has produced two self-published collections of poetry that she has sold through bookstores on consignment. She also has read her work at the Tenderloin Self-Help Center and other social service and “outreach” organizations.
“I don’t see how those places are inferior to a Berkeley coffeehouse or a highbrow bookstore,” said Saulson, who wears steel-rim glasses, a painted leather jacket and braids dyed the color of a polluted sunset.
“The Tenderloin excites me,” she said. “New ideas are generated here because necessity nurses invention. It’s a bad place only if you let yourself get into trouble. You can sleep on the street and not get beaten up.”
Saulson, who sings in a band called Poetic Justice, writes the lyrics of a rebellious child forced to grow up fast:
God doesn’t care about my hair
Or the kind of clothes I wear
If I’m straight or if I’m gay
God will love me either way.
Jesus was an outcast, too
Not Mr. Authority, like you.”
