Listening To Daphne

We take Daphne Gottlieb for granted sometimes: She's our performance poet, dreadlocked Amazon, and general object of desire, all six feet of her pierced, tattooed, and thought to be fearless. She's just … ours; we are San Francisco, therefore we have Daphne Gottlieb, kinky sex poetry ambassador. It seems that her own iconic reality got away from her a bit recently -- she found herself a too-frequent character in other people's dirty stories. To snap everyone out of it, she decided to take control of the phenomenon, and now we have Fucking Daphne, an anthology of maybe-fictional stories about just that, by a roster of local authors who, as you might already be suspecting, write mostly about themselves. Because editing that was not enough, Gottlieb also produced a new book of poems, Kissing Dead Girls, in which she gets all Marianne Moore on us: "and please please no more poems about poems/the only thing worse/than poems about poems/are poems about/love." Sex is OK, though.
Thu., July 17, 7:30 p.m., 2008