Nog - Guerilla Poetry.....

A few months ago I was hiking around North Beach  in San Francisco, I looked down and saw this poetry stuck all over the sidewalk.

These random off-hand almost discarded words reminded me of the late 1980's back in Santa Cruz when I walked around spreading poems like appleseeds around UCSC.  I was writing under the name 'nog' (From the book by Rudolph Wurlizer. (Also on wikipedia I just found out there was a Star Trek character named nog. as well))

I was cold and lonely in those distant years. So I think my poetry sprang from some sexual repression. I wanted attention but in some roundabout way. Why didn't I put my name on these poems? They were pretty good.... I wanted to influence people's minds but in a subtle way I guess.

As I walked through the redwoods, I would take my poems and tack them up around campus; outside the practice pianos at the music performing hall (the one with the trippy reverb), or inside the bathroom outside the art studios.

Sometimes I would get creative and fold one up and hide it in some dusty volume in McHenry Library, or when the 'Apple Sci' (applied science building) was under construction I slipped another poem into a wall before it was drywalled closed. (The last line reads, 'Hey man what's eating you')

Poetry to me is kind of like reggae or jazz. My favorites are the big names; Pablo Neruda, Gary Snyder, or Allen Ginsberg. There are other modern poets but they don't really speak to me.

Just like I know there are many other talented musicians besides Bob Marley or John Coltrane but in jazz and reggae they have made the largest ripples.

As a 'guerilla poet' I worked spreading my thought-viruses for months. Then one day I posted a poem called "Fucker" (my titles did not always relate back to the poem).

For the days and weeks after a posting I would check back on my creations, just to see if anyone had ripped then down yet. Then to my surprise someone had written "Thank You" on this poem.

I was infatuated with the Chinese Tang Dynasty poets. How they would write of drinking wine under trees while flower petals fell all around them. So one night I walked out with a sleeping bag out by the Lime Kilns by campus and wrote this story/haiku.

In those Santa Cruz years I considered 'poet' part of my identity. Once a poet always a poet? Or does one need to continually write poetry to be a poet? Can one be a poet in how they live their life?









Bob Dylan said in his memoir 'Chronicles' in order to create one must be moving. I just don't seem to have as much to say now. Maybe it is because i have sunk deep roots and am not moving anymore.

It's ok. I like trees.