Live review #2: Marc Zegans

Poet's Beat Museum gig gets the once-over from a respected San Francisco-based counterculture commentator. And he likes it

Marc Zegans, Beat Museum, San Francisco, November 19th, 2022

By Jonah Raskin

IT’S TOO BAD and really sad that Lawrence Ferlinghetti isn’t still around and couldn’t show up for the reading and performance that poet Marc Zegans gave the other day at the Beat Museum in North Beach in San Francisco. Zegans was launching his new book, Lyon Street, in the city where he came of age and where, he explained, he learned to write.

Some years ago, Ferlinghetti – who died in 2021 at 101 – complained to me that newspapers didn’t review poetry readings. The founder of City Lights Books & Publishing, the author of A Coney Island of the Mind, a best-seller, and other books of poetry, as well as a visual artist, Ferlinghetti had skin in the game.

Ginsberg, McClure, Snyder, Lamantia, di Prima and more all read at City Lights for years and no newspaper recounted their performances. As far as I know, the only time that the New York Times assigned a reporter to cover the poetry scene in San Francisco was in 1955 when Ginsberg was performing ‘Howl’ in public and before Ferlinghetti published it as number four in the Pocket Poets Series.

Richard Eberhart wrote about the scene in an article titled ‘West Coast Rhythms’ in which he wrote: ‘In the Bay region there are several poetry readings each week. They may be called at the drop of a hat.’ The pandemic disrupted live and in-person poetry readings, and, while they don’t happen at the drop of a hat, they have made a big comeback in the last month. I’ve attended and read at a couple of them, with as many as 30 poets and audiences twice as large.

Pictured above: Marc Zegans with his latest collection Lyon Street at the weekend museum reading. The writer has Beat credentials: two of his poems appeared in 2018’s Kerouac on Record: A Literary Soundtrack (Image: Jonah Raskin; headline image: Julie Oxendale)

An exuberant crowd showed up on a Saturday night at the Beat Museum to hear Zegans read from Lyon Street, recently published in a handsome edition by Bamboo Dart Press with a drawing on the cover by Dennis Callaci and a frontispiece by the artist Paul Madonna, whose work, including All Over Coffee, which sealed his reputation, is published by City Lights.

Brandon Loberg set up the stage, adjusted the microphone and then sat down and listened. A genial host, he keeps the wheels of the Beat Museum running day-in and day-out, especially when the founder Jerry Cimino and his wife Estelle are on the road spreading the gospel of Kerouac.

Zegans explained that Lyon Street is his ‘touchstone’. Located at the edge of the Presidio, which was once a major military base and near the Palace of Fine Arts, which hosted the 1915 Panama-Pacific Exhibition, it’s an emblem for this writer of the city’s rise and fall, verticality, intimacy and geography.    

Lyon Street boasts 22 poems, along with an introduction by the author, a map of the city that shows the location named in the poems and a short bio that explains that the new book is Zegans’ seventh and follows on the heels of The Snow Dead (2020).

What the bio doesn’t say and might have said, is that the author worked in Boston for Mayor Raymond Flynn’s administration, and later served as the executive director and research director for Harvard’s Innovations in State and Local Government Program. This information is important because Zegans is an urban poet who cares about local government and civic life.

But perhaps the information about Boston and Harvard would have detracted from Zegans’ focus on San Francisco. In the lead-in to one of his poems, he mentioned that he was the chauffeur for Louise Renne, who served as a supervisor in The City, after an ex-cop named Dan White shot and killed Mayor George Moscone and supervisor Harvey Milk, an openly gay politican who campaigned for gay rights. As Renne’s driver during her campaign for Congress, Zegans learned to navigate nearly all the major streets, avenues and boulevards as well as some of the car-friendly alleys.

Lyon Street is all about the soul of San Francisco, its thoroughfares, its landmarks such as the Café Trieste, City Lights, Bob’s Donuts and Suckers Liquors, as well as its neighbourhoods, from North Beach to Ocean Beach and Golden Gate National Recreation Area.

The poems don’t take the place of actually walking the city, but they take readers on a peripatetic journey, and they might inspire locals and tourists to travel across the San Francisco peninsula on foot. They also carry the reader into the past, specifically into the poet’s own past – his boyhood and youth – and into chapters of the city’s past that no longer exist.

Zegans travels back in ‘Solstice’, ‘Catch’, ‘Rack ‘em’, ‘Dim Sum till 11:00’, ‘Unmasking’, and ‘San Francisco’, the next-to-the last poem in the book, the longest and the most experimental, with lines and words spread out across the pages:

van ness

                                             concrete and jumble

                                    a broken spine

that once led

                                    to the head

                                      of this city

                                              that remaindered

                                    its soul      

Lyon Street chronicles a lost city. The poems are infused with a sense of nostalgia, but they don’t wallow in sentimentality and the author doesn’t feel sorry for himself, for his lost youth and a time when the city seemed kinder and gentler, before the election for president of Reagan, plus AIDS.

Some of the poems are outright funny and some are downright sensuous and seductive. Others might whip-up your appetite, provided you’re not a vegan or vegetarian, such as the poem ‘Mile High’, in which the poet describes a time he devoured link sausages, collard greens and rice, ‘swimming in sauce, which I mopped up with a soggy/ single, slice of wonder bread’.

Lyon Street reveals the generosity of Zegans’ soul. That same generosity emerges when he turns away from his book, talks directly to the audience, and acknowledges the work of fellow poets like Larry Beckett, the author of the monumental contemporary classic, American Cycle, artists like Paul Madonna, and longtime friends like Frances Phillips.

Is Zegans a Beat poet? I say ‘Yes’. As a teenage beatnik, the author of American Scream: Allen Ginsberg’s Howl and the Making of the Beat Generation, as well as the novel, Beat Blues: San Francisco, 1955, I see, hear and feel Zegans’ Beatitude. No one asked him if he was a Beat poet, and perhaps even to pose the question would have been irrelevant and unnecessary, especially since he stood next to a 1949 cherry Hudson that has helped to create the ambiance of the Beat Museum ever since it opened.

In his poems, Zegans mentions Ferlinghetti and ‘Howl’ and in the whimsical ‘P(un)k Poets too Fucked to Drink’ he repeats the lines ‘the times/demand/Williams/not Whitman’, which might sound un-Beat and subversive. Zegans remarked, ‘In an important sense, the Williams/Whitman lines speak to the very questions Ginsberg was grappling with as he prepared to write “Howl” and also the incorporation of both poets into, in Whitman’s case, the making of the poem, and, in Williams’, its heraldry.’

Zegans helps keep the Beats alive and the beat vibrant by coming at them from the perspective of a punk poet and a lover of jazz, the blues and rock’n’roll. He’s Beat because he remembers reading The Dharma Bums when it sold for 50 cents, and because when he talks about Neal Cassady as a ‘chronic car thief’ he doesn’t shake a disapproving finger and scold him, but rather laughs. What else can one do with Cassady? Cry, I suppose.

But Zegans wasn’t in the mood for tears and neither was the audience or the ghost of Lawrence Ferlinghetti which hovered above the scene on a Saturday night in November at the Beat Museum and nodded his head approvingly.