Koan Kinship — Bill Mohr's Blog

Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Center has presented thousands of poets in public readings since it was founded, in Venice, California, in 1968 by George Drury Smith, whose primary interest was not a cultural center but a magazine that focused on avant-garde writing. Beyond Baroque’s survival during its first half-dozen years depended entirely on George’s determination and a handful of donations from compassionate arts advocates. What needs to be emphasized at this juncture in American literature is that Beyond Baroque was quite different from another project that was founded in NYC in the mid-sixties. The Poetry Project was started with funding from the federal government. Beyond Baroque idid not receive a penny of federal grant money for its first haff-dozen years.

Smith died two weeks ago, in Los Angeles, and I learned of his passing soon after it happened. I was asked by Beyond Baroque, however, to withhold any public statement until the organization had released a public tribute. A friend alerted me to a short statement on an Instagram account, so I assume I have permission tcall attention to Smith’s extraordinary accomplishments as an editor, publisher, and arts curator, in addition to being a writer himself.

In this post, I am going to take the liberty of letting George speak for himself through the biographical sketch that he posted to accompany the publication of his book, The Slant Hug o’ Time. I have memories of George that I would prefer to include in my own memoir rather than reveal them now. I do want to say, for the time being, that I would never have been able to come to the assistance of so many other poets in Los Angles unless George had empowered the small press scene in this city by securing the funding that started New Comp Graphics, a typesetting and book production facility at Beyond Baroque that stared in the mid-1970s. When the communities of poets thank George, it should be not just with a general nod toward Beyond Baroque, but to the very specific ways he invigorated a scene that could easily have withered in its earliest stages.

***

George Drury Smith (in his own words):

I currently divide my time between Los Angeles and Amsterdam, where my now-husband had several post-doctoral research teaching fellowships at Dutch universities after completing his PhD in theoretical linguistics at UCLA. He now has a language services business.

I occupy myself with writing, editing and reading. My novel, “The Slant hug ’o time,” was published by Kitsune Books in 2012 (available on Amazon).

I worked with Sophie Rachmuhl editing a translation of her French doctoral dissertation on the Los Angeles poetry scene which was published as “A Higher Form of Politics: The Rise of a Poetry Scene, Los Angeles, 1950-1990” by Otis College of Art and Design’s Seismicity Editions in late 2014. I am listed as co-translator.

My interest in experimental, “avant-garde” writing spurred me to start the magazine Beyond Baroque in 1968 and I opened Beyond Baroque Center in Venice, California, which focused on literature, publishing, poetry and fiction readings and workshops, art exhibitions and musical presentations. In 1972 this became Beyond Baroque Foundation, a nonprofit tax-exempt educational organization. Around 1980 Beyond Baroque moved into The Old Venice City Hall, 681 Venice Blvd., Venice and I resigned as president and director of the foundation, but stayed on its board of trustees for another decade. What became known as Beyond Baroque Cultural Arts Center has survived, and is still in the Old Venice City Hall in Venice, said to be one of a handful of such institutions in the country.

I am currently working on what I call “memoires” relating to Beyond Baroque.

I am interested in languages, which I studied in Europe for three years as an undergraduate. I am still reasonably fluent in French, but much less so in Spanish and German, which I once spoke fluently. I studied in France, Spain, Austria and Germany for three years as an undergraduate and I received a Bachelor of Arts cum laude with majors in French and Spanish and a minor in German in1953 from Marietta College, and went on to the University of Minnesota as a graduate teaching assistant, but did not complete work for an M.A. Later I entered the Graduate Internship Program in Teacher Education at the University of California at Berkeley, and then did some graduate work in French, German and Spanish at the University of California at Los Angeles.

My careers have involved being a trainer and reservations manager for Pan American World Airways in Los Angeles, Chicago and Dallas; teaching foreign languages and ESL in San Jose and Santa Monica, California; working for The Argonaut, a weekly newspaper in the Los Angeles coastal area in various capacities, including copy editor, associate publisher and CFO.

I enjoy reading, movies (especially foreign and “far-out”), theater, classical music and art, and spend a few weeks in Paris several times a year while in Europe.

***

PRAISE FOR “The Slant Hug o’ Time”:

 “HOWL meets ULYSSES in a book like no other! George Drury Smith, iconic founder of the Beyond Baroque magazine and Literary/Arts Center in Venice, California, crafts an amazing alternate-history tale of invention, corporate control, and hidden agendas, all told through Smith’s tour-de-force wordsmithing. “Playfully earnest and pleasantly baffling, ‘The slant hug o’ time’ is a work like no other. Enabled by rhymes, puns, anagrams, science, pseudo-science, reason and unreason, it joyfully elides the past, present, and future… In other it’s a slippery world out there, and welcome to it.” -Jim Krusoe, author of ‘Toward You’ (Tin House Books)

MARK ON YOUR CALENDARS — SEATING LIMITED

Make your reservation ASAP

William Andrews Clark Memorial Library

       presents a day-long conference on

 “California Fine Press, and Literary Activity”

 Friday, November 13, 2026

  9:00 a.m. – 5:30 p.m.

                           featuring

      Johanna Drucker (conference chair)

                                  and

                       John Bidwell

                    Helena de Lemos

                      John Howell

        Bonnie Thompson Norman

                       David Kipen

                     William Mohr

                       Pat Reagh

              Brian Kim Stefans

                      Vicki Steele

                 Paul Vangelisti

       Free and open to the public. Reservations required.

                 William Andrews Clark Memorial Library

                   2520 Cimarron St, Los Angeles, CA 90018

The William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, is a library affiliated with the University of California, Los Angeles. It holds books and manuscripts with particularly many regarding English literature and history from the 17th-19th century, Oscar Wilde and the fin de siècle, and fine press printing..

Recite again, fond muse, the stratagems

Devised by Wiley E. Coyote, whose jaunts and dives,

sprints, leaps, and twisted somersaults

Are mocked by Acme’s product line…..

*********

If Emily Wilson was disappointed by how the “complicated man” of her translation of The Odyssey turned out in her opinion to be “uncomplicated” in Christopher Nolan’s cinematic adaptation, then she needs to take an afternoon off and buy a ticket to Coyote vs. Acme, a film that almost ended up on the proverbial cutting room floor in its entirety. Salvaged by a protests from fans of the eternal return of Coyote vs. Road Runner, the film features an Oscar-winning performance by the titular character. I kid you not: this biopic, in which the protagonist plays himself, offers the Academy Awards committee a chance to have the shortest acceptance speech ever given: “I have a limited number of signs.”

One of the most remarkable aspects of this film is that it is a comedy that has little interest in making its audience laugh out loud. Instead, this is a delightful intellectual exercise in which Mr. Coyote accepts the astronomical odds of failure with undiminished appetite. The courtroom he confronts is not the one empaneled in a civic building; it is also in the motel lobby where the desk clerk humiliates Mr. Coyote by citing the rule, “No pets allowed” when the lawyer checks in to his by-the-week abode. Fed up with the clerk’s dismissals of his equality with the other guests at the motel, Mr. Coyote holds up a sign with a macabre rejoinder: “I eat pets.”

Lest one think that Coyote vs. Acme is merely a piece of entertainment in which live action and animation are a perfect tag-team, one should consider how the final scene at a congressional hearing drives home the protest point: corporations have used animals for their ghoulish experiments for decades and decades, all in the name of the “progress” promoted by Foghorn Leghorn. That’s the obvious target. The less obvious one is us: corporations see us, the consumers, as nothing more than cartoon characters whose dignity is a laughing matter at board meetings. We exist not merely for their profit, but for their finicky, outlandish entertainment.

One beep for no. Two for yes.

Beep, beep.

When President Trump was first running to be President of the United States, he told an audience at a Christian college that “”I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters, OK?” I doubt he would have lost Bernie Goetz’s vote.

Goetz, for readers whose knowledge of those alleged to have indulged in vigilante justice needs refreshing, shot several African-American youths on a New York City subway on December 22 1984. Considering the severity of Goetz’s attacks on his victims, it was a bit of a shock to me at the time that he got off fairly lightly in terms of his criminal record and time served in confinement.

A new book on Goetz was published in early 2026 about Goetz entitled “FEAR AND FURY: The Reagan Eighties, the Bernie Goetz Shootings, and the Rebirth of White Rage.” The photograph by Peter Morgan could not have been better chose. To the left lof the roughly six by four inch image, a handprinted sign blares out is message above a white man’s head: “CONGRATULATIONS! Bernie Goetz wins on for the GOOD GUYS!” In the foreground, facing the man, are a pair of African-American individuals, with anguished disbelief buffeting their features.

If anything  reveals how out of touch the Weather Underground was with the inclinations of the American populace in the 1970s and early 1980s, the Goetz case has to be in the top five instances. It would be a mistake, however, to isolate Goetz from the foreshadowing that one can find in popular culture in the decade before Goetz engaged in his assault on young African-American men.  If Trump would not lose Goetz’s vote, neither would he have ever been in danger of losing Archie Bunker’s vote. Bunker’s vote is merely a thought experiment, of course, but the world view he articulated in ALL IN THE FAMILY from 1971 to 1983 leads one to suspect would have been one of the people who called the police hot tip phone line and expressed support for Goetz’s actions.The fact of the matter is for every Michael Stivic, the liberal son-in-law of Archie Bunker who might have harbored some secret admiration for the Weather Underground, there are two dozen men who identify with Archie Bunker. At least a few of those in the viewing audience went on to have real life children who joined the “Proud Boys” whose notorious support of Donald Trump only served to amplify Trump’s street level credibility.

Goetz may not see what he is responsible for, but that will not lighten the penalties that history will impose on him. While guilt by association may seem like arbitrary collage, I see no other way to underline the continuity of the factors at work in undermining any possible redemption of social life in the U.S.A. The extent to which Goetz feels no shame about what he did on that subway car in 1984 is proportionate to the lack of shame felt by the Proud Boys who championed Donald Trump for president.

August 19, 2026

After the death of my friend Harley Lond, I began to try to salvage my blog. Whether or not I have managed to do so remains a problematic conjecture. I have spent dozens of hours on the phone with GoDaddy representatives the past two months, yet for all I know, this blog will disappear in one week or one month. All I know is that I’m tired of being put on hold for hour after hour after hour, only to have the representative “drop” the call.

Among other projects, I have been typing up a list of books that have to find another home. The CSULB library has expressed interest in a “Bill Mohr Collection,” and I would be happy to donate my books, even though I have my doubts about whether CSULB would respect their provenance twenty years down the road. In any case, since I will turn 80 years old in less than a year and a half, it is imperative that I begin “dostadning.” The more books I move out of the house Linda and I rent, the easier it will be to move when the landlord’s son sells this house after she passes.

Also of note is that Linda and I went to LACMA recently with Michael Docherty, who was in town to do research. We had heard favorable reports of the museum’s new design, but all three of us thought it was a major disappointment. I find it impossible to believe that the people in charge of LACMA actually thought this design was an improvement. It certainly didn’t inspire whoever curated the current exhibition in the wing that straddles Wilshire Blvd. to mount something that is an advance on what might have been on exhibit in the Los Angeles Museum of History, Science, and Art, in Exposition Park.

In getting the blog started again, after this hiatus, I thought I would start by addressing a book that asks difficult questions about the historical context out of which the Democratic Socialists of America will be recruiting the next generation of political leaders.

“DESPERATE, CLEAN, NON-VIOLENT, AND YOUNG”

Perhaps the most compelling piece of writing I’ve encountered the past several months is an article in the Los Angeles Review of Books about Zayd Ayers Dohrn’s Dangerous Dirty Violent & Young: A Fugitive Family in the Revolutionary Underground. This memoir reveals the tunnel vision that a handful of opponents of the Vietnam War succumbed to as any possibility of the United States recognizing its errors steadily diminished between 1963 and 1975. I use the term “tunnel vision” to describe the choices made by the Weather Underground because I truly don’t understand how the Weather Underground ever could have fantasized that a left-wing revolution was possible in the United States. It’s absolutely ludicrous to believe that a small cadre of white revolutionaries could align themselves with the Black Panthers in such a manner that it would inspire a massive insurgency on the part of the American populace against the most powerful military-industrial complex in the world.

What other options did “Desperate Dirty Endangered & Young” people in the 1960s have? By “endangered” I initially mean those subject to the draft, who had three options: into the military; go to prison; or go to Canada (unless of course they flunked the physical exam). I suppose there might have been a fourth option: one could set oneself on fire, either literally or metaphorically. The literal instance was, in fact, a choice made by several Americans, including one in Los Angeles. Her name was Florence Beaumont. The metaphorical self-immolation is a far, far less arduous trajectory, but it offers a person a way to retain some measure of inner equilibrium in the face of monstrously devouring power. Smoldering choices, on a daily basis, must be made with a quiet discipline. Perhaps kindness is the most revolutionary act of all.

In any case, I recommend a thoughtful perusal of Emmett Rensin’s review of Ayers Dohrn’s memoir. Rensin brings to his critique a harrowing awareness of the multitude of impositions that the United States of America should have o its conscience. The U.S.A. is, at the present moment, an empire unlike any other seen in human history. How long it can sustain itself without imploding under the weight of its success will only be determined by the willingness of its populace to fully comprehend what it means to have that global stature. American citizens don’t merely have enormous privileges that they have done little to deserve other than win the lottery of birth; they have very little sense of what they should do to exploit those privileges, other than casual consumption. It is perhaps in this disparity that one can find the crevices in which to practice a metaphorical self-immolation. A “better” world may not be possible; a more remunerative world of shared knowledge, however, is still attainable. At the very least, a memoir such as Ayers Dohrn’s allows us to partake of a history too many wish to prefer had never happened.

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/dangerous-dirty-violent-young-ayers-dohrn-weather-underground/

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/dangerous-dirty-violent-young-ayers-dohrn-weather-underground/

A Better World Is Not Possible

Did the Weather Underground have a point?

TUESDAY, JUNE 23, 2026

This morning, I saw a news headline in my email in-box that referred to a gunman having killed some people at a library in Chico, California. My first thought was that it was probably a domestic dispute. Don’t ask me why I thought that. When the unfamiliar interrupts one’s attention to the mundane tasks of early morning, one posits that which seems immediately possible as an explanation.

Instead, it is reported that the gunamn had no known connection to the two people who were killed. News reports further claim that an 18-year-old, who allegedly had aspirations to kill many people, has been taken into custody as the suspect who committed the murders.

If these reports are accurate, it suggests hat two adults woke up yesterday morning and had not the slightest notion that they would be gunned down by a total stranger for no other reason than they were an available target on the gunman’s path to infamy. How is this not, yet once again, an instance of an unfathomable sickness in our society?

“Thought and prayers….” will predictably be recited.

“Is there a hole for me to get sick in?” sang Bob Dylan.

******

Over 30 years ago, I wrote a monologue entitled “Whose Gun,” which Jordan Jones published in an issue of BAKUNIN magazine. I reprint it now with the fraught knowledge that someone who reads it might themselves someday become a victim of the easy access, in this country, that mentally ill people have to guns. Foreknowledge is inherently granted to the literate. Foreboding contingencies, yes; but queasy anticipation is not the same as the abrupt trajectory of personal catastrophe.

I hope that all who read “Whose Gun” are spared the fate of those who were in Chico’s library, though who knows? Perhaps I, too, am sauntering toward that desolate crossroads. Why me? Why would I deserve this fate? Why should those who were murdered in a library in Chico deserve to die in that manner? The can be no sufficient memorial for this “shadowed ground.”

“Justice” is a farce of a stage play, directed by a callous manic-depressive.

WHOSE GUN

You don’t want to shoot me.

You don’t want to shoot me.

You want to shoot the man who pretended to be your father.

You want to shoot the man who pretended to be your father.

It’s not dying I’m afraid of

But the pain of the facelessness of it —

Your facelessness.

Your face is not one to ask questions.

You’re too numb to ask questions.

You’ve stupefied yourself.

You want me to pretend.

You imagine death simply is not —

Simply not —

The not that blends sweat and fear

Into spit on the ground —

Skin hooked into the part that can’t be buried.

You want to kill the part of me that can’t be buried.

You want to kill the part of me that can’t be buried.

If you could kill just that

You would be happier.

But you can’t.

No matter how often you shoot

That part won’t die.

I won’t live to see it live.

I won’t live to see it live.

It’s not me that living.

It’s not me that’s living.

That your face should be the last one I see.

That is the crime that can’t be forgiven.

That’s what makes you evil.

I hated flying in airplanes

Because I didn’t want to die next to people I never knew.

The plane slamming into the mountain’s side —

Each bullet the pilot

Knowing the engine’s on fire.

My stove. I don’t like to cook

But I’ll miss my stove.

It’s a messy stove. The dishes

Aren’t done. Sometimes I’ll come home and eat

Spaghetti sauce I made the day before

And I’ll eat it cold, forkful after forkful,

Not even warming it up.

My friends might think I’ll miss

My records or my books or my dog

Leash and its long black coil

Of leather, but I’ll miss my stove.

Imagine shooting a stove.

But you, with your fucking gun

Don’t know the difference between heating a sauce

Or boiling an egg.

A stove has a face that I’ll never forget.

The face of onions.

Brown onions.

I gave them onion names.

Uncle Double Onion. A strong one.

Strassel onion — the sound of an onion growing.

Now the onion grows with green peppers,

Mushrooms, garlic and tomato sauce.

Its name grows like a vine with gourds,

yellow, brown and orange.

You don’t want to shoot my stove.

Who else do you want to shoot?

My stove accepted me.

You don’t want to shoot me.

You don’t want to shoot

Anybody but the ones you need to shoot.

They aren’t here

And they deserve to be shot.

If you can judge me,

I can judge them.

I stopped at this store:

Green beans, cranberry sauce, cat food.

You walked up, took my wallet

And car keys. How long do you want

Me to plead? I am more than my stove.

I hardly ever think of my stove.

It’s there. In my kitchen.

If my stove were next to the front door

Or my bed, I might think of it more often.

What does your gun have to do with my stove?
I cook one thing at a time.

You fire one bullet at a time.

My legs look good.

I like their muscles.

Not many people have seen my legs.

You can’t kill me by shooting me in the legs.

You could, but it would be difficult.

It would be easier to shoot me in the face.

The forehead. The eyes.

The side of my head.

Or in my chest.

If only I could imagine your face

As well as I can see my stove!

But your face is not a face

That should be remembered.

It should be forgotten

Like a night when one has gone to sleep hungry.

You’re not hungry. You’re angry.

You have stopped your anger with sleep

More often than gone hungry.

Whose gun?

Whose moment of insatiable defiance?

When you could have shot me

And said, much later, he deserved to die.

You want to shoot so many others.

You want to shoot all these others

Except they aren’t here.

You want to shoot all these others,

So you don’t have any choice —

You shoot me or you shoot them.

You don’t have any other choice.

You don’t want to shoot me

But you need to shoot them.

You don’t have any other choice.

Saturday, June 13, 2026

It’s mid-June in Long Beach, California, and I have finally caught up with enough personal tasks that went undone in the past semester to be able to devote some time to my blog. About a month ago I happened to see Alex Umlas at a poetry reading featuring Alexis Fancher at DiPiazza’s and she mentioned that she hadn’t seen any new posts in a while. It always surprises me a bit when someone mentions that they actually read my blog. I don’t have any sense that what I broadcast is taken note of by anything other than screen crawling bots in China. On the off chance that someone other than a computer-generated entity might chance upon this blog, however, I am back on the poetry patrol.

Linda and I were at DiPiazza’s again this past Wednesday to hear Michael C. Ford read his poetry in Long Beach for the first time since we read together at Dizzy’s record store on E. Seventh. Before he read one of his mid-set poems, Michael gave us a glimpse of his first weeks on the planet as 1939 segued into 1940. When his youthful fondness for jazz music only increased as he reached adolescence, Michael’s mother commented one day that it was to be expected. “I asked your grandmother, when you were three weeks old, what kind of music we might play you for a lullaby, and she said, “Well, I was at a downtown department store on Saturday and I bought Artie Shaw’s “Moonglow,” so let’s try this.”

The other poet who read with Michael was Liz Marlow, whose first book The Ground Never Lets Go was recently published by Eric Morago’s Moon Tide Press. The book focuses on acts of resistance that took place during the Holocaust; afterward, I asked her if she knew of Gail Newman’s very fine collection, Blood Memory. Not only was acquainted with Gail and her poetry, Liz also knew my poet friend Lynn McGee. Both Lynn and she shared the distinction of having won a Slapering Hol chapbook contest. Given her subject, I mentioned that she should become familiar with a still too little known poem: “Feasts of Death, Feasts of Love,’ by Stuart Z. Perkoff, Over sixty years after its first publication, “FDFL” inexplicably remains obscure. As I pointed out in my book HOLDOUTS in 2011, even scholars who think they have comprehensively covered Holocaust poetry omit this poem, even though it appeared in the most important anthology of American poetry after World War II. Such is the fate of work written by a poet based in Los Angeles, rather than San Francisco or New York…..

Another gratifying recent reading was Harry E. Northup’s featured presentation of poems from his most recent collection, TO ASK FOR LOVE. Harry’s voice retains the timbre that made him a compelling presence on the cinematic screen during his decades as a professional actor in films such as “Over the Edge” and “The Silence of the Lambs.” The Cahuenga cohort of poets who read before Harry were very fine, too. I was especially pleased to hear Harry read the poem he composed about the John Ford chapel at MPTF in Woodland Hills, and which first appeared in my blog. At the request of the chaplain, the poem is also now framed on the wall of the chapel.

During the spring I gave a fair amount of what little time I had left over from teaching to reading three sets of proofs for my forthcoming book, REMIGES: THREE EXTENDED POEMS (1980-2025). I do want to thank Karen Kevorkian for her assiduous copyediting, which helped me scour these texts for the slightest stumble. I was abashed at how much needed attention, which perhaps was to be expected, given that I had long given up hoping that these three poems would ever be published, and I had stopped polishing them a very long time ago. Many thanks, therefore, to What Books in advance for taking a chance on a manuscript that so many other presses had rejected. My thanks go out to the editors of magazines that supported individual segments of these long poems: Paul Vangelisti, Greg Boyd, and Jocelyn Fisher, Lawrence R. Smith.

One poet editor who recently wrote me and requested poems for a magazine is Juan Delgado, who taught for many years at California State University, San Bernardino. Juan said that he has been the guest editor for spring issue of the monthly magazine, Cholla Needles, which comes out of Yucca Valley. Issue no. 115 has just been published, featuring work by David Garyan and George Hammons as well as myself. The magazine appears to limit itself to print editions that are primarily available on Amazon and at the California Welcome Center in Yucca Valley. While I’m not familiar with most of the contributors to this magazine, several issues that I checked at random do include poets whose work I have been aligned with at various points in the past half-century. For instance, No. 91 features A.D. Winans; Issue 97 includes work by John Brandi and Renee Gregorio; issue 100 has work by Tobi Alfier, the late John Brantingham, Miriam Sagan and Juan Delgado; No. 101 includes Donna Hilbert and Ellen Maybe; No. 112 has Penelope Moffet.

The poems I sent Juan Delgado and that were published in issue 115 are:

“The Anthropocene” (a cento)

“Paper, Scissors, Rock: Water, Fire, Pot”

“Tiptoe”

“Wall”

“Pencil Sketches”

“The Unknown Unknows”

“Pater Noster / Mater Nostrils”

“My Obsession”

Anyone who would like to read this set of poems is welcome to write me at William.BillMohr@gmail.com and I will send this set right along. I want to thank the Rapp Poetry Saloon, curated by Elena Secota, for giving me a chance last year to read all these poem in public for the first time, in the company of fellow readers Amy Gerstler and Guy Zimmerman. It was a memorable thrill to read with them. I was especially pleased that Beth Ruscio was in the audience to hear all of us.

The one lapse in this issue of CHOLLA NEEDLES is that there is no bio note of any kind for the editor, whose one page introduction is among the most precise yet compressed account of the contents of a particular issue of a magazine that I have ever read. There is, of course, a contributor’s page. As a way of making up for this omission, I would like to reprint the bio note from the selection of Juan’s poems that appears in an online anthology edited by David Garyan.

https://davidgaryan.wixsite.com/ladige/post/juan-delgado-california-poets-part-8-five-poems

Juan Delgado is Professor Emeritus in the English Department at California State University, San Bernardino, where, in addition to his professorial duties, he chaired the English and Communication Studies Departments and served as the university’s interim provost. His collections of poetry include Green Web (1994), published by the University of Georgia Press and selected by poet Dara Weir for the Contemporary Poetry Prize; El Campo (1998), a collaboration with the Chicano painter Simon Silva and published by Capra Press; and Rush of Hands (2003), published by the University of Arizona Press. His most recent book, Vital Signs (2013),was a collaboration with photographer Thomas McGovern and won the Before Columbus Foundation’s American Book Award. One can find a sample of his poetry and a critical essay on his last book at the Poetry Foundation: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/juan-delgado. In recent years, he has presented his photopoetics and signage throughout southern California in museum exhibitions such as Más Allá del los Fencesat the Peppers Gallery in Redlands, 2017. Manos, Espaldas y Blossoms, a collaborative art project with Thomas McGovern featured their artwork and poetry in the groves of the California Citrus State Historical Park, 2018. Sign Language, a mixed media exhibition at the CSUN Art Galleries, featured the collaborative work of McGovern and Delgado, and the artwork of Amando Lerma and Carlos Ramirez, aka “The Date Farmers.” In 2023, he won the California Established Artist Award for his Concrete Poetry.

The primary editor for Cholla Needles is r soos, who was the editor of the monthly literary magazine Seven Stars from 1973-1998. He launched Cholla Needles in 2017.