Koan Kinship — Bill Mohr's Blog

(Updated, Wednesday, April 10th, 2024, 9:00 a.m.)

“Risky Business: A Painter’s Forum” curated by Marie Thibeault and Max Presneill
March 30 – May 4th, 2024

Torrance Art Museum (TAM), 3320 Civic Center Drive, Torrance, CA 90503; 310-618-6388
Tuesday — Saturday; 11am — 5pm; Admission is FREE

PARTICIPATING ARTISTS: Nick Aguayo, Sharon Barnes, Michael Bauer, Fatemeh Burnes, Galen Cheney, Mark Dutcher, Barbara Friedman, John Goetz, Zachary Keeting, Robert Kingston, Christopher Kuhn, Annie Lapin, Michael Mancari, Ali Smith, Vian Sora, Marie Thibeault, Liliane Tomasko, Chris Trueman, Suzanne Unrein, Audrey Tulmiero Welch.

Thirty years ago, when I was still making my living as a typesetter at weekly newspapers, I was asked by the painter Audri Phillips to be part of an artist’s critique group in which every other week we would meet at an artist’s studio and give the entire group’s attention to a discussion of their work. I remember that Rich Bruland was one of the other artists. My longstanding practice as a poet seemed to be the attraction for asking me to join their ensemble. There was a quiet understanding that I would provide the perspective of someone who was not formally trained as a visual artist but who enjoyed it enough to pay close attention to individual pieces, even if on first glance they might not forthcoming about their gestural intentions. Such is the case with my reaction to “Risky Business: A Painter’s Forum,” a show currently up at the Torrance Art Museum. If I remember correctly, the work of each painter in Audri’s ensemble distinguished itself from everyone else’s in some manner regarding materials, composition, or chain of influence. The variety in this exhibition is equally exuberant as that late-century critique group’s commitment to individual inquiry, and the work at TAM has continued to shimmer in my mind’s eye as I ask myself, “Why exactly is being risked?” One obvious answer is that almost any artist would hate to be judged simply on the basis of one painting, and so the willingness to limit oneself to a single piece in this show indeed feels tremulously daring.

Perhaps that singular limit is compensated for by another fact: these canvases are for the most part much larger than average. This is not a show for the reticent or self-confined temperament. Those who make the drive to Torrance will be rewarded at the very least by having to spend a fair amount of time absorbing the consistently impressive size of the canvases on which the artists staked their fortunes. This is not a show one can walk through in less than an hour and do the work justice. In particular, there are four or five paintings one will definitely want to linger in front of:

Michael Bauer’s “Land of Tiny Hands (Return to Ether Shelter”)
Not many painting can provide the sensation of planet-scale energy being devoured and reclaimed simultaneously. This one’s inhabitable zones provide a compass needle to its inner wheel of mutability and realign any personal tendency of a viewer to feel dispossessed.

Liliane Tomaska’s “Portrait the Self (stormy yet optimistic)
This piece begged for its companion piece to be included. I don’t know what that companion piece looks like, but this one had just the right amount of feeling unfinished to suggest that its urgent fulfillment awaited in a sequence yet to be completely choreographed.As with many other pieces in the show, the risk involved the act of reclamation. Mind you, I don’t mean some kind of redemptive configuration. Rather, the painter is determined to extract that segment of a “lost” world that enables one to confront the necessary fictions of the subjunctive mood.

As I type up my notes, I am beginning to realize how uncertain I am about which paintings belong to which artist. I am fairly sure that one of my favorite paintings in the back room was by Annie Lapin. How rare it is that a painting has such a tender omphalos, especially on such a large scale. Just as an example of the average endeavor of the artists in this show, Lapin’s “Cantos Emergent (heap 7)” is six feet by 8 feet, and in that arena Lapin has coaxed the smudged transitions of momentary perception into the reassuring grasp of an assiduously dismounting equilibrium. Her entire canvas coils and recoils with a clarifying calmness. This painting is almost in and of itself worth the trip to Torrance.

Returning to the front room after gazing at Lapin’s work, the enormous piece by Suzanne Unrein (“The Rush, The Trash and the Flesh”) seems even more frisky in the turmoil of its carnal impetuosity. Alighting in a corner of the front room is also a very recent piece by Marie Thibeault who is steadily establishing herself as an indispensable part of the story of painting on the West Coast since World War II. Thibeault’s “Wild Gravity” is one of the few paintings I have ever seen that has the “unheard music” of a soundtrack playing in the background. One can hardly believe one’s ears as one looks at this painting. Is it possible for a triumphant insurrection against the debris-strewn forces of artificial intelligence to actually take place? Thibeault’s painting urges us not to give up. Finally, I want to mention that I recollect seeing Mark Dutcher’s work at a show at TAM ten or so years ago called “Sincerely Yours.” What a privilege it was to see that he is still working so well!

Let not the absence of commentary be regarded as sizing up work not mentioned as secondary. I could easily imagine follow-up shows at TAM in which four painters have four paintings each: “QUARTETS.” Christopher Kuhn, Ali Smith, Fatemeh Burnes, and Vian Sora would make an intriguing quartet to initiate this mush needed championing of abstract work. Indeed, each piece in this show makes one want to check one’s mailbox every day in the hope of finding a handwritten invitation to drop by for a studio visit. This exhibition demonstrates once again how disproportionately painters persist at a time when studio space at an affordable price is almost impossible to find in Southern California. Any painter who is feeling somewhat stymied in the aftermath of the pandemic should in particular catch this show and then get right back to work, even if it can’t be at the scale of “Risky Business.” Those who crave a chance to be revitalized in their now private undertakings should not delay in getting to Torrance either. This show closes all too soon.

Not to be overlooked, by the way, is the exquisitely exhilarating pleasure that TAM extends its visitors through the post-psychedelic, recalibrating mandalas of Kenneth Salter. I could have spent two hours just in front of them and still not been sated.

Torrance Art Museum (TAM)
3320 Civic Center Drive
Torrance, CA 90503
310-618-6388
TorranceArtMuseum
@TorranceCA.Gov

Tuesday — Saturday
11am — 5pm
Admission is FREE.

888888888888**********************&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&

BILL MOHR
PROFESSOR
DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH
CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY, LONG BEACH
William.BillMohr@gmail.com

www.koankinship.com

AND

LindaFryArtist.com

.

Thursday, April 4, 2024

One week ago, Small Press Distribution (SPD) shut down all of its operations without any warning whatsoever. While SPD and the presses it distributed are an infinitely minuscule percentage of this nation’s GNP, in the Republic of Literature’s ecology this organization’s collapse is a devastating event, and not just simply because several small presses find themselves being owed a substantial amount without any way of finding out what the balance sheets at SPD looked like in the months leading up to last week’s announcement.The Washington Post has just published an article on this debacle and no one associated with SPD was apparently willing to be interviewee. Maybe, from the point of view of Kent Watson, this refusal to be up front about how much SPD has in its bank accounts is just a decision made on the advice of the lawyer who is handling SPD’s bankruptcy case. For a press such as Rose Metal (whose books I have long admired), and which estimates that SPD owes it $40,000, this refusal to answer any questions must amount to a case of adding insult to injury. It may be legally permissible to refuse to answer questions, but it would be hard to resist calling it anything other than self-serving stonewalling. I simply find it mind-boggling that SPD’s management refuses to provide even a hint of the actual financial condition of the organization during the final six months of operation and how things stood on March 27, 2024.

Rose Metal is not the only press that is owed a substantial sum of momey or finds itself hard pressed to find the resources to get its books back. Black Lawrence Press, according to Diane Goettel, had a large portion of the stock of its backlist and current releases in the warehouse that SPD emptied and shipped to a storage facility in the Midwest just prior to closing its doors. How many copies of books, you ask? 18,000. Yes, Eighteen thousand copies of books.The situation that SPD has placed Black Lawrence Press in is absolutely incomprehensible. Why would the management of SPD ever believe that what they were doing was in the best interest of Black Lawrence Press????

How does all of this affect me personally? Let’s take a quick look.

The late Neeli Cherkovski just now had a major collection of his poems published by Lithic Press, which was distributed by SPD. How will Neeli’s book find its way into libraries, let alone the bookshelves of his many admirers? In addition, Neeli and I coedited an anthology which was still being distributed by SPD the last time I checked. How will CROSS-STROKES: Poetry between Los Angeles and San Francisco (which was published by Otis Books/Seismicity Editions) now be easily available to readers?

NYQ (New York Quarterly) Books is one of the most supportive small presses for several Los Angeles based poets. NYQ has published books by Alexis Rhone Fancher and Clint Margrave, for instance. As is the case with the ill-fated timing of Neeli’s book with the SPD collapse, NYQ has just now begun the roll-out process for the late Gerry Locklin’s SELECTED POEMS, edited by Clint Margrave. A reading on May 4th at Gatsby Books in Long Beach is scheduled as the kick-off publication event.

Brooks Roddan’s IF/SF Publications has many titles that were carried by SPD. IF/SF recently published the first American edition of Mike Mollett’s PINBALL WIZARD, a book that I reviewed in this blog and which is quoted from on the back cover. PINBALL WIZARD is one of my favorite books to have been published in the past ten years, and Brooks Roddan has told me that the books was actually getting some traction in the marketplace, even though SPD was having trouble getting the title out to stores.

Beyond Baroque Books was also distributed by SPD. How will Carol Ellis’s prize-winning book, for which I wrote a blurb, now be able to find the audience it deserves?

And what about Cahuenga Press, which the late Holly Prado, along with her poet-actor spouse Harry E. Northup, and Phoebe MacAdams, Jim Cushing, Cecilia Woloch, and I founded 30 odd years ago? I left Cahuenga Press after the second book was published, but I have always cared about that project, no matter what else might have happened in the meantime.

This is just a portion of the ways that SPD’s collapse is affecting my life and the lives of those I admire.

There are of course other questions that need to be answered by Kent Watson in a public forum. You were hired in June, 2022 to be in charge of SPD. You had worked for PubWest for well over a dozen years, so you were hardly someone who could say that you were unfamiliar with the world of non-corporate publishing. Surely you had a sense of SPD’s condition when you took over. Why would anyone take on a job without knowing the fundamentals of an organization’s likelihood to maintain viability? So what exactly happened in the past 22 months? What did you know and when did you know it?

I repeat: What did you know and when did you know it?

Perhaps the demise of SPD was inevitable, given the cultural shifts of the past half-century. For the record, though, so that literary historians can write a full account of this period, Kent Watson owes us nothing less than detailed answers.

Here is the link to the Washington Post article, which you can cut and paste into your browser.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2024/04/03/spd-business-independent-publishers/#

And here is a partial list of some of the prominent small press publishers who were carried by SPD:
Ahsahta Press
Anvil Press
Atelos
Aunt Lute Books
Aztlan Libre Press
Bamboo Ridge Press
Barrow Street Press
Beyond Baroque Books
Black Lawrence Press
BlazeVOX (books)
Burning Deck
Cahuenga Press
Calamus Books
Chax Press
Counterpath Press
Dos Gatos Press
Drunken Boat Media/Ethos Books
Durga Press
Edge Books
Fence Books
Fourteen Hills Press
Futurepoem Books
Green Lantern Press
Hambone Publishing
Hanging Loose Press
IF/SF Publishing
Insert Press
Junction Press
Kelsey Street Press
Kore Press
Les Figues Press
Lithic Press
Litmus Press
Lost Roads Publishers
Many Mountain Moving Press
Marsh Hawk Press
Mayapple Press
Noemi Press
NYQ Boox
Otis Books / Seismicity Editions
PANK Books
Pleiades Press
Ricochet Editions
Seaweed Salad Editions
Segue
Semiotext(e)
Shearsman Books
Singing Horse Press
Sinister Wisdom
Station Hill Press
Subpress
Swan Scythe Press
Talisman House
Tarpaulin Sky Press
Taurean Horn Press
Tebot Bach
Tender Buttons Press
The (Great) Indian Poetry Collective
The Bitter Oleander Press
The Figures
The Post-Apolo Press
This Press
Tinfish Press
Tres Chicas Books
Tupelo Press
Tuumba Press
Unicorn Press
White Goat Press/Yiddish Book Center
WriteGirl Publications
Zone 3 Press

******

Finally, it should be noted that the Community of Literary Magazines and Publishers stands in contrast with SPD’s former management team. CLMP facilitated an on-line Zoom meeting that representatives of several of the above presses attended. I myself was able to log on for the last half of the meeting as it was taking place and I do want to thank CLMP for making this effort.

https://www.clmp.org

The playwright Peter Weiss is best known for “Marat/Sade,” and yet it is his play “The Investigation” that equally deserves to be staged again and again. Weiss makes use of trial transcripts of Nazi war criminals for his script, and documentary theater often proves far more compelling as drama than one might expect (cf: “The Chicago Conspiracy Trial”).

Suzanne Lummis and Jim Natal understand how a recitation of an indictment is in and of itself a moment of undeniable deduction. What happened on January 6, 2021, must remain a prominent part of this nation’s meta narrative. If possible, I urge you to attend and ratify the indictment’s relevance to how we will cast our vote in a little over seven months.

*****
As for how the two major candidates for President rank in terms of their performance in office, here are the results of a poll that included both Republican and Democratic-leaning historians:

http://www.brandonrottinghaus.com/uploads/1/0/8/7/108798321/presidential_greatness_white_paper_2024.pdf

On a scale of zero to one hundred, DJT barely broke double digits.

Does D.T. have any idea of how bad a score this is?

It’s one thing to score a 10 in ice skating or gymnastics; it’s quite another to take a test and only get one out of ten questions correct.

It seems unfathomable that the worst ever president in the United States (currently facing a plethora of criminal indictments) should have a chance of being reelected to another term in office. And yet…..

And yet let us review the results of all the presidential elections since I was eligible to vote in 1968, the year I turned 21.
1968: Nixon was elected.
1972: Nixon was re-elected in a landslide; then resigns in disgrace two years later.
1976: Jimmy Carter was elected (and then deposed by a deliberately manufactured surge of INFLATION
1980: Ronald Reagan elected. “Are you better off than four years ago?”
1984: Ronald Reagan selected in a massive landslide.
1988: George Herbert Walker Bush elected.
(Note that at this point five of six national elections have resulted in a set of presidents in which a professional war criminal such as Henry Kissinger can thrive.
1992: Bill Clinton is elected. He proves to be the most competent Republican president of the 20th century, a “bait and switch” expert who is unrivaled by any politician of his era.
1996: Bill Clinton is reelected.
2000: George W. Bush is elected.
2004: GWB is re-elected.
2008: The economy collapses. Barack Obama proves to be even more nimble than Clinton in selling out the working class. The failure to create a national jobs program in the spring of 2009 leaves hundreds of thousands of American simmering in economic misery. Where is the change they were promised?
2012: Obama is reelected, and the banks recover their pre-collapse prosperity. Aging workers discarded by the system between 2008 and 2012 struggle to make ends end.
2016: Stephano J. Trinculo, a notorious blowhard, and the supreme incarnation of all the fascist policies of previous GOP presidents, is elected. by the Electoral College, even though he loses the popular vote by several million.
2020: Joseph Biden is elected, winning the popular vote by several million as well as the Electoral College. His mediocrity is exemplified with his choice of a vice-president. Trump was still popular, but his non-stop excessive claims about his self-importance finally wear thin with the majority of voters, and over 75,000,000 people vote for a candidate who is not much better than saying “None of the Above.”
TRUMP ATTEMPTS TO LEAD THIS FIRST COUP D’ETAT.
2024: Trump re-elected, even though he loses the popular vote for the third time in a row. This shouldn’t be a surprise. Eight presidential elections from 1968 to 2020 were won by very conservative, racist warmongers. Only five were won by so-called liberals, such as Carter, who signed off on giving weapons to a country that engaged in a mass slaughter.

With that pattern, 8 for one side, and five on the other, why would you expect any other outcome?

The most important thing to note is the playbook of the very wealthy and even more conservative factions of those who understand how to destabilize any movement toward government accountability. The plan that has successfully eroded support for Joseph Biden is not a new one. When Jimmy Carter’s administration seemed too “liberal” for the tastes of the ruling class in the United States, the way that his reelection chances were undermined is through the instigation of rampant inflation.

Finally, it’s not as though those of us who are appalled by Trump and his neo-authoritarian goon squad don’t have those who speak up. The part that personally chagrins me is how wrong I was back in 1995 about the youngest of Trump’s future critics. I remember teaching at an elementary school in the San Fernando Valley back then and hearing a fifth grader say that his favorite band was Green Day. “Sure,” I thought, “and how many people ten or twenty years from now will ever remember anything this band does?” Just as I was right about the Beatles and the Stones when I was young (though not quite that young!), so too was that young man. By coincidence, I recently went into Fingerprints, a used record store in Long Beach, and met a clerk who was in the fifth grade the same year I met that very young fan of Green Day. The store had recently had an event honoring Green Day, and I told the clerk about my experience with that fifth grader. It turned out that he, too, was in the fifth grade that year, and he, too, had been an early fan of Green Day. There was a generational shift going on in 1995, right in front of my eyes, and as is too often the case, the old guy (nearing 50 years of age) didn’t have a clue.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/maryroeloffs/2024/01/01/elon-musk-defends-maga-after-green-days-slap-on-new-years-eve-broadcast/?sh=2a246015334d

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“Why, in some circumstances, does evidence of mendacity, crudeness or cruelty serve not as a fatal disadvantage but as an allure, attracting ardent followers? Why do otherwise proud and self-respecting people submit to the sheer effrontery of the tyrant, his sense that he can get away with saying and doing anything he likes, his spectacular indecency?”
“Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics” — Stephen Greenblatt

The two major magazines that championed surrealistic poetry during the past sixty years were KAYAK magazine, edited by George Hitchcock, and CALIBAN, edited by Lawrence R. Smith. The latter had two incarnations, the first as a print edition and the second on-line (Calibanonline.com). Forty issues of the on-line project are still maintained, along with intriguing, tantalizing art.

Most editors of poetry magazines are poets themselves. Sometimes the poets they publish are far better than they are (as in my own case), though whether they would be able to edit with any significant discernment unless they also attempted to write poetry is open to question. George Hitchcock was certainly as good a surrealist poet as the ones he selected for kayak, and the same is true of Lawrence R. Smith, though Smith has a greater range of topic and lyricism.

Among my favorite poems in OTHER SACRED is “Bird Signs,” which is dedicated to his granddaughter. Smith has given me permission to quote the poem in its entirely, and reprinting it here is one of the most rewarding moments for having done a blog for the past ten years.

When birds write on air,
they know the audience is small.
Their kin the lizards
occasionally watch,
but spend most of their time
doing push-ups.

My granddaughter
speaks to hummingbirds
in their strange chirping language —
and I’ve heard them reply.
She says their darting moves,
in all the vectors of a compass,
are calligraphic strokes
of hummingbird text,
advanced lessons for the child
who broke their code.

Language can live only in midair,
not on the page, and proud cities
raised with the music of vowels
dissolve as they are uttered.

There is no memory.
Hummingbirds merge
into the space they occupy,
writing their best lyrics
on the beating heart of the world.

**********

In “Bird Signs” a child serves as a mediator in the manner of immigrant youth negotiating for the elderly in a defamiliarized world. Open to the gestural as an alphabet, the child’s literacy enables her to see into the very heart of consciousness itself. This poem, however, is not the only one in which Smith regards air as the fundamental component that aligns one’s self-awareness of existence. Air is the amphitheater that hosts the resurrection of the life force, Smith reminds us in the culminating stanza of “Neighborhoods.” His cartography focuses on the inhabitants of the “netherworld,” however, rather than the quotidian domains of domesticity associated with the word “neighborhood.” In an annual resurrection, the small gods “tease the moment / with a fluttering samba danced in midair.” The minuscule devours the grandiose, in Smith’s account of a fundamental equilibrium between the life force and the always already “project of collapse.” How rarely I have found a quiet poem to set alongside well-known poems by Dylan Thomas and Gerard Manley Hopkins! on a similar theme!

At this point, I want to say how much I admire blogs in which lengthy reviews provide readers with a comprehensive understanding of a book under review, and I do wish I could do justice to “Other Sacred.” It is a volume that I am willing to bet will not be read in its entirety by a single person who contributes to that all-too-pretentious volume called “Best American Poetry of (name the year).” Yes, almost every volume of that anthology contains some memorable work, but I have also read poems selected for that honor that do not have a single stanza as perceptive as Smith’s insight that “Work gloves want to live on an / upper story but can’t pay the rent./ They feel the weight of brilliant flesh, / but can only hold and shelter it.” The poignant backwash of the conjunction in each of the poem’s final sentences reminds us of the long toil of evolution to bring human fingers and “urgent touch” into dialogic contiguity.

In this all too brief review, I also wish to point out some of my other favorites; in particular, one poem that is on the “local” side: “Santa Anas.” These are the notoriously fickle outbursts of superheated air that often cause voracious fires to erupt at the slightest provocation. Smith’s poem perfectly captures this whimsical apocalypse in its opening stanza:

“When the key that lives in wind
opens fire inside the house
of ordinary weather, a kind of madness
that tastes like smoke strews needles,
cones, and resin over the streets,
obscuring routes of escape.
Trees wheel, groan, pop sinews.”

All of the poems I have cited so far come from the first two parts of “Other Sacred.” The third part consists of a twenty-four page, six-part poem entitled “Eleven Roads to the Meeting Place,” which is in turn complemented by a five page prose piece that recalls Smith’s visits to the classic jazz club, the Five Spot, in New York City. His account of seeing Thelonius Monk play should be kept in mind by anyone working on a biography of that masterful composer.

Will any poet of equal stature to Hitchcock and Smith ever launch a magazine devoted to surrealist poetry that is as inspiring and inclusive? Perhaps it is enough that a miracle happened twice in my lifetime, and I am immensely grateful for both instances.

“OTHER SACRED” by Lawrence R. Smith (2023)
BALD TRICKSTER PRESS
9784 Nature Trail Way
Elk Grove, CA
95757
www.baldtricksterpress.com

Sunday, March 3, 2024

Today’s New York Times contains three major obituaries: Robert M. Young, a filmmaker, age 99; Nancy Wallace, riparian activist, age 93; and Guy Alexandre, a transplant surgeon, age 89. All three deserved their extended notices.

But where in the New York Times is any notice of the recent passing of Lyn Hejinian, whose work as editor and publisher of Tuumba Press infused the Language poets with a heady sense of an irrefutable avant-gardism. The chapbooks that she printed on a steady basis between 1976 and 1984. It’s impossible, I believe, to convey to readers the excitement that I felt as I received those chapbooks in the mail from her. By late 1980, I was looking for some alternative to the post-Beat writing (additionally influenced by James Schuyler and Ted Berrigan) that I had been doing for over a decade. While I had been an assiduous reader of Paul Vangelisti’s and John McBride’s INVISIBLE CITY, Dennis Cooper’s LITTLE CAESAR, and Leland Hickman’s BACHY, as well as Stephen Kessler’s ALCATRAZ EDITIONS, I still found myself reluctant to “experiment” in the way that inaccessibly simmered within me. Hejinian’s ensemble of chapbooks proved to be a major turning point. Her impact as an editor and publisher on almost all the poets who contributed work to or were influenced by Ron Silliman’s anthology, IN THE AMERICAN TREE (1986), made her a proleptic force within the Language insurgency. In 1984, for instance, issue four of POETICS JOURNAL included her crucial essay, “The Rejection of Closure.”

Although Hejinian’s “My Life” will probably always be her best-known work, and it certainly had a profound impact on other poets such as Ron Silliman, it is the combination of all her projects that makes her such an important figure in contemporary poetry. In particular, I would direct attention to THE GRAND PIANO, a ten-volume group memoir that should serve as a model for any community of poets seeking to preserve the dialogue of poets in their youth.

I wish she could have lived so that she could have witnessed a massive celebration of the 50th anniversary of the founding of Tuumba Press. I would hope that UC Berkeley and UCSD’s Special Collections might be able to pull together such a convocation. In the meantime, I will find myself being more quiet than usual when I retreat to solitude, though no amount of stillness could be enough to suggest my appreciation for her inspiring example.

******************

RON SILLIMAN on Lyn Hejinian:

“When, in 200 years, students are reading the poetry of Lyn Hejinian – as certainly they shall if humans are still about – those readers will undoubtedly begin with My Life (hopefully in its initial Burning Deck version, not because the earlier edition is “better,” but because that is the volume that changed the lives of so many other poets). Those who go on to read Hejinian’s finest work, however, will then turn to The Book of a Thousand Eyes, which Omnidawn brought out earlier this year.” Ron Silliman’s Blog, December 10, 2012
https://www.writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/2012/12/when-in-200-years-students-are-reading.html

******

Lytle Shaw’s Obituary notice:
://jacket2.org/article/lyn-hejinian-1941-2024-obituary-lytle-shaw

*******

Tuumba Press

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyn_Hejinian

******************

French critic Hélène Ali:

https://www.cairn.info/revue-francaise-d-etudes-americaines-2005-1-page-79.htm

The Stakes of Narrative in the Poetries of David Antin, Ron Silliman and Lyn Hejinian: New Forms, New Constraints
Hélène Aji
Dans Revue française d’études américaines 2005/1 (no 103), pages 79 à 92

************

Interview with Lyn Hejinian:

https://english.berkeley.edu/news/remembering-lyn-hejinian-0

Friday, February 23, 2024

Of the quartet of photographs in today’s post, only one somersaults back over 30 years ago: the second one, which features painted wooden panels leaning against a wall. I first saw those panels in the late summer of 1993, when I read with poet-actor Harry Northup at Portfolio Coffee House in Long Beach. Kitty-corner to the coffee house was an elementary school playground with a block-long chain-link fence on which the panels gleamed as public art. Harry and I were celebrating the release of our spoken word albums, VEHEMENCE and PERSONAL CRIME, along with fellow spoken word performer, the late Linda Albertano, and a local poet Pam Nielsen.

Portfolio Coffee House was forced to move by the landlord over a year ago, after being a landmark gathering place for poets and the occasional musician. Other coffee shops have opened up on Fourth Street, including Coffee Drunk and Rose Park Coffee. I have met and talked with young poets at both these places, but I miss Portfolio. My hair is all gray now. How dark my.hair still was, back then, 30 years ago. Of course, what do I expect of inevitability but its unwobbling fulfillment? I sit ere, grateful to be able to still move my fingers on a keyboard and to know that I will be reading my poetry on Harry’s Poetry Hour this coming Tuesday, February 27th.

I took the photograph of the panels a couple weeks ago, before a set of rainstorms pumped up the snow levels in the Sierra Nevada and pushed the annual precipitation totals in Los Angeles County above normal. I should walk over this weekend and see if they are still there, leaning agains the wall in the subdued, but vigilant light of a Southern California winter.

February 20, 2024

The California Faculty Association (CFA) is a union representing over 20,000 faculty in the California State University system. The overwhelming majority of its members are not tenured faculty, but part-time (adjunct) faculty who exercise the same franchise as the tenured faculty. Each member gets one vote. Since the majority of the faculty are not tenured, but at best have three-year contracts, guess which contingent gets the most attention from the union’s leadership?

When the CRA reported that 76 percent of the vote on the new contract was in favor of accepting it, guess which percentage of the CFA is adjunct faculty? You wouldn’t be far off it you name the same percent.

It certainly came as no surprise to me that the CFA called off its strike after one day. This union’s leadership would never be tolerated by the United Teachers of Los Angeles or the Auto Workers Union. In recognition of the extraordinary erosion of our paychecks the past two years, the Chancellor’s Office offered a five percent raise, and the CFA accepted it.

Supposedly, there is another five percent raise coming next year, but that depends on whether the Legislature and Governor deign to honor their promise. Well, I’m not waiting around to get spit on again.

I quit.

I quit the union, and why shouldn’t I? .The value of my pension (which I will finally at age 76 begin collecting this summer) was decimated the past two years, and the union did not lift a finger to protect it.

And to think that I endured a month of hell on behalf of this union back when things were really tough at the end of this century’s first decade.

Good luck, CFA, with negotiating your next contract when the current one expires in the summer of 2025. You won’t find me wasting my time on your picket line in 2026, when I am FERPing (half-time, tenured faculty), and when the deal you made is worth even less to membership than it is now.

If you ever get your courage back, let me know and I’ll reconsider. But CFA leadership has long refused to take the needs of its tenure-track and tenured faculty membership seriously, and I predict it will never change.

Post-script on Wednesday, February 21:
I was hired as a tenure-track assistant professor in 2006 with a salary that was below $60,000. Mind you, I had a Ph.D. and brought over 30 years of experience as an editor, publisher, and teacher to the table on day one. When I given tenure and promoted to associate professor four years later, I got a ten percent raise, which was 2.5 percent more than the minimum that often accompanies that promotion.

The fact remains that if I had not put in a tremendous amount of work and been promoted to full professor in 2017 and been awarded a 15 percent raise that year, I would now be only earning a pittance more as an associate professor than I did as a newly hired assistant professor, once inflation was factored in.