Lyon Street

In the forward to Lyon Street, Marc Zegan’s luminous new poetry collection, he explains that he spent his formative years in San Francisco and marks Lyon Street as the touchstone for his coming of age as an artist. He specifically notes the Lyon Street stairs “surrounded by a eucalyptus grove lit magically by an old verdigris lamp” where he and his friends hung out drinking beer and writing songs. With a delightfully detailed and signifying map of locations included as part of this collection, Zegans pays powerful tribute to this place, this city, in an era before both Reagan and AIDS, where he witnessed beauty, eccentricity, decadence and grit and was moved by the memory of its varied characters to write.As it happens, I’ve been relistening to Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks, and the song “Cyprus Avenue” with its bittersweet longing and visionary mélange of figures, its sweet cherry wine, etheric strings, and blissful jazzy atmosphere resonate with Zegans work. Both express hard-won rapture and hard-scrabble nostalgia for the way a place can transport and identify one’s identity. Like Morrison, Lyon Street, hearkens after a love both innocent and lost, but possible to reconjure through an artist’s sensibility in the right light.This collection contains well-wrought poems that are heart-felt odes to old friends, musicians, lovers, barmaids, BBQ, blues joints, strippers, drag queens, rival Chinese restaurants and neighborhoods, along with the simple joy of fishing in the bay and riding the Steep Ravine Beach surf. It captures an era, like Patti Smith’s late ‘60s and early ‘70s in NYC, when a place that has yet to completely commercialize and sell out, stimulates and nurtures young artists’ nerves and visions.Part of Marc’s genius is in the unique style and inspiration of each book he produces. The excellent Lyon Street is a charming and acute portrait of a magical city the poet remembers like a timeless song. It’s well worth reading.

Lyon Street is a unique book in which Marc Zegans brings us into memories from his youth and their links to the earth, buildings, and people of San Francisco. The book provides a map of the locations alluded to in the poetry, so the reader can move with Zegans through the city while moving through the evocative visual images of human interactions he creates verbally. As he recalls personal encounters, he reminds the reader of the tragic history of change in his young adulthood in the 80's, much fueled by the AIDS epidemic as well as shifts in wealth. So many visual images last after reading this piece. Full disclosure: Marc Zegans is a close friend and the most eloquent human I know personally.

Marc Zegan's Lyon Street is a poetic guidebook to the underbelly of San Francisco of the 70s and 80s. A young man's SF, where life was a little dangerous, a little sordid, and a bit of fun. These poems aren't for everybody, but lovers of underground music, art, and culture should find this highly enjoyable.

What a sweet gift to 'the city by the bay' and to anyone who sits back somewhere cosy and comfortable and decides to read this little book. Lovely collection of things remembered, treasured experiences and observations and always, the beautiful city of San Francisco and it's varied neighborhoods at a certain time, described with intimacy and love. Upon receiving it, I skipped through quickly and then slowed down to begin at the beginning. Most of all for me, the Lyon street steps and the scent of eucalyptus carried me all the way. Very enjoyable read. I must thank the author.

Magical poem narratives of the city that used to be- fog laced, vibrant, with midnight strolls on the beach, through the flashing lights in North Beach and through dark late in the parks. It is a line by line video dream of what used to be- now memorialized in these lines of poetry from San Francisco’s native son- Zegans.

Marc Zegans LYON STREET takes me back to Good Old San Francisco where I stayed at the San Francisco YMCA in 1979 when I travelled the USA like the American Beat Generation. There was a man in a Richard Brautigan story who ‘decided to take the plumbing out of his house and completely replace it with poetry’. But the poets kicked him out of his house when he wanted to replace poetry with plumbing again and ‘the man is now living in the YMCA in San Francisco and loves it’. To me Brautigan’s story was the American answer to Gaston Bachelard’s French classic ‘La poétique de l’espace’. And Marc Zegan found his own language to create a new poetic space for poetry lovers to live in. He re-invented San Francisco Poetry.

It's been more than thirty years since I visited San Francisco. On the West-Coast Beat trail, money already nearly exhausted as I trudged Russian Hill laden with newfound, long out-of-print in the U.K. riches from City Lights bookstore.Marc Zegans brings back to me the scents, sounds and the low-thunderous, continuous rumbling energy of San Francisco - and more within the places that I couldn't, didn't or dare not venture then. Down to the map in the opening pages which tells you where each of these beatific, mesmeric poems took place, they make me wistful to visit again. And when I do next time, I'll be armed with this beautiful work to further open my eyes and my mind.