Poetry in the Streets 1973-1976

In 1971 I returned to California after living in Drop City, Colorado, for two and a half years, and then in New Mexico for two years, where I worked on the Navajo Reservation. I settled in Berkeley and soon began reading my work at open poetry readings. The poetry community was very alive in the East Bay, revolving around a number of different centers.

Berkeley is a cultural axis, originally spun off from the university, but it has always been more than a university town, with a significant industrial zone and neighborhoods that were and still are historically Black, Latino, immigrant, and working class. I was living literally on the other side of the tracks, and working in the industrial zone as a cabinet maker. The poetry that I connected with most, was out in the community and away from the university. One of my favorite venues at first was the Starry Plough Irish pub, where they held weekly open readings.

But I started to feel hemmed in by the limitations of poetry readings, where audiences consist mostly of other poets. I felt a deep sense of frustration and incompleteness. I had to connect more with people outside of poetry readings.

What should a revolutionary poet do? To overcome my alienation, I decided to take it to the streets.

Starting in 1973, I wrote a series of short poems, cut four of them out as stencils about three feet high, stapled them to plywood frames and began spray painting them on local walls. I signed them NJ.

By my fourth stencil poem, the limitations of the medium became apparent to me, and I realized that tagging with spray paint was not a sustainable way to publish.

So my final stencil poem also became my first silk screen poster poem, which I printed on old continuous 11×15 computer paper with holes, then posted in public places around town with wheat paste. I made ten silk screen posters in this series.

TRA (Toward Revolutionary Art) magazine printed one my poems on their cover in 1973, with a spread inside. This was followed by another spread in Radical America magazine. Liberation News Service reprinted one of the posters.

I then printed eight poems on a Multilith 1250 offset press at Bay Print Shop, which became Inkworks. These were still the days before copy machines became ubiquitous. I worked with artist Bruce Kaiper on two more silk screen poetry posters. Then one night I was pasting up a poem on an electrical box near a street corner, when a cop convinced me that I was pushing my luck and needed to rethink things. After that I focused more on bulletin boards around town, in laundromats and supermarkets, as well as handing out poems at readings.

Photographer Ken Light took photos of many of these wall poems in situ around town. Then I painted one poem freehand on the wall of the warehouse where I worked. Finally, with some friends I erected a poetry billboard eight feet high and twenty feet long (sheetrock and house paint) in the Emeryville mud flats on the approach to the Bay Bridge. The billboard lasted a few days. In their following issue, TRA magazine published a photo of Billboard 1.

In total there were 23 wall poems in this first series. Why NJ? It obviously was not John.

A friend of Bruce Kaiper volunteered some funds to print books, so in 1975 I put together my book Insurrection/Resurrection, by NJ, (1975) which included the wall poems, Bruce’s graphics, Ken Light’s photos, and other poems of mine.

In the following years, I started to read and focus more in San Francisco than in the East Bay, and became involved with other activist and street poets in Cloud House, Poetry for the People, and the Union of Street Poets. With those associates and associations, I did a second series of over fifty poetry broadsides printed on copy machines, which I continued to post and distribute on both sides of the Bay between around 1977- ’82, and which you can read HERE.