If you like Zoom seminars, on Thursday November 19 — noon to 1p.m. Pacific Time — Bancroft Library is hosting a discussion in re: Jack London’s best pal, poet George Sterling.
Titled:
Meet George Sterling
The Famous Poet Nobody Remembers
(but Bancroft)
Sign in at the link, if interested.
I’m happy to spread the word since I was a pioneer in modern Sterling Studies — also something few remember. But we got a new plaque put up on Russian Hill and on the side managed to get the park it is in named George Sterling Park.
Among other things I put together a reading of poetry from the California Romantics — of which Sterling, his mentor Ambrose Bierce and his protege Clark Ashton Smith were mainstays. I notice with some amusement that Donald Sidney-Fryer’s current Wikipedia entry describes this reading as a play written by DSF, saying: “Sidney-Fryer wrote the group drama California Romantics, which was performed in 1982 in San Francisco by Sidney-Fryer, Fritz Leiber, Margo Skinner, G. Sutton Breiding, and Marie Boker.” Goddam. Who researches this stuff???
Here’s a paragraph from an essay I did for the book A Free Library in This City in 1996, celebrating the opening of the new Main Library. Remember, I was there. I organized the program. DSF thought that we’d have Fritz read first, since he was the most famous, but I told him, No. Fritz is the headliner. The main act. He goes last!
Here’s my blurb on the event:
I have worked on projects with and in the library over the years. The reading of poetry from the California Romantics in the Lurie Room of the Main, November 17, 1982, was one of the best. We had Donald Sidney-Fryer recite verse by the inimitable Clark Ashton Smith and for a tour de force finale lined up the fantasist Fritz Leiber with George Sterling’s epic “A Wine of Wizardry,” a favorite of Ambrose Bierce, but not the sort of poem the average person can get into today. Son of the Shakespearean actor of the same name, Fritz knew all of The Scottish Play by heart from listening to rehearsals as a child, and his tonal range was as rich as rolling thunder. Immediately after, Lawrence Ferlinghetti came over to me and said that Fritz’s rendering was the best reading of a poem he had heard in San Francisco since Dylan Thomas came through in the 1950s.
