David St. John called Larry Levis “a close friend” of over 30 years before reading Levis’s poem Anastasia & Sandman with his usual coolness; but when he read, there was something in his voice, a tone, a desire perhaps, to honor his passed friend. I hear the same, though in different tones, whenever I hear someone speak about Philip Levine. How strange. I feel like I’ve known Levine and Levis, and other poets who are no longer with us, all my life, though I never had the privilege. And I never will. *** It recently occurred to me that when I’m at school, I walk and enter into some of the same buildings as did Larry Levis and Gary Soto, Suzanne Lummis and Sherley Anne Williams. They were all once students here, yet strangely this had never occurred to me. It never occurred to me that they were even students to begin with. *** “We Grow Writers.” Yes, we do. The We is not a single teacher or a classroom, but of an entire city, a community that goes beyond lectures and workshops, classes and departments. The We goes back to almost 60 years. *** About two weeks ago, I was in the library when I casually ran into the 2015-2017 US Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera. There was a reading at the Laureate Lab, and Bryan Medina, the current Fresno Poet Laureate, was there as well. I introduced myself, shook their hands. When I joked about what …show more content…
The Santa Fe Depot 46 years The San Joaquin Valley Fresno The Fresno Poets. There’s two wonderful, black-and-white photos of the past and present of this community. Despite not knowing, quite embarrassingly, half of the people in these photos, I still felt this enormous sense of connection, of togetherness, to the point that I somehow knew about each and every one of