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Poetry, artists featured at Watershed Festival
The Sixth Annual Watershed Poetry Festival comes to Berkeley’s Civic Center Park Sept. 8, noon to 5 p.m.
This free family-friendly community gathering features a day of poetry, music and more. Artists such as poet Robert Haas, writer Maxine Hong Kingston and musicians Grito Serpentino will be complemented by River Village exhibits and interactive events for the entire family.
Watershed Festival brings together citizens and artists to apply our imagination to the problem of environmental despoiling. To highlight connections between literature and place, celebrate poetry, form a partnership between literary and environmental communities.
Berkeley itself is a watershed. Strawberry Creek runs down from the Contra Costa Hills to the bay. Beginning at 10 a.m. at Oxford and Center poets and others will walk three blocks to the Watershed Festival stage, taking the route of the creek as it tunnels beneath downtown Berkeley.
In this symbolic “daylighting” of Strawberry Creek poets and others will discuss plans to open the creek to daylight.
What we have done with Berkeley’s watershed, this place where we live, is analogous to what we are doing with many things in our lives, putting them away, trying to bury them.
But they’re there. The nuclear waste radiates away, the creek winds its way to the bay.
In our symbolic opening up of Strawberry Creek, we call attention to it, to our connection to it. We release our trapped spirits.
