I went walking down dead end alley.

                  Nowhere to run to, stone walls

                  cold under my hands.

                  My hands are colder. 

                        - from DEAD END ALLEY 

Berkeley poet laureate Julia Vinograd has been called many things: street angel, hustler, The Goddess of People’s Park, con-artist, the conscience of Telegraph: Vinograd would probably be the first to tell you all of these descriptions are justified. One thing that can’t be denied is her brilliant accessibility ala Bukowski. The mirror she holds up to the streets and society carries a brutally honest reflection.  

                  A guy’s beard argues with the wall

                  while he watches from behind his beard

                  just in case…

                  A 3 year old girl in a yellow raincoat laughs

                  and pulls the puppy’s ear,

                  her mother sighs. The child was supposed to hold

                  the cardboard homeless sign and look pathetic…

                  The puppy’s owner pulls it back

                  under the semi-legal shelter of a shop awning,

                  scratches its belly

                  and finds it some dogfood.

                  There’s no people food, not at the moment.

                  Maybe later. Maybe not.  

• excerpts from “Rain On The Street”

Vinograd has been doing this work since the late sixties, a time when a poet could choose a life on the street and still carve out a nice day-to-day existence. In nearly forty years, she has published approximately forty books, and she is easily Zeitgeist’s most prolific writer.   

Well over ten years old now, The Eyes Have It is unique in that the cover depicts Vinograd in the role for which she has become most famous; that is, the Telegraph bubble lady whose signature floating spheres themselves represent the simple, consistent and gratifying dream that is Vinograd’s prose style.  Eyes also represents a particularly interesting phase in her career, not just the peak of the Babar scene (which also represents the final gnarled cry of the truly explosive spoken word movement that ruled for the standard fifteen minutes in the early 90’s before devolving into post hippie styled slam competitions) but also the grassroots conservative backlash which came into it’s own at that time during the ’94 midterm elections: 

                  We’ve just elected the bogeyman,

                  lots of bogeymen.

                  They don’t feed children,

                  they eat children.

                  And maybe they wear suits on TV talk shows

                  but I’d know those smiles anywhere.

                  White teeth anticipating. 

• from “The Election”

Vinograd doesn’t pretend to be a saintly person in her work.  She has more than a passing familiarity with the process of separating the naïve from their precious currency: 

                  …the tarot reader knows

                  where the face feeds

                  and what sort of house of cards

                  it needs to relax in.

                  He has them all up his sleeve:

                  the castle where he waves a hand

                  makes eye contact

                  and invisible servants bring in the mind

                  on a silver platter… 

• from “Tarot Reader On The Street”

But not for one minute does Vinograd, like Baudelaire and Bukowski, feel the need to apologize for this way of street life in a world that runs the exact same con games in the courts of law and the media. The strength of her poetry is her precarious balance of this same dynamic in two very disparate experiences, as we can see in the final lines of the final poem of Eyes, “My Time Machine’s Broken”: 

                  A fetus shoots doctors.

                  My time machine’s broken.

                  Swarms of young people go to nightclubs

                  dressed like shop window mannequins.

                  When the clubs close

                  they’re sprayed with gold paint,

                  frozen and put in shop windows.

                  They never move again.

                  My time machine’s broken,

                  rich grown-ups take food out of children’s mouths

                  proudly

                  and want everyone to watch

                  and do the same.

                  My time machine’s broken.    

-Paul Corman-Roberts