F2K Ep. 12: Poet David West

Fun 2 Know Podcast

David West, revered San Francisco poet is our guest for Part One of a two-part episode. Like Bucky Sinister, whose interview kicked off our first podcast, David West was a prolific participant of the San Francisco spoken word scene of the 1980s and 1990s, a scene that spawned such memorable writers as Daniel Higgs, Michelle Tea and the Sister Spit collective, Eli Coppola, Beth Lisick, David Lerner and many more. Week in and week out, David West would bring the reading's volume down to stillness as his gentle voice and his writing brought a ragged range of characters to life, some transcendent and some miserable, but David made them all human and beguiling in their own way. As wise and he was funny, David has slipped away from the world of readings to quietly ponder Shakespeare, politics and the arts while bringing a certain grace as a secretary hiding away in the business world. This episode was recorded in David's Bernal Heights kitchen as the sun and a bottle of red wine slowly disappeared. Unfolding like most of the sprawling two-part episodes of FUN 2 KNOW, the first part tells David's origin story, traveling from factories in Ohio, to an ill-fated stop at Harvard onto the mid-seventies world of Harvey Milk's San Francisco and beyond. The second part turns from biography of conversation, and David is a fount of insight and humor into people and today's world.