Poetic Couplet: Berkeley writers Judy Wells and Dale Jensen make a life in poetry

June 7, 3:49 PMSF Poetry ExaminerJannie Dresser

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    Poets Judy Wells and Dale Jensen outside their Berkeley home.

"I hold this to be the highest task of a bond between two people: that each should stand guard over the solitude of the other. . . . a wonderful living side by side can grow up, if they succeed in loving the distance between them which makes it possible for each to see the other whole and against a wide sky!" --Rainer Maria Rilke*

GO SEE/HEAR:

Judy Wells and Dale Jensen
Monday evening, June 8, 7 p.m.
It’s a Grind Coffee House
1800 Polk Street at Washington, San Francisco

(415) 928-8904; (415) 441-1274

Inside the front door of the home that Judy Wells and Dale Jensen share in Berkeley, there is a small cardboard cut-out of a black and white Jack Russell. Puppy contemplation is in the works. When they met nearly 20 years ago, both poets were past 40 and childless-by-choice. Wells says “I’m not sure two poets living together with kids is a good idea unless they have good jobs, nannies, and a housekeeper!”

Two poets domestic-partnering? (I’ll no longer use “marriage” until the state applies its privileges equally.) The very idea courts disaster.  Emotionally sensitive, prone to melancholia, prone to substance-use/abuse, impracticality, navel-gazing: dang, got my number! But Wells and Jensen have forged an active creative and social life that seems to include “loving the distance between them" as Rilke prescribed.

Both are Bay Area natives. Jensen was born in Oakland in 1949 and attended Castlemont High School; Wells, a second-generation San Franciscan, grew up in Martinez where she attended St. Catherine’s and Alhambra Union schools. She is the elder of the pair, born in 1944. Between them, they have published 15 books and chapbooks, founded and supported literary ventures, coordinated and hosted several Bay Area reading series, and participated in perhaps as many as a hundred more. On a daily basis, they do all the things one must to sustain sanity and social dependability, with an added emphasis on nurturing their writing practices.  “Living with another poet isn’t just about poetic inspiration,” says Wells, “but includes paying the bills, caring for the house, planning the future, and sharing our books.”

Both started out in pursuit of an academic career. Jensen was well into a Master‘s Degree in Psychology at the University of Toronto but was dismayed by faculty in-fighting; he got his degree and got out, finding work in a factory for awhile, then settling into a 25-year career in the Social Security Administration. Wells was a French major at Stanford, then completed a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature at the University of California Berkeley. She was part of a group of women in the 1970s who pushed for a Women’s Studies Department and more gender balance on the faculty. For the past few years, Wells has taught in a Master’s Program at St. Mary’s College in Moraga, but prior to that she spent years as one of the Bay Area’s “freeway flyers,” part-time instructors in local colleges who work with few benefits, limited representation, and no job security. It inspired her 1991 prose and poetry book, The Parttime Teacher.

Wells and Jensen were fully ensconced in their separate yet bifurcated careers--making a living and living to write--when they first met, at a poetry reading of course. She was coming off a 5-year relationship and wasn’t looking to hook up with "another poet who needed a ride."Jensen was running a reading series at Oakland’s Coffee Mill. Their mutual friend Carla Kandinsky assured Wells that Jensen was not only nice but owned his own house.

Jensen asked her to go see Japanese filmmaker’s Akira Kurosawa’s expressive, autobiographical 1990 film "Dreams." He was looking for someone who was  a writer, or who had a strong interest in poetry. "When you write, you don’t want to be disturbed," he says. He needed a partner who "understood that writing was a priority that had nothing to do with finances." The initial spark led to cohabitation in 1992 and a civil union ten years later.

"Dale and I write in such different ways,” Wells says. Her poetry is in a lyrical and narrative mode while Jensen’s stems from Surrealist/Dada movements, avant-garde and Beat influences, poets he had begun to read in grad school, such as the more accessible Allen Ginsberg, Michael McClure, and Gary Snyder, arriving finally at William S. Burroughs and Patti Smith. Jensen quotes Andrew Joron who has called this experimental group of writers and writings “otherstream.” Wells was inspired by the breakout of  feminist writers in the late 1960s and 1970s, and by poems like “Daddy” by Sylvia Plath and poets Anne Sexton,  Susan Griffin and Judy Grahn. When Wells first heard the type of writing that Jensen was doing, she thought “Oh, my God, what is this?” She didn’t understand it though she says she grew to appreciate it, while Jensen claims that his writing “has gotten more rhythmic because of Judy.”

This difference in writing styles and their critical underpinnings and practice has meant that there is less competition between them than there might have been if they were both pursuing the same literary magazines. Instead, they enjoy the fact that they have introduced each other to writers and have gained appreciation for how the other works. There‘s even a symbiotic affect that spurs on their work: “When I’ve got a reading, and Dale’s sending stuff out, it makes me want to send stuff out, and makes him want to be doing a reading,” Wells says, noting that she was raised in a large family where “there’s always a little looking over at what the other person is doing and saying, ‘maybe I could do that too.’”

Jensen is one of several coordinators of the reading series at Berkeley’s Nefeli Café. This past weekend, both participated in the Berkeley Poetry Festival, and while they often perform in the same venue, they do not do so as a couple.

Jensen writes daily, spinning out poems that may or may not come together in a longer piece. He frequently employs a “cut-up” technique pioneered by British/Canadian writer Brion Gysin (1916-1986) and others; the poems are not always themed until he begins to put a book together. His book The Troubles focused on the 1980s and Twisted History explored ideas about history. Wells, on the other hand, works project-by-project, creating poems for a particular manuscript; she excavated her Irish Catholic heritage in Everything Irish (1999); Call Home (2005) dealt with childhood themes, the loss of her mother and relationships with siblings. Most recently, and under the influence of her academic curriculum, she published Little Lulu Talks with Vincent Van Gogh, a collection which posits dialogues between the cartoon character and some of the West's great thinkers and artists.

Since completing his most recent book Oedipus’ First Lover, from Beatitude Press,  Jensen is working on a “non-literal autobiography.” Explaining that his life wasn’t characterized by the traumas and exploits of the stereotypical poet--“I wasn’t a junky, I didn’t live in Sudan waiting for the waters to subside, and I never got into hang gliding"--he is instead exploring the emotional realm of his life using  playful techniques such as knocking off prefixes of words, paring words down to smaller suggestive units of sound, and using spelling tricks to jolt readers and listeners to hear language in a fresh way.

Wells is working on a family history project that will undoubtedly work its way into poems. She is transcribing 150 letters written in the 1860s that were passed down from her ancestor, woman of English descent from Massachusetts who came to California in 1864, married a rancher and started a family. “Since we don’t have the letters that Phebe Dickinson wrote, I have to recreate them.” And, yes, Wells discovered in doing family research, that she has ties to that other Massachusetts Dickinson.

Wells and Jensen read several times a year in the Bay Area's popular venues. This Monday, they are featured at It's a Grind Coffee House in San Francisco.

* Rainer Maria Rilke, “Letters on Love” in Rilke on Love and Other Difficulties (W.W. Norton & Company., Inc., New York, NY; 1975).