This Unpretentious Poetry Series Roams the Pockets of Golden Gate Park

On a brisk afternoon in Golden Gate Park’s Monarch Bear Grove, Amy Berkowitz and Erick Saenz are taking turns reading Google reviews about this secluded spot at the western edge of the AIDS Memorial Grove.

“Nice trees to walk through but easy to miss if you are here for the museums,” Berkowitz reads from her phone. An audience of several dozen people comfortably arranged on picnic blankets and stone blocks chuckles lightly — they aren’t here for the museums, they’re here for poetry.

This is the eighth event in the cheerily easygoing Light Jacket Reading Series, an outdoor, roving poetry reading hosted by Berkowitz and Saenz since March 2023. Over the past nine months, they’ve featured 32 readers, mostly from the Bay Area, in casual and unamplified meet-ups in various nooks and crannies of the park.

Saenz and Berkowitz, poets themselves, are not new to hosting. Before the pandemic hit, Saenz had just started putting together events at the since-closed San José arts space 3F, and Berkowitz was running a reading series called Amy’s Kitchen Organics out of her Upper Haight home.

Early this year, after Saenz moved back to San Francisco, he announced his desire to pick up where he left off. “I wanted,” he says, “to try to create some sort of lit scene that I could be a part of that felt local and felt good and felt kind of punk and DIY. And so Amy was a perfect person to collaborate with on that.”

The timing — and concept — appealed to Berkowitz, who craved a return to curating and reading, but like many chronically ill people, wasn’t interested in entering unventilated indoor spaces where she might be the only one in a mask. “For me, it feels really nice to be doing poetry readings outdoors,” she says. “I sometimes see people show up who feel more comfortable wearing a mask outside and I’m like, ‘Great, I’m glad this is here for you.’”

Also, she says, “I fell in love with the park during the pandemic.”

Meeting up at the Ghirardelli Card Shelter or in a field near the Rhododendron Dell, Light Jacket sheds any semblance of institutional formality. “It was just like the wackiest idea that I could think of,” Saenz says of holding the readings outdoors. “We’ve all been to readings where it’s kind of weird and stuffy and people are trying to be too quiet. It’s just awkward to me.”

On Dec. 9, poets Lindsey Boldt, Sophia Dahlin, Danielle Freiman and Christine Imperial raised their voices over the sounds of a helicopter, passing mountain bikers and the repetitive thud of a nearby handball court. The limits of projection necessitated a cozy circle of audience members; at one point, a squirrel perched on a branch seemed to pause and listen. Berkowitz announced the final reader with her 14-month-old perched apprehensively on her hip.

Most poetry readings aren’t as family or kid-friendly — nor do they have playgrounds located conveniently nearby. As Light Jacket leans into comfort and accessibility for its audiences, the series also becomes truly public in a way few readings are. At the first event back in March, Saenz says, “People were stopping and listening to a poem or two and then carrying on — it was really cool.”

Scout Faller, a San Francisco poet who might hold the record for attending the most Light Jackets, was hooked from the get-go. “I first messaged Light Jacket before I knew the names of the organizers or anything,” Faller says. “I just had this excessive enthusiasm about it.”

Faller says they mostly associate the poetry scene with Oakland and Berkeley (and told Berkowitz as much at some point). “I was like, ‘Excuse me!’” Berkowitz laughs. “So to spite them, when we invited them to read, I curated the other readers to all be people from San Francisco.”

Faller met stevie redwood, Tatiana Luboviski-Acosta and Felix Dina for the first time at that July 8 reading; the poets have stayed in close touch ever since. “I talk to stevie every single day,” Faller says. “It’s like my dream of what would happen at a poetry reading but never quite does.”

At December’s event, the poets’ styles and subjects varied — Dahlin read from a collection devoted to Bernadette Mayer, Boldt included a piece written on the N-Judah earlier that day — and yet the whole thing hung together effortlessly, with space for all the tones.

“I can think of certain reading series in the Bay Area that have had the same dozen people read multiple times over the last dozen years — and that’s fine,” Berkowitz says. “But that’s not what I want to do. I want to put people in front of an audience who hasn’t seen them yet. I want to give people a chance to do their first-ever poetry reading.”

The next Light Jacket will be another kind of first — the first time readings will take place virtually instead of in-person. The Jan. 4 event is co-hosted by Exquisites, a queer reading series in Brooklyn, and Hot Pink Magazine, poets yet to be announced. (The timing is right for a screen-bound gig: January is too chilly, even in San Francisco, for just a light jacket.)

But on Dec. 9, even when the last shafts of warm sunlight were long gone, the crowd remained rapt. After the applause for Christine Imperial faded away, about an hour after the whole thing began, Berkowitz stepped back into the circle to close the event: “As I always say, feel free to hang around, it’s public space!”

Follow Light Jacket Reading Series on Instagram to stay up to date on future events, including a Jan. 4 virtual reading at 5 p.m.