Is that Ina Coolbrith in the William Keith painting?

William Keith, With a Wreath of Laurel, 1900-1911*

Who is that tall brunette woman carrying a laurel wreath in William Keith's painting? I think it is Ina Coolbrith and that is why I chose the painting for the cover of Ina Coolbrith: The Bittersweet Song of California's First Poet Laureate.

California landscape artist William Keith and Ina Coolbrith were friends. In 1876 Keith, John Muir, and Ina took a Sunday carriage ride in the Oakland hills. “I had a most delightful time, for the day was superb, and Keith in one of his wildest moods,” Ina told Charles Warren Stoddard.

It is not known where Ina, Muir, and Keith stopped for a picnic that day, but their repast might be gleaned from a recipe for a meal that Ina later contributed to a cookbook. When asked in 1913 to contribute to the book, Ina responded that all of her family recipes had been burned in the 1906 earthquake, but that she could supply a suggestion for a picnic from one she would never forget. The setting should be “a nook under the trees,” and the meal should be eaten with a “sauce of appetite acquired by a long tramp in the fields.” The menu should include “old-fashioned, home-made salt rising bread; fresh butter; young green onions just pulled from the soil; [and] water-cresses fresh from any washed in the brook.” For the beverage, she suggested “vintage of Adam, cold, clear and sparkling from brook that grew the cresses.”

At the end of the recipe, Ina added, “Good anywhere, but best in California.”

Keith painted With a Wreath of Laurel sometime between 1900-1911. The title he gave to the painting is the same title that Ina Coolbrith gave to a poem she wrote in 1870 after she and Joaquin Miller gathered California bay laurel leaves for a crown to place on Lord Byron's grave site in England. Read "Poetic Gesture" in California magazine here.

I discovered the painting in The Comprehensive Keith: The Hundred Year History of the Saint Mary's College Collection of Works by William Keith (Saint Mary's College Museum of Art, 2011). It's the first painting in the book.

* With a Wreath of Laurel, 1900-1911, oil on cardboard, 15 3/4 x 20 inches. Collection of the Saint Mary's College Museum of Art. Gift of Cochrane Browne, Jr. 0-154.

Ina Coolbrith contemplates war on Christmas Eve 1863

Ina Coolbrith came to San Francisco at age 21 in the middle of the Civil War. On Christmas Eve 1863, she sat in her Russian Hill parlor as the rest of her family slept and the clock on the mantel kept time with her "midnight thought."

Ina was a Union girl, but that wasn't a given in California. One year earlier she had lived in Los Angeles where Union troops drilled in the streets to quell Confederate sympathizers. After she moved to San Francisco she showed allegiance to the Union by attending a festival organized by Thomas Starr King, the minister of the First Unitarian Church who was known as the orator who saved the nation.

Ina was reeling from a divorce she had obtained a year earlier after her husband tried to kill her with a six-shooter, but on this night her personal melancholia made way for a broader pathos. Here's the heart of her twenty-one stanza poem "Christmas Eve: 1863,” published in the Golden Era:

A thought of the gory trenches,
Dark-seaming our Country’s plain,
Where the forms of friend and foeman,
Rest—never to rise again!

Where the gold-tinted curls of boyhood,
Dark tresses of manhood’s prime,
And the silvery locks of the aged,
Commingle in dust and slime...

Each sabre that clashed in the carnage,
Each bullet that whizzed thro’ the air,
Hath sped to some desolate house-hold
A message of death and despair.

Yet we sing of the splendor of battle,
“The pomp and glory of war!”
Oh, God! Could those battle-fields open,
And show what their trophies are:

Could the thousands of maimed and mangled,
Of widowed and orphaned, be led
To the rivers, and hills and valleys,
That are drunk with the blood of their dead:

How quickly would rage melt to sorrow,
How silenced the cannon’s roar;
And the hands that are clenched in combat,
Be clasped in love, once more!

Fifty-two years later Ina Coolbrith was crowned California’s first poet laureate during the Panama Pacific International Exposition, an honor that made her the first state laureate in the nation.

Ina Coolbrith inducted into the CA Library Association Hall of Fame

Ina Coolbrith was California’s first poet laureate and Oakland’s first public librarian. She was inducted into the California Library Hall of Fame on Friday, November 7, 2014, during the CA Library Association’s gala at the Marriot Oakland City Center. I was proud to accept the award on Ina's behalf.

Learn more about the Hall of Fame and the 2014 inductees.

The following day, Saturday, November 8, 2014, I gave a talk about Coolbrith at the Oakland Public Library, Oakland History Room, at 2 p.m. I told attendees how John Muir, Jack London, Joaquin Miller, and Isadora Duncan spent time in the library, and explained why Coolbrith called the place her  “Inferno.”

Ina Coolbrith: The Bittersweet Song of California’s First Poet Laureate will be available in March 2015.

"View from the Blind" in Bay Nature magazine

I spent the last year learning about hunting and conservation, a long-standing tradition in North America that harkens back to the second half of the 19th century.

My story about hunters who are passionate about the natural world is in the October-December issue of Bay Nature magazine. 

Read it online.

"Okeanos: A Performance Where Dancers Move Like Octopuses and Seahorses," a blog post on Smithsonian.com

Photo by Joseph Seif

I loved working on this story because it brought together my love of dance and the ocean. While I wrote it I watched the video, "Naomi Underwater," by Joseph Seif over and over again. It is mesmerizing. Jodi Lomask, the artistic director of Capacitor, discovered a new technique she calls "sink and fall" to choreograph the video.

Go to "Okeanos: A Performance Where Dancers Move Like Octopuses and Seahorses" at Smithsonian.com

The House is Yours: Sarah Ruhl's Water

In Sarah Ruhl's script for Dear Elizabeth, she gives this stage direction for when Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell meet in Maine:

Suddenly the stage is full of water and a rock.
They stand waist high in cold water, holding hands, looking out.
A silence.
She turns to him.

Photo courtesy of kevinberne.com

I love the simplicity of that direction, and that Ruhl didn't back away from her vision even though the actualization of it sounds untenable. She believed that the director, Les Waters, the scenic designer, Annie Smart, and the stage crew could bring her imagination to fruition.

The resulting water scene in Dear Elizabeth, now playing at Berkeley Rep, doesn't match her directions exactly, but it does interpret it.

I can't say more or I'll spoil the surprise. What I can tell you is that underneath the stage there are two 500-gallon water tanks and a sump pump to get the water up to the stage. It takes two people on headsets to run the tank. When stage manager Cynthia Cahill gives the cue, "Go water," one of the the crew flips the open switch on the first tank. When that primary tank gets low, the second crew member opens the valve of the "slave" tank. "The set-up is very Rube Goldberg," says stage supervisor Julie Englehorn.

At intermission, the crew pushes the water off the stage to a downstage drain with long-handled squeegees. They follow up with towels. After each performance, Englehorn washes four loads of laundry.

And what does the water mean? Literal-minded patrons want to know.

In one poem, Bishop wrote, "There are too many waterfalls here; the crowded streams / hurry too rapidly down to the sea." So there's that. I asked a poet what she thought the water meant, and she said, "emotional possibilities." Another poet looked at me quizzically, "Does it have to mean something?"

Come see the water, and this beautiful and tender play that Ruhl elegantly describes as, "a play in letters from Elizabeth Bishop to Robert Lowell and back again."

Learn more here.

The "House is Yours" is a specific term used by a front-of-house manager in handing over the audience to the stage manager. I'm a house manager at Berkeley Repertory Theatre, but please don't hold them responsible for anything in this post other than the fact that they employ me in their house built on words.

"An Artist Creates Fog in San Francisco," Smithsonian.com

Fujiko Nakaya is soft spoken. I could barely hear her during our interview outside of San Francisco's Exploratorium at Pier 15, especially with a fork lift beeping behind us nine days before the opening of the science museum and the debut of her latest fog sculpture, Fog Bridge.

I leaned in to what she had to say: "Observation is imagination."

Read more in "An Artist Creates Artificial Fog in San Francisco," at Smithsonian.com.