Joe Safdie reads at the Gloucester Writers Center on June 1st, 2016. 90 mins.
Sara and Joe Safdie in the courtyard of the Gloucester Writers Center, June 1st, 2016.
So to start, it’s one’s literal place – the ground – that we’re talking about, as Shakespeare wrote about his lover: “My mistress, as she walks, treads on the ground.” But that place can also be inhabited in other ways, and has been by Olson and other writers like Geoffrey Chaucer – a place without hierarchy that exists without “displacing” other places – possible with “the attention, and / the care,” even when “so few / have the polis / in their eye.” That’s the project.
Joe Safdie has lived, mostly chronologically, in Oklahoma City, Los Angeles, Santa Cruz, Venice Beach, Boulder, Olomouc, Prague, Seattle, and now Encinitas, where he writes from a small office with a window that looks out over a cheramoya tree, a lantana plant, and a lemon tree.