“When I first came to San Francisco, I knew no one,” says Dee Allen of his arrival to the Bay Area from Atlanta in 2002. “No job, no family, no lovers either. I started my entire life over from zero and was dead broke and homeless after the third day.”
This month, and in a March 9 livestream from Bird & Beckett Books & Records in San Francisco, Allen celebrates the launch of his 10th published collection of poems called “The Mansion” (Gnashing Teeth Publishing, 106 pages, $17.50), titled for his memoir-laden, vivid takes of years living in San Francisco’s unoccupied and abandoned buildings, better known as squats.
“It was an ongoing battle to just keep a roof over my head,” he says.
Today and for the past decade Allen has lived in his own two-room house in Oakland. He belongs to the community at Homefulness, a multi-use space that connects landless, unhoused and formerly unhoused people with resources toward permanent residences. “Beneath,” the opening poem in “The Mansion,” speaks to Allen’s experience of being part of the group that broke ground and created its “growing green future, beneath the asphalt.”
The central piece of the book is the story of Allen’s on-and-off residence at a “sweet squat, big enough to be a Mansion,” an abandoned Edwardian in Japantown that repeatedly was liberated by squatting rights activists and fellow travelers.
Yet inevitably upon discovery, squats like The Mansion have been dismantled by neighbors, contractors, realtors and law enforcers who demand that denizens like Allen become unhoused again. In the breach, some folks choose to sleep on the street rather than in the shelter system.
“I never went back again after that one night,” said Allen, recalling unsettling conditions he found in a Fillmore District shelter, described in “November 6, 2002″: “Anyone could steal anything from me, while I’m catching Zs…”
Figuring his best bet was an abandoned building, he forever opted for squats or “Liberated Zones Inside the Controlled Inner City,” which is the book’s subtitle. Throughout “The Mansion,” he revisits his former pads, like “The Thorn” on Rose Street.
I wear black to recall
The loss of a home that kept me off the street,
That I wanted to provide to others in my situation
A safe haven that was taken from me.
There were others, in the Lower Haight, Noe Valley and the Mission. By day he served food at UN Plaza with the Food Not Bombs crew and volunteered for the Coalition on Homelessness. By the dark of night, in buildings without electricity, he continued to write.
“I try to record all my feelings and observations down on paper. I keep a notebook right next to where I sleep to make sure my creative process keeps going,” he says. “I don’t write every single day but I write most times, to keep the discipline, to make sense of what’s going on in my life, as a Black man, as a resident of the San Francisco Bay Area or the United States for that matter.”
Allen’s beginnings as a poet and lyricist go back to Atlanta in the early 1990s.
“I started out exclusively writing song lyrics. I worked with several different heavy metal bands that never made it past the garage,” he says.
But friends wouldn’t let him and his verses off the hook that easily.
“I pulled a Cyrano de Bergerac when they talked me into writing love poetry for their girlfriends. My first attempts at poetry were horrible. In order to learn, I read books of real poetry by Langston Hughes, Amiri Baraka, political prisoner and news reporter Mumia Abu-Jamal, and former San Francisco poet Laureate Janice Mirikitani.”
He recalled his first spoken-word performance at a friend’s birthday party at a big house where a punk band worked and practiced.
“A Black heavy metal guitarist and Brown punk bassist talked me into going up to the mic and reading a three-page piece I was working on,” he remembers. “They kept egging me on, and I walked up to the mic, with my hands shaking, did the do, got it over with and at the end, I ended up getting applause. All over a three-page poem I just finished.”
He started sending his work to zines and literary journals. “I still submit my work to those because I never forget my roots,” he says, though he found his niche onstage in San Francisco as a performance poet.
“Before coming to San Francisco, I read about the literary community in San Francisco for years, particularly the mid-20th century Beat generation: Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gregory Corso, Michael McClure, Philip Lamantia, Bob Kaufman, Diane DiPrima. They really inspired me, big time.”
It was perhaps owed to sweet synchronicity that Allen was encouraged to become involved in San Francisco’s literary community by Diamond Dave Whitaker, “a Beat Generation survivor” (as Allen calls him) hosting the open mic at the Haight Ashbury’s Park Library.
“Thanks to that particular open mic, I started going to more venues around the city. The places I still consider home are The Sacred Grounds open mic and Bird & Beckett Books & Records in Glen Park,” he says.
Allen’s previous collection of poems, “Discovery,” published in 2024 by Southern Arizona Press, probes ever-present and escalating threats on human rights through the life of its unlikely subject: Pin-up model Bettie Page.
“One reviewer got it right when she said it was a feminist book,” says Allen. ‘We still live in a country where women are still being paid one third to one half of what a man makes doing the same kind of work.”
“Discovery” is also a look at the American experiment, a simultaneous exploration of encroaching tyranny and a celebration of those who resist it.
“People tend to fear the unknown, what and who they don’t understand rather than try to understand it or approach it or engage in a dialogue with it. They lash out in the most violent ways, verbal, physical. That’s where your racism, antisemitism, even your sexism comes from,” says Allen. “I saw it in the making when I first started putting this book together as far back as 2016. There was an assault on women’s rights and the civil rights of non-white people across this country back then.”
Despite the pressures of survival in a country becoming increasingly hostile to free thinking and alternative life paths, Allen stays consistent with his writing practice and his assistance to others on their journeys toward finding ways home.
“Never mind the Webster’s dictionary definition or Roget’s Thesaurus definition of poetry,” he says. “Here’s mine: Poetry is a written attempt to try to make sense out of an increasingly insane reality. It’s also a written attempt to try to find the beauty in our everyday reality.”
Dee Allen appears in a SFLives livestream at 10 a.m. March 9 from Bird & Beckett Books & Records in San Francisco. Visit birdbeckett.com. For information on Homefulness, visit poormagazine.org/homefulness-project.
The post SF poet Dee Allen’s 10th collection chronicles 20 years, homeless and housed appeared first on Local News Matters.