Ted Greenwald and Al Robles: November 10, 1976

The Poetry Center presents Ted Greenwald and Al Robles, reading their work in succession for this New York–San Francisco pairing in the erstwhile Barbary Coast Room of the César Chavez Student Center at San Francisco State. Greenwald, on a rare visit from his home in New York City, reads an extended set of his poems, finishing with a reading of his book-length poem The Life (Big Sky Books, 1974). Robles, regarded as the godfather of Filipino poets on the West Coast of the US, reads primarily poems set in San Francisco: in the Fillmore District at its musical-cultural heights, in SF and other West Coast Chinatowns, in Manilatown with the immigrant Manong workers of the International Hotel and other residences, and among Japanese Americans subjected to racist incarceration during World War II; he brings a guitar onto stage to accompany himself through the second half of his set in song. Lewis MacAdams, Poetry Center director, makes the introductions. 

Publisher
American Poetry Archives
Location
Barbary Coast Room, César Chavez Student Center, San Francisco State
Date
19761110
Event Run Time
01:43:28
Contributors
Lewis MacAdams
Ron Silliman
Rights

©© American Poetry Archives. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. For all other uses please email poetry@sfsu.edu.

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Ted Greenwald (00:39:45)

Ted Greenwald reads his poems: "Saturday Night," "Looks Like a Busy Week," "The words to the song were about love...," "For Joan," "Restless," "Straight On, Bearing Left," "Thinking," "Ah!" (for painter Susan Hall), "Man of War," "pre-domes graze the temple of wind...," "Next Week" (for Ed Baynard, artist), "the pears are the pears...," three "longish" poems: "For Ted on Election Day," "P.S.," and "Whiff," followed by "the gun raised and fired at the man next to the blue car...," "we're in a strange country...," "one foot in the other world...," "Ninth Street," and concludes his set with a tour-de-force reading of his book-length poem The Life (for Joan).

Al Robles (00:57:20)

Al Robles opens his set by performing, in theatrical mode, two poems dedicated respectively to Japanese writers Yukio Mishima and Yasunari Kawabata. He moves to read "Fillmore Black Ghetto," then "Chinatowns of America," "Biographical Notes" (for Japanese-American painter and US-Vietnam War-era revolutionary Wendy Yoshimura), "Cold Mountain in Chinatown," "On a Bisan Bowl" (for Ron Tanaka), "Travel North to the Woods...," "Serafin Malay Syquia, Filipino Poet," "Carlos Bulosan," "Taxi Dance" (accompanying himself on acoustic guitar and singing), his longer poem with its title translated from Tagalog as "The Heart That Grew Deep in the Soil of My People" (also with song, and with lines in Tagalog), "Ifugao Mountain, Tagatac," "A Thousand Filipino Songs" (another longer poem, also with guitar and song), concluding his near hour-long set with a longer poem written for an elder Filipino immigrant farm worker, "Lolo's Dream" (incorporating lines in Tagalog and song).

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