An Introduction to the Café Babar Poets

All Hail the Barbarian Poets!

Photo: Richard Gibson

Unlike the Beat-era poets, little is known about the anarchic band of outsider poets who followed in their footsteps.

The restlessly radical talent that infused the late-20th century Bay Area literary underground paved the way for a national spoken word and performance movement.

Though locally regarded as the ‘Gladiator School for Poets’, the Café Babar, along with Poetry Above Paradise and The Chameleon Room were venues where serious writers devotedly workshopped their verse.

Before the distractions of cell phones, laptops, and social media, the power of these thriving, participatory writing scenes brought people together in community to produce work that inspired and defined their era. 

Julia Vingorad was an eccentric, indomitable street poet who fought state oppression with bubbles instead of bricks, and pushed through multiple disabilities to produce more than seventy volumes of poetry that champions those surviving on society’s margins.

She was an active participant in San Francisco’s Café Babar poetry scene in the late 1980s on through the 1990s, often kickstarting the Thursday night readings with the voluminous roar, “Staaarrtiinnng!!!”  

The raging and relentless poet, David Lerner, perfectly captured the essence and the attitude of the Barbarian poets when he wrote:

“Poetry is the rock of tomorrow… and Barbarian poetry—the sensibility, not the players—is the future of poetry. What the Babar does is take the fierce rebellion and impossibly lucent imagery of Ginsberg’s early work, mixes it up with Bukowski’s plain-spoken doom-struck melodies, cooks it all up in Bob Kaufman’s spoon, throws in the Sex Pistols, a few magazine articles and something a stand-up comic said last week, and blares out a poetry that—at its best—could be spoken at midnight on a street corner and draw a crowd.”

In a few short weeks, you can hear Julia, David Lerner, Vampyre Mike Cassell, and a potpourri of Babarian readings via the following never-heard-before audio recordings that will be offered as thank-you gifts for your tax-deductible donation in support of the in-progress feature documentary, Julia Vinograd: Between Spirit and Stone.  

• An entire evening of Café Babar readings featuring 15 poets recorded on June 23, 1988.  

• Poet Bucky Sinister reading his essay about the Café Babar, Julia Vinograd, Poetry Heckler from Our Lady of Telegraph Avenue: Tributes to Julia Vinograd (Zeitgeist Press).  

• Julia reciting 14 poems from The Book of Jerusalem that director Ken Paul Rosenthal recorded in her apartment in 1991.  

These audio confections will sweeten your ears on Giving Tuesday, November 27, 2023 via the film’s website.

Stay tuned to Poetic Outlaws for the link soon! And if you would like to read a more in-depth history about the Barbarian Poets, read this from Zeitgeist Press where you’ll also find many of their published works.

I’ll end with a poem from Julia Vinograd whose luminous verse takes us right there in the smoky atmosphere of Café Babar in the heyday of all its madness and glory. Let’s go!

Photo: Richard Gibson

For The Cafe Babar Poetry Reading

If these walls could talk
they wouldn’t get a word in edgewise. 
Love poems, ex love poems,
Beautiful blame game poems. 
Even the toilet bowl boiled over with emotion.
A beer glass smashed in praise. 
Half the girls were strippers
and came to the reading 
in their work clothes,
what there was of them.
Musk and sweat, feather boas and sequins. 
We almost broke the mirrors in the entrance room,
throwing our reflections like rocks at a riot. 
We were crucified
on a mission street cross of light bulbs, 
but we shone much brighter. 
One wall was a tin sheet
to be thunder when we hit it,
while we were lightning. 
Canaries from mines fly down our throats.
Oh, the dark. 
If the sea is a shout it is ours.
Oh, the deep. 
We tripped over songs like half-mast trousers. 
Jail bars over the sky, 
they were there for us to break thru, 
if we would. 
A long breath before the first word
while the audience shuddered. 
We were the lions, we were the gladiators
and swords fell shattering on our words;
we expected nothing less. 
Our skins embraced to make a net,
catching us like acrobats
falling in glitter and sawdust. 
Later we went to a burrito joint
with black velvet paintings.
We knocked out the bullfighter without noticing
and somersaulted over the horns of the bull 
like we’d done with the stars. 
We threw sticks for beauty to chase, tail wagging. 
Stuffy back room, the window didn’t open. 
We breathed each other’s breath,
mouth to mouth poems.
We almost died;
more than a few of us did. 
We lived forever.