Poets’ faces, handwriting on the wall
A poet’s portrait means a lot more when it shares a frame with a verse scribbled by the hand of the poet.
Photographer Christopher Felver made this deduction 40 years ago, making it his mission to take the pictures and collect the writing samples of several literary icons. He’s made two books out of these diptychs, and now, for the first time ever, they are enlarged and framed in a San Francisco gallery.
“Christopher Felver: The Imagination of American Poets” is currently on display — appropriately up in April, known as National Poetry Month — through June at the San Francisco Public Library’s Main Branch in the Jewett Gallery.
“It’s the human factor; that’s what poetry is about,” says Felver, who has been entranced by the form since he was 14 and his grandmother took him to the inauguration of President John F. Kennedy in 1961, and he witnessed a reading by Robert Frost.
When Felver later became a photographer and filmmaker, he looked for picture books of poets next to their poetry, on facing pages. There were a few out there, but the poems were always typeset for easy reading. His twist was to show the handwriting.
“The idea is the calligraphic script,” he says. “If it were typeset, it wouldn’t be as interesting.”
Felver, who lives in Sausalito, is known for his portraiture of cultural figures in the arts, often done backstage at performance venues. Musicians, even rock stars, don’t mind cooperating, because he has a reputation for working so fast the subject hardly knows he is there.
But poets proved easier to work with.
Felver’s project started in 1978, when he took his camera to a May Day reading at the Savoy Tivoli in North Beach. Beat poet Bob Kaufman welcomed him. Since Kaufman had famously not spoken for 10 years after the assassination of President Kennedy, Felver paid close attention to Kaufman’s words, which were, “Mi casa es su casa.”
The resulting image and prose: Kaufman posed in a straw hat and the words, “From now on, all Presidents have to be movie stars.”
A few days later, Felver visited City Lights and took photos of shopkeeper and poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti. While there, he asked Ferlinghetti, “Would you mind writing something down?” Ferlinghetti not only wrote something down, he also illustrated it.
Once Felver had 35 portraits and 35 poems, he flew to New York and checked into the Chelsea Hotel, and within two days he had a book contract for “The Poet Exposed,” published in 1986. It had contained all the big names, from here to New York.
A second book, “Tending the Fire: Native Voices,” published in 2017, broadened the reach to American Indian poets.
Between the two books, he captured some of the greats who have since passed on — Allen Ginsberg, Robert Duncan, Philip Whalen, Philip Levine, Gregory Corso, and the American Indian voices Maurice Kenny, John Trudell and Russell Means.
Of the 300 subjects he approached, just one poet turned him down (a famous name he declines to mention). For the exhibition, he culled his images down to 50, from Ferlinghetti up through 2016-17 San Francisco Poet Laureate Kim Shuck. All of the pictures are blackand-white, taken while the subject looks straight into the camera.
“There is a creative, openminded resilience that all these people have,” Felver says. “If you look at the picture, then read the poem next to it, you see there is a connection beyond the ordinary without being heavily religious.”
Sam Whiting is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: swhiting@sfchronicle.com Instagram: @sfchronicle_art