Just imagine: you're a poet whose starting out on the scene and you've spent weeks working up the courage to share your work. You get to the venue there’s a raucous crowd of OG poets, they're cheering, but they're also waiting to see what's up with each person as the step to the mic. If the OG poets think your poem is a cheap knockoff of someone else's work, they'll throw peanut shells against the bar's aluminum walls. That sound will stay with you.

This might sound chaotic and harsh (and don't worry this is not how open mics in the bay roll these days) but it was the environment where Spanglish speaking pocho poet Josiah Luis Alderete sharpened his performance chops. In the mid '80s and '90s, Thursday nights at Cafe Babar in the Mission District was an epicenter for San Francisco's poetry scene.

Cafe Babar was the spot. Josiah remembers poets would show up from the East Bay, the Fillmore, even New York. Sitting on wooden benches, you could hear the words of Julia Vinograd, Juan Felipe Herrera, David Lerner, David West and Jack Micheline.

"Babar really opened my eyes and my heart to what poetry was. I remember leaving that place like leaving the church after you get saved... This is flor y canto! This is poesía! That fucking fire coming out of mouth! That truth." 

In our conversation, poet Josiah shares some literary history of the Mission, why Axolotl's show up in his work, and how co-owing Medicine for Nightmares Bookstore & Gallery is helping keep the Mission's poetry scene alive.

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