Reading to celebrate new "Milvia Street" in Berkeley February 25

Milvia Street Art and Literary Journal
BERKELEY CITY COLLEGE ARTISTS AND WRITERS

The new Milvia Street Art and Literary Journal is out and a reading of its contributors will take place Thursday, February 25, 6-7:30 p.m. at University Press Books at 2430 Bancroft Way in Berkeley.

Among the readers scheduled to appear are Doeba Bropleh, Anita Garriott, Emery Garriott, Alexandra Kostoulas, Margo Iserson, and Janice Embrey.

The new Milvia Street recognizes 20 years of survival and the hard work of students and faculty of Berkeley City College. Writing teacher Marcy Alancraig, now fulltime professor at Cabrillo College in the Monterey area, founded the journal "a lifetime ago," and it has been kept going as a collaborative project of students and faculty supported by grants from the Peralta Foundation and Berkeley Civic Arts commission.

The 2009 edition features over 40 artists and writers, nearly half of whom are poets. This is much to the credit of Sharon Coleman (at right with Birtukan Beyenessa). Coleman is a poetry instructor at the school with a green-thumb for growing poets. The work in the journal is above average  when one considers that it is “student” work, but so many of the writers in BCC classrooms are already accomplished, published writers who have returned to school to refine their skills, jumpstart a project, or enjoy community.

Take poet and storyteller Carla Kandinsky (photo below) for example: Kandinsky is a much-loved poet and artists’ model who has been active in the Bay Area’s poetry scene for several decades. Portraits of Kandinsky adorn walls and chapbooks throughout the region, and in this issue of Milvia Street, Kandinsky is represented by two send-ups of fairy tales:

The prince doesn’t care how long
she naps within the wall of roses
and thorns. His good gardening
gloves, best clippers, were stolen
when a thief broke into his car.
It’s been years since he saw her,
how does she look, all this time
without root touch-ups? She could
be a sleeping disaster.
(from “Sleeping Beauty”)

Kandinsky’s sly touch adds mischievous humor to the poems in Milvia Street, many of which are much more somber and provocative. Students’ work includes poems on geopolitics (it is Berkeley, after all), spiritual pathways, and life on the streets, as in Cassandra Dallett’s “Every Other Week”:

There were 27 wreaths
at Terry’s funeral.
He was gunned down outside his
daughter’s basketball game.
A week after that funeral
I pick my man up from work.
When I pull up
He sits on the curb, defeated, smoking.
Sliding in, he sighs, “I’m tired of being black.
I had the day of a black man”

Dallett offers the details and description to put us into that man‘s skin even if our own life experiences are quite different. Another poem that drops us into another’s consciousness is Sara Luise Newman’s “Beetle in the Flower”; its about a young man, the poet’s son, who works as a paramedic and has just responded to a  horrible Christmas Eve car accident. As in Dallett’s poem, we are invited to identify with the subject of the poem as well as its speaker.

Anita Garriott does something similar in “Morning’s Loom,” which features a lover or spouse watching from bed as her partner dresses for work. Though unspoken, the language goes beyond everyday expression in lines that include the words “mourn,” “silken noose,” and “pillowed tomb.” We are aware of the speaker’s serious loss, though we are uncertain of what it is: a loved one, a job, an identity? The poem leaves us disturbed and wondering, yet feels complete.

The erotic is well represented in the anthology, represented by Blake C. Ahrens in “Love Me Like the Wind,” a roadside sexual epiphany, and Robyn Brooks’ “Venus in Retrograde.” Amy Ballard Rich’s poem “Thump” tackles the movement of the heart in a whimsical way:

Then my heart traveled down and found my legs.
All those miles run, all those bicycle rips.
All that hiking in the woods alone.
All those muscles, scars, and tattoos
All that not being afraid to walk home in the dark.
My heart may have noticed my legs forming  solid foundation
to carry heavy loads.

Kimberly Satterfield’s poem “First Day” opens the book alongside a collage by Judith Wehlau of “2 Birds Feeding.” The poem was a good choice, containing as it does imagery of nature, of life’s possibilities, alongside images of war and street violence. By the end of the poem, both themes are woven together:

An explosion
of lemon flowers
attracts a butterfly
winging across war
   
     Wild tulips, violets
     sprout among violence
     The Red Flower Festival
                  In Mazar-Sharif

        How far can petals travel
            on the first day of spring?

The 142-page book is remarkably cohesive considering the artists and writers come from as far away as Liberia, Peru, the Netherlands and a Zen monastery, and hold a variety of professions including that of an architect, muralist, photographer, preschool owner, therapist, business consultant, and artist’s model. They also have many language backgrounds, including Tamil, Spanish, and Dutch.

Ellen Mizuhara is credited as the artists and designer who envisioned and produced the final publication, and Dana Davis is acknowledged along with Coleman as one of two faculty advisors.

Milvia Street Art and Literary Journal (Berkeley City College, 2050 Center Street, Berkeley, CA 94704: 2009). Design and production by Ellen Mizuhara, printing by 1984 Printing, 142 pages, $10.  

This is a publication of Berkeley City College
2050 Center Street
Berkeley, CA 94704
http//berkeley.peralta.edu