We at The Capilano Review remember and mourn Stan Persky, who died in Berlin on October 15, 2024. Throughout his many years in BC after coming north with Robin Blaser in 1966, Stan contributed to TCR. Always challenging the relation between politics and poetry, getting priorities straight; examining style and interrogating the conventional approaches towards educating the young; always witty and ready to expose and laugh at the idiocies of local politicians; committed to speaking freely about gay love and desire particularly during the early days of the AIDS crisis; ready to pursue community-enlivening projects such as the Philosopher’s Café and the online Dooney’s Café with his friend and collaborator Brian Fawcett; and so much more, all of it marked by profound generosity.

Stan’s appearances in The Capilano Review, some of them excerpted below, capture his warmth and wide-ranging commitments.

Stan Persky / Notebook Entries

From Issue 1.5 (1974)

Beginning with The Capilano Review’s 1974 issue, Stan refers to his Berkeley days among the poets of the San Francisco Renaissance, including his mentor Jack Spicer who had died in 1965, nine years earlier. 

Jan. I, 1974  Spicer

. . . First dream of the new year: coming up a street . . . I am surprised to see, at the crossing facing me (I look up at the stoplight for the flash of the white man in a black background that means, Walk, Jack Spicer (in his book, Language, the grapheme, stoplight, appears).

I’m filled with welling up and warmth of intense love. And the awe of the miraculous. The shock of seeing someone returned from the dead.

I rush across the street. He’s glad to see me. I want to embrace him — to bury myself in his hug. Shake hands. . . .

Each time I question the existence of this Spicer new questions occur to me. Where has he been all these years? Is he an android of some sort? Is he a ghost?

Wake up in the middle of the night. Joyous at Spicer’s return and terrified for having seen through the illusion of Spicer’s return.

Audio / Interview with Stan Persky at Capilano College on January 24, 1975

An excerpt from a conversation between Stan Persky, Pierre Coupey, Maria Hindmarch, Daphne Marlatt, and Bill Schermbrucker.

In his twenty-minute monologue, Stan explains his prickly response to the opening ten minutes of the conversation. He describes his early and developing identity as a writer and the prominent place occupied by poetry in the 1960s when “to be a writer was to be everything.” For Jack Spicer, Stan says, “poetry was life, poetry was everything.” Now all is changed, and poetry has lost its centrality for him. As his political views have progressed, he no longer thinks of himself as a writer. He still writes but talking about writing is not an activity that he identifies with. Knowledge of the world is his priority, says Stan.

Stan Persky / Writings

From Issue 1.12 (1977)

Stan foregrounds the political in his poem “PHUOC BINH STATEMENT” from our 1977 issue, which featured an extended selection of his recent poetry and prose:

What’s relevant in poetry
is not simply a recitation of the facts, e.g.
the liberation of Phuoc Binh, January, 1975,
75 miles north of Saigon
by the Provisional Revolutionary Government
thus strengthening the hand
of the Catholic segments
in the “third force”
now arrayed in a series of
anti-corruption organizations
calling for the removal of Thieu,
as well as putting the squeeze on
the puppet regime’s control
of neighbouring Tay Ninh province.
What’s relevant there
is not simply that additional step taken
toward Vietnamese liberation, but
equally, the weakening of U.S. imperialism,
after all these years, that string of
American presidents I’ve known as intimately
as my own relatives, Kennedy,
Johnson, Nixon, and now Ford,
Rockefeller, Kissinger, the slogans
they raised — their history crosses
the awakening of my generation
who first raised the banners of
anti-imperialism within the belly
of Leviathan itself.
…

Stan Persky / Giraffes: Or, Why and For Whom I Write

From Issue 2.32 (Fall 2000)

In this piece from 2000, an anecdotal opening leads to an article about gay sexuality:

One windy spring afternoon in Vancouver, shortly before travelling to Berlin, I was sitting in a dentist’s waiting room, on the eleventh floor of a typically bland medical office building, leafing through a recent issue of Time magazine. The NATO bombing of Serbia and Kosovo had begun a few weeks before (in late-March 1999), and I wanted to check out Time’s line on it. But as I flipped through the pages, my attention was snagged instead by a photograph of a pair of giraffes. The photo was laid out in an eye-catching triangular shape, emphasizing the giraffes’ at once ungainly and graceful bodies. One of the giraffes had curled his neck around that of the other. They were literally — in a way that only giraffes can manage — “necking.”

The picture was both comic and unexpectedly beautiful in its implied tenderness. The giraffe doing the necking had his brown-and-orange haunches to the camera, while the other giraffe stood stiff-necked, at a slight angle to its partner and the photographer, its small head quizzically peering into the distance. The cut-line to the photo read: “Heavy Petting: Pairs of male giraffes often engage in extreme necking, entwining and rubbing and becoming sexually aroused as they do.” The story was headed, “The Gay Side of Nature,” and began, in Time-argot, “Giraffes do it, goats do it, birds and bonobos and dolphins do it. Human beings — a lot of them anyway — like to do it, too, but of all the planet’s species, they’re the only ones who are oppressed when they try.”

Stan Persky / from The Music of the Spheres

From Issues 3.1 / 3.2 (2007)

In “The Music of the Spheres,” Stan presents his teaching philosophy:

. . . Once we’re all settled into the room and the students are nibbling on their morning muffins, I may kick it off by saying, “On the way into school this morning, I was thinking about something we said last time about whether it’s possible to really be a solipsist about reality. Now, my idea is . . . ” And after I’ve rattled on for a bit, somebody in class asks a question, makes an observation, is provoked to challenge something outrageous I’ve said, and we’re off. Sometimes, I’ll say, “Well, you’ve read chapter two of Nagel’s What Does It All Mean?, right? What is it about?” At other times, I’ll just ask, “Where did we leave off last time?”, and then, like stoned people trying to remember what they were talk­ing about five minutes previously, we’ll fumble around a bit until we find the thread back into the labyrinth. Sometimes, when the class has coalesced into a group (about a third of the way into the semester), and things are going really well, I walk into the room and only have to say, “Well . . . ?”, and we’re on the way. It is not the only way to teach, as I’ve said, and it’s more exhausting or nerve-wracking than coming in with a well-planned, neatly-packaged talk, complete with “overhead transparencies” on which the main points of the lecture can be projected onto the screen. To make matters a bit more challenging, at the start of each teach­ing season, I try to forget everything I think about teaching, and start all over again. I tend to think of my method as “non-algorithmic” teaching. That is, it’s designed to be difficult for a computer to simulate (since I’m paranoid about teaching machines replacing teachers). . . .

Stan Persky / A Man and a City

From Issue 3.14: The George Stanley Issue (2011)

Deeply immersed in Vancouver culture, Stan writes about his San Francisco poet-friend’s own engagement with his city, Vancouver: a Poem by George Stanley:

. . . . For all its interesting complexities, Stanley’s Vancouver offers the straightforward notion that all of us (in Vancouver) have a version or vision of “Vancouver” in our minds, and it suggests the question, “What kind of Vancouver is in your mind?” That is, there’s a sense in which each of us could articulate, if we wanted or were able to, the city that we experience over time. What would your Vancouver look like? In the meantime, there’s George Stanley’s capacious mind, trying out ideas about everything from Vancouver to the void in a remarkable poem of urban exploration.

Stan Persky / Sonnet About Orpheus (Friend)

From Issue 3.17 (Spring 2012)

Finally, one last piece: a poignant poem from our Spring 2012 issue:

The law of friendship is
one of us must die

before the other
Mourning begins

before death
We imagine a world

without the friend
Speaking is impossible

but so too would be silence    or a refusal
to open one’s heart

so   the sorrow is shared
In the reader’s grief

the work of mourning
keeps the dead who never die

in us   alive within ourselves    the world
the poem   at a loss   for words