Leo Cruz makes the most beautiful white bowls; / I think I must get some to you / but how is the question / in these times”
Those are the first lines from Louise Glück’s poem “Song,” among the pieces the Nobel laureate recited at her February 2, 2023, Lunch Poems event at Morrison Library. The place was packed for Glück’s reading that day. People lined the railing at the second-level balustrade and looked down from behind the podium. A spillover crowd peered in through the windows. All that for a subdued poetry reading. And yet it was precious; for nearly everyone there it would be the last time to see Glück, who died later that year.
“It’s an argument for embodiment,” said Geoffrey O’Brien, the series’ current director, trying to explain why Lunch Poems, held in the Morrison the first Thursday of every month, persists in its 30th year, at a time when presence-optional, screen-first living is the norm.
O’Brien took over the series about a decade ago. In the intervening years, questions about the viability of the humanities have only piled up. The pressure is on across higher ed to demonstrate value and paths to growth—anathema to most artists, unless the idea is growth of the human spirit. So, what are the prospects for poetry in general and Lunch Poems in particular? Does the line, whatever it’s measuring, go up and to the right? O’Brien, a poet and a past reader at the series, laughed, then turned to the structure of poetry itself. “With poetry, the line goes to the right, and then it enjambs back to the left margin,” he said.
The idea for the series was conceived in the mid-1990s by Zack Rogow, a poet and playwright who worked in the School of Education. He was inspired by a popular midday music series on campus that students, faculty, and staff could attend during their lunch breaks. Why not try the same with poetry?
He brought the idea to Berkeley Professor Robert Hass, who had just been named U.S. Poet Laureate—widely considered the first from the West Coast—and was looking for ways to bring the genre to wider audiences. Hass named the series Lunch Poems in a deliberate nod to Frank O’Hara’s 1964 collection. “It was just kind of serendipity,” said Rogow, now retired, in a WhatsApp call from Provence, where he is working on various writing projects, including a book of poems. “You know, at poetry readings you’re lucky to get 30 people,” he said, adding that “from the beginning, the crowds were much larger than that.”
Hass’s fame and gracious introductions proved magnetic. Consider a sampling of early readers: Jorie Graham, Tess Gallagher, Claudia Rankine, Galway Kinnell, Gary Snyder, John Ashbery, and, of course, Berkeley Professor Czesław Miłosz, who won the Nobel Prize in 1980.
The venue, tucked into a corner of the Doe Library building, also helped. With its dark-wood paneling, enormous windows, mismatched seating, and first editions, the space, sometimes called “the university’s living room,” seems to exist outside the normal pressures of life—perfect for poetry readings.
For the first several years, each new season of the series was kicked off with a reading featuring members of the campus community—scientists, administrators, university staff, coaches—reciting their favorite poems. At one kickoff, astrophysicist Alex Filippenko read Walt Whitman’s “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer,” a poem whose speaker, growing bored with a scientific lecture, wanders outside to look at the stars in silence. Filippenko, whose research would help lead to the discovery of the accelerating expansion of the universe, refuted the poem from the lectern. “It’s true I don’t see stars up in the sky, but rather giant spheres of hot gas,” he told the room, “but for me, that knowledge enhances the beauty of nature, and adds to my enjoyment of it.”
These days, Lunch Poems exclusively features poets—often local ones, which undoubtedly keeps travel expenses down. It’s perhaps a sign of harder times for the craft. Last November, the Poetry Foundation, one of the wealthiest private poetry institutions in the world and the publisher of Poetry magazine, announced it would step back from public programming, instead directing its resources toward philanthropy to better support individual communities in the broader poetry ecosystem. In the late ’90s, Hass wrote a popular poetry column for The Washington Post. Today, the idea seems quaint. But then, increasingly, so do newspapers. Adding insult to injury, a 2024 University of Pittsburgh study suggested that, in blind comparisons, readers preferred AI-generated verse to that of Shakespeare and Dickinson.
This concerns O’Brien. “What’s amazing about poetry,” he said, “is that you go back to it because you’re never done exhausting the complexity of what’s there.… If you shirk the possibility of generating that complexity yourself as a poet, in one way or another, then I think you’ve lost the cognitive and feelingful experiences that have made the genre.”
There was silence in Morrison that day as Glück finished reading the enigmatic “Song.” The poem works, she told an interviewer, because we can’t find Leo Cruz—a name that came to her in a dream.
“He is teaching me / to live in imagination: // a cold wind / blows as I cross the desert; / I can see his house in the distance; / smoke is coming from the chimney // That is the kiln, I think; / only Leo makes porcelain in the desert // Ah, he says, you are dreaming again // And I say then I’m glad I dream / the fire is still alive”
Geoff Koch is a writer and poet in Portland, Oregon.
