Coit Tower Poetry Club reads Mario Santiago Papasquiro and Leopoldo Maria Panero

Join the Coit Tower Poetry Club for the May installment of their First Friday residency. This month, the gathering turns toward the restless, insurgent voices of Mario Santiago Papasquiaro (1953–1998) and Leopoldo María Panero (1948–2014), two poets whose work challenges convention through intensity, fragmentation, and a refusal of polite literary boundaries.

The Featured Poets

Mario Santiago Papasquiaro, a central figure in Mexico City’s Infrarealist movement, wrote poetry that feels immediate and unfiltered—charged with motion, urban life, and a kind of ecstatic urgency. A contemporary and collaborator of Roberto Bolaño, Papasquiaro rejected institutional literary culture in favor of raw expression, often composing in bursts that blur the line between diary, manifesto, and poem.
Leopoldo María Panero, one of Spain’s most transgressive literary voices, produced work that is dark, hallucinatory, and deeply philosophical. Associated with the “Novísimos” generation but always at its edges, Panero’s poetry grapples with madness, exile, and the breakdown of language itself. His writing resists easy interpretation, instead inviting readers into a disorienting, often unsettling interior landscape.
Together, their work offers a confrontation with poetry as something alive, unstable, and untamed.

The Ritual

The reading takes place outdoors on the back lawn of Coit Tower. Following the club’s tradition, attendees form a circle and pass around selected works by the featured poets. Anyone is welcome to step forward and read aloud—whether in English or Spanish—though simply listening and absorbing the atmosphere is equally part of the experience.

The Setting

At the summit of Telegraph Hill, Coit Tower overlooks the city and the bay, creating a striking contrast between the vast, open horizon and the intimate circle of voices below. As evening settles in, the setting lends itself to the unpredictable, dreamlike qualities of the poems being shared.

The Community

This is an informal, welcoming gathering open to all. No prior familiarity with Papasquiaro or Panero is required. Whether you come with a favorite passage or encounter their work for the first time, you’re invited to join the circle and take part in a shared exploration of poetry at its most boundary-pushing.