by Paul Buckley

Poetry for the People was founded 50 years ago at City College of San Francisco by professor Leslie Simon. Currently housed in the Interdisciplinary Studies department and taught by professor Tehmina Khan, the course celebrates poetry by asking, “how can poetry connect us to our shared humanity?” Forum interviewed Leslie, Tehmina, and former participant-poets to learn about the origin and evolution of the course, and its lasting impact on students and the broader City College and Bay Area community. These interviews were edited and compiled into an oral history of the class, which was published in print in the Spring 2025 edition of Forum. Lauren Muller, who taught the course at CCSF from 2000 to 2022, passed away in 2023. The oral history is dedicated to her memory and legacy, as well as the legacy of Leslie, Tehmina, June Jordan, and all the other teachers, TAs, students, administrators, community members, and poets who have kept and keep the spirit of Poetry for the People alive.

Forum is pleased to be able to present Leslie’s full interview (lightly edited for clarity) on the Forum blog.

Forum: Let’s start by talking about the founding of the course and how it came to be, as well as any memories you have from the early days of teaching the course.

Leslie Simon (former professor at CCSF and founder of Poetry for the People): In 1973-74, my partner, then (now husband, father to my children, and grandfather to my grandchildren), and I were traveling in a VW bus on the “gringo” trail in Mexico. And we see the murals, of course, Rivera and Siqueiros and Orozco, and I think, Oh, isn’t that something else? Then on our way back, we stop in my hometown, Chicago, and there are murals again. And I’m thinking, Whoa, wouldn’t it be nice to get poetry out to people that way, in a free way?

We made our way back to Berkeley, where we were settling then, and there was some kind of request for a course proposal. So I put together a little syllabus about this idea of Poetry for the People. I had a master’s degree in African Studies, which allowed me to teach in community colleges. So I sent the syllabus to every single Bay Area community college, about 14 of them. I had just also read the book, which I still recommend and is still in print called What Color Is Your Parachute, by Richard Bowles, and he argues, if you create the job, they have to hire you for it.

 I sent the syllabus everywhere. I heard from Solano College, they needed 25 people. We didn’t get that many, but I met in the library with some students for free, because I wanted to test out the idea. But the biggest, best news was it landed on the desk of Glenn Nance, he was the chair of African American Studies at CCSF, and he brought me in, and he said, “You know, I like this. I’m going to see what we can do, and we’ll put it in Interdisciplinary Studies. I’ll bring it to the Curriculum Committee.” So he did, and the faculty there said, “Oh, no one’s going to take this class.” But with spillover from the ‘60s, there were still active students on a lot of committees, and the students said, “If this class were in the catalog, we would take it tomorrow.” And the students pushed it through. It was 1975.

So then we have the class. I have to say that the class did not make enrollment for the day section because a teacher at the registration table was sabotaging it by telling interested students that no one was signing up for it, so it wouldn’t fly. I told Glenn about that. He said, “Okay, let’s go to the night class and see what happens.” I had printed up 750 flyers. I had posted them all over town. City Lights, up and down the stairs there, and just everywhere I could think of. We needed 15 students in those days. 28 showed up. Glenn comes in to see that, okay, no sabotage, because you couldn’t sabotage the night class. To register for a night class in those days, you just showed up, and they all showed up. Glenn says, “This is great. You got a class. I don’t even like poetry, but it sounded like a good idea to me.” I joked and said, “Glenn, you need to stay and take the class.” So he was always a supporter, and remained my supporter as I traveled through the college in many different ways.

I first focused the class on Third World poetry. I was not a feminist yet, but there was a brilliant queer student, Tede Matthews, who later went on to become a popular San Francisco poet and bookseller before he died of AIDS in the ‘90s, and Tede said, “You got to get Gay Liberation poetry in there and Women’s Liberation.” So we brought that in, and then I said, you know, I need to move on now. I am a feminist, I’m moving myself into Women’s Studies. So I asked my good friend Alma Villanueva, the wonderful poet and fiction writer, to teach it. She didn’t have a master’s degree yet, but her husband at that time, poet Wilfredo Castano, did. He taught it for a little bit, and when he transferred to another college, I asked Opal Palmer Adisa, now a well known poet and novelist, who had taken the class, to teach the class. So I had passed it on into the ‘80s. It survived, and then it’s the Reagan era. People are taking computer classes. Enrollment in the ‘80s wasn’t what it was in the ‘70s. So it went away.

But then in the early ‘90s, June Jordan started a class with the same name at UC Berkeley. The chair of Interdisciplinary Studies at City College, who is still a friend and colleague, Abdul Jabbar, said, “Hey, we got a class at UC Berkeley with that name, it can articulate, and that will get us enrollment.” And, sure enough, it did. So he put together a team, and I was on that team, and we taught it for a year or two.

Just before that, I was at Berkeley, 1990-91, and met Lauren Muller in one of my classes. She was getting a Ph.D. I was getting a second master’s in English. We became friends, and she was June Jordan’s TA, and in fact, if you look at June Jordan’s book, Poetry for the People Blueprint, edited by Lauren and a collective of students at Berkeley, you see they have a note in there about Leslie Simon’s class at City College. Lauren and I became very good friends, so I approached her with an idea and said, “You know, this team, we all have other things to do. Lauren, come over to San Francisco and please teach the class.” She was busy. So I said, “Just one night a week, come on over.” And, thankfully, she did.

We owe so much to Lauren Muller. She has to be a big part of this story. And so she comes over, she starts teaching it, and then within a year or two, she gets hired full time in IDST, she becomes the chair, and she offers so much to the college and to Poetry for the People. So I think that’s all I’ll say. Now you have the full history. I just have to remember, though, whenever I think about the origins, I think back to my mother’s apartment in Chicago. I absolutely remember when I got the idea for Poetry for the People, sitting there and thinking about the murals in Mexico City and the murals in Chicago.

Forum: I’m curious to know more about Lauren, what she brought to the course.

LS: Lauren was amazing, and she brought a more formal training in English. What Lauren brought to it is closer readings, which I love, and she absolutely helped people with their craft more than I did. I mean, I never took any creative writing classes. I never took any English classes. I took literature classes but I stayed away from the English Department as an undergrad. So Lauren brought that more formal approach. But she was also so much of the people and so much of what we were trying to do. She encouraged people to get up, to stand up, when they read their poems, to project. She gave them confidence in their gifts. She was tireless in how she supported new voices, and she did these amazing events at the end of each semester with food and community poets and Poetry for the People poets. I owe so much to Lauren. Poetry for the People owes so much to Lauren.

Forum: How have you seen the class evolve as Tehmina has taken it on?

LS: It’s magnificent. Tehmina is the perfect person. There have been other people teaching it, and they were all excellent. Tehmina is perfect. I went to one of her end of the semester parties, which had the same spirit as the ones Lauren offered. Tehmina is a gifted poet. Lauren did some beautiful writing, but that was not her main focus. She was not focused as a poet, though she left us some really great work that we’re going to publish. Tehmina is a practicing poet, and she brings that to the class in such beautiful ways. And her political engagement is filled with lots of love and a strong commitment to people’s work. So to me she is the perfect teacher for it, and I know that Lauren would be thrilled Tehmina has taken it on.

Forum: There seems to be a belief in Poetry for the People about empowering students, which is really radical in a lot of academia, where students are not trusted. Was that intentional as you were designing the course, that this is going to be something that’s student driven and directed?

LS: Absolutely, absolutely. So I told you that I went into Women’s Studies, and then I had this crisis of conscience about teaching, how it’s hierarchical and you have to give grades. I hate all of that. And then at the time—I was still part time and part-timers have to teach everywhere to make a living—I was teaching Women’s Studies at San Francisco State, where Angela Davis, who later went on to teach at UC Santa Cruz, was on the faculty. I sat in on her class on incarcerated women. And I said to myself, Okay, if Angela Davis can stomach this hierarchy, I can too. So it is about trying to break down those walls, but they’re still there.

Forum: As you think about Poetry for the People moving forward under Tehmina’s stewardship for now, and then she’ll pass it on to someone else, what are your hopes, what are your visions, as you think about the legacy of this class as we move forward into the world that we’re in now?

LS: Well, that’s a really great question, especially as you said, in the world that we’re in now. We have to keep the people’s voice alive. It’s very, very important. I remember we would bring poets to campus, and we brought Alejandro Murguia, who eventually became one of the poet laureates in San Francisco. And I’ll never forget, he was on Rams Plaza, and he did this poem called “They Kill the Poets.” Because in other countries, that happens. And part of my starting Poetry for the People was that they don’t have to kill the poets in the United States, because they’ve already killed poetry. Academia has taken a certain spirit out of poetry. Now, I don’t mind doing those close readings, and I’m glad I went back to grad school in English and got some more formal training, but, still, there’s a spirit of poetry that must not be squashed and that sometimes can be, in academia.

I remember when rap started, spoken word. I remember going across campus, and two young men were rapping to each other. I went, Oh my god, this is it. This is Poetry for the People, even outside the classroom. So it’s not letting those voices be murdered right now. What we’re facing is a fascist government that is barely a government anymore, it’s a dictatorship, and we’ve got to speak up, and poetry is a great way to do that.

Forum: It sounds like this deep belief in the political power of poetry was really present for you from the beginning, and this idea of using poetry to elevate voices that have been traditionally suppressed.

LS: Exactly, exactly. And if you think about it, some of Orozco’s murals, for example, were very political. But what really grabbed me, not just the aesthetic of it or the content, was that people could see the murals for free. They were available to anyone. I grew up in Chicago when museums were free. My immigrant grandmother, a working class woman, took my mother, a working class little girl, to the Chicago Art Institute once a week. You can’t do that now. It costs a lot of money. It’s not just about being free, however. Michelle Robinson Obama lived on the very segregated South Side of Chicago, as I did. Different generations, different neighborhoods. As First Lady, she went to the Whitney Museum and gave a speech about how it was hard for a little Black girl to go to the museum. So even if the museum is free, if you’re not welcomed there, it’s a problem.

What I loved about the murals is that everyone is welcome. And that’s why we worked really hard to get to the Greyhound bus station. We had to get a lot of permissions to do that. We went to the unemployment line, food stamp line, laundromats. Just go where the people are, and at first they think you’re crazy, and then they go, Oh, that’s cool. And then someone in the audience has a poem.