This has been a bracing few years, when all the changes have been so apparent, and I’m not on board with what’s been happening. Writing about the language that people use to traffic in the world of San Francisco now is a way for me to address it and to cope with it. And that’s not true, but sometimes it can feel like that. There have been lots of times when I’ve felt like the last poet standing in San Francisco. RANDALL MANN For me there is a real ambivalence, in particular when I was working for biotech companies: I’m in the middle of an economy that is increasing the disparity between rich and poor, and pushing out what are also “my people” - queer artists. You use so many of the elements of what has been happening, but you never sentimentalize them or allow them to become moralistic symbols.
I talked to Mann over the phone about rhyme and reason, pornography and gentrification.Ĥ8 HILLS I think of you as kind of our bard of the emotional and metaphorical effects of “techiness” on San Francisco, how corporate language can rule over relationships.
Proprietary is an excellent gauge of what it feels like to live in San Francisco - or at least what it recently felt like, until the presidential election knocked everything into a different dimension.
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Proprietary is full of contemporary Bay Area markers, transfigured by Mann’s delicate turns of phrase and moody intrigue: CFOs asking to “ loop back with you,” crickets chirping on Divisadero, realtors overselling Ocean Beach-front property, a “parliament of scowls at the Owl Bar,” strange feelings of being followed over Carquinez Bridge.Īs in his previous books, Mann’s sensitivity as a gay man and poet in a rapidly changing city and rapacious global economy take center stage (there is a poignant sestina about fisting - a fistina?), but this time the language is shot through with sometimes hilarious, sometimes heartrending corporate-speak.
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“Once I figured out how to write about it, how to leach a poem out of it all, it was time to let go and move on,” he told me over the phone, referencing his recent severance from the company. Like most of Mann’s poems, this one is pretty autobiographical: He worked at Genentech for a decade, a sly recorder of corporate biotech culture and its surreal doublespeak, filling his notebook with the language that would become Proprietary‘s poems. “It might be nice to lie and watch the smoky/ marrow rise and fall, and rise. (Mann reads with fellow poet Alex Dimitrov at City Lights, Wed/15 at 7pm.) The speaker sits “seven boxes below the CEO on the org chart” in “an office that faces the hallway” where “ calendar is a verb.” Eventually he convinces himself to take a walk through the leafy trees near Building 5. So starts the unnerving “ Proximity,” from local poet Randall Mann’s fourth collection, Proprietary, released this week from Persea Books.
It ferries us south to the technical mouth
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