Shortly after noon today, Paul Vangelisti gave me a call to talk about various topics, including the disappearance of box scores from daily newspapers. We are not alone in missing that pleasure. I think particularly of a poem by the late Tom Clark, “Baseball and Classicism.” You can find it at this blog post:
https://archivedinnings.com/2015/08/06/baseball-and-classicism-by-tom-clark/

And for those in protest:
https://www.latimes.com/sports/story/2023-07-22/letters-to-sports

Toward the end of our conversation, Paul mentioned that he had to head over to Beyond Baroque for a memorial service this afternoon for Barbara Maloutas, a poet and book artist who worked at Otis College of Design for many years. I had not heard that she had died, so the news startled me.

I first met her when I was teaching a free poetry workshop at Beyond Baroque from the summer of 1993 to the summer of 1995. Barbara was obviously not a novice writer, but on the other hand she seemed reticent to get her poetry out into the world. I recollect that several of the poems had references to life in Greece, but she never provided any personal background that explained her attachment to those images. In general, I remember how the other members of the work always talked about one of her poems, after she had passed it around and read it, with respect and curiosity. To an unusual degree, each poem she wrote seemed to be already in anticipation of the poem that was yet to come. There was a foundation of clam inevitability to her writing. She seemed undaunted by the “youth culture” that permeated “po biz.”

Douglas Messerli’s PIP (Project for Innovative Poetry) has an obituary that gives further details about her life. According to this obituary, it was indeed around 1994 that she began writing poetry in earnest.

http://pippoetry.blogspot.com/2010/06/barbara-maloutas-usa-1945-born-in-bryn.html

It is certainly not unheard of for an older poet to finally begin getting their work out in books; indeed, several women have done so in recent decades, and Barbara is one of them: swas almost 60 years old when her first full-length book, “Practices” (New Michigan Press/Diagram; 2003). That volume was followed by “In a Combination of Practices,” (New Issues, 2004), Coffee Hazilly (Beard of Bees, 2007) and “the whole Marie” (2008 Sawtooth Poetry Prize winner). In 2011, “Of Which Anything Consists” appeared from New Michigan Press.

I hope that future anthologies of Los Angeles-based poets make certain to include a generous selection of her work.

Audri Phillips went to extraordinary lengths in the spring of 2023 to pull together a festival of dancers, musicians, visual artists, and poets in West Hollywood’s large public park near its library. I was only able to attend one afternoon, but it was a yet another instance of mutual respect among the artists who participated.

Over 50 poets were part of the programming, so only a small percentage of them are glimpsed in the footage of this three-minute panoply of programming dexterity. Some of the poets who are not visible in the film include Pam Ward, Terry Wolverton, Laurel Ann Bogen, Brendan Constantine, and Suzanne Lummis. Tom Laichas also deserves considerable praise for his curation of the poetry potion of this arts festival.

You can find the video on ladiesofcourage.com on the bottom of the opening home page.
You can also find it https://vimeo.com/837260862?share=copy

(left-to-right: Hassan; Rep. Adam Schiff; and S.A. Griffin at the Netflix picket, Wilton & Sunset.)

This Actor Kills Fascists
This machine kills fascists – on Woody Guthrie’s guitar

as actors and writers
we are the dream language of
popcorn and celluloid lions
the philosophy of light and sound
and their flickering byproduct
a creative disagreement in action
as spectacle on full view

we stand before A.I.
the new wheel
a Promethean spark
the bright edge of a
blistering sunrise

the evil it is
that it can be
we are

for too long we have been divided
by fantasies of an Easy Street
allowing the power brokers and their elected messengers
to wage war on humanity

and now it is time for us to
wage war for humanity

pain is human
and these human machines that
make machines human
must feel our pain

if in our action
we do not inflict substantial pain
our pain will be that much greater

the feral creatures of our creative existence
our collective suspension of disbelief
is what is at stake here

as curious children
doubt follows belief

but first
we must
believe

– S.A. Griffin

July 14, 2023
The First Day of the SAG-AFTRA Strike with WGA
Woody Guthrie’s birthday

Monday, July 17th

I talked with S.A. Griffin this past weekend about several things, including an event to honor the poet and actor Harry E. Northup at Beyond Baroque on Saturday, September 16. About 25 poets have been invited to take part in this celebration of his writing and I’m looking forward to it very much.

In the meantime, both the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) and the Writers Guild of America (WGA) are on strike, and S.A. is walking the picket line. As we continued our conversation via text messages, both of us acknowledged that these simultaneous strikes will one day be looked back upon as turning points in the struggle for human dignity. The corporations that insist on imposing absolute control on the economic, social, and cultural agency of working people are not settling for half-way measure in 2023. Corporate aggrandizement is truly after total domination.

I am not a member of SAG or WGA, but in solidarity with their cause, I propose that all working people in Los Angeles set aside their Labor Day holiday this year, on Monday, September 4, and take part in marches across the entire county of Los Angeles in support of our sisters and brothers in these unions.

Now it’s possible that these strikes will be settled by the end of August, but I doubt it. If not, it’s imperative that a massive turnout increase public pressure and force the corporations to relent.

Onward!

THE COYOTE CYCLE: A Documentary Film
World Premiere – Sunday, July 30 at 4:00 p.m. (PDT)

LINK TO RESERVING YOUR SEAT:

https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/the-coyote-cycle-documentary-finishing-funds–2/x/2682414?fbclid=IwAR3RCnVVX_aTXlTfSzPVU-7GzufalRYVYGSAVWyhzmaNLCy1Sqy8sCnfrPk#/

The first public viewing of a documentary film about Murray Mednick’s THE COYOTE CYCLE will take place on-line as a fundraiser to complete all the loose ends needed to launch this film into full distribution. Admission, however, is not contingent on your ability to pay. A donation at any monetary level will give you a virtual seat.

Padua Hills was a crucial turning point in my life as a poet. In point of fact, I am probably the only American poet to have a poem about a major underground theater festival as the subject of a poem in her or his first full-length book of poetry. To a large extent, much of the writing I have done since my first attendance at Padua Hills in 1979 has involved a dialogue with its theatrical poetics. While this film focuses on a cycle of plays that deserve to be set alongside other canonical cycles, the first assessment should be about establishing the context of Mednick’s encounters with indigenous myth as it once again permeates the domain it emerged out of. This is not done in a theatrical vacuum. If one is not aware of the other plays done at Padua, the Coyote Cycle loses some of its impact. Among the most memorable productions that accompanied the annual installments of THE COYOTE CYCLE, I would in particular cite the following:

Martin Epstein – “The Man Who Killed the Buddha”
John O’Keefe – Don’t You Ever Cal Me Anything But Mother
Maria Irene Fornes – Fefu and Her Friends
Maria Irene Fornes – Mud
Martin Epstein – Mysteries of the Bridal Night
Leon Martelll – Hoss Drawin
Leon Martell and Elizabeth Ruscio – El Dorado 1961
Walter Hadler – Alive
Connie Managhan – Guys in Black Leather Jackets Stepping into Phone Booths
Susan La Tempa – Sunset Beach
John Steppling – Neck
Kathleen Cramer and O-Lan Jones: The Man Whose Brother Was Eaten by Wolves

Although THE COYOTE CYCLE as a published script is available in a stand-alone volume, I would argue that an ideal reference volume would be to have entire script by Mednick interspersed in a volume with the scripts from the above plays. Only then could you begin to understand the significance and meaning of Padua Hills as a cultural project. There were other playwrights who contributed work to the Festival, too, such as Michael Monroe.

Finally, I would note that Murray Mednick is also a poet, and I included him in POETRY LOVES POETRY, my anthology of Los Angeles poets that I published in 1985. Other poets included Paul Vangelisti, James Krusoe, Bob Flanagan, Dennis Cooper, Amy Gerstler, Suzanne Lummis, Lewis MacAdams, Brooks Roddan, Jack Grapes, Bob Peters, Charles Harper Webb, Ron Koertge, Charles Bukowski, Laurel Ann Bogen, John Doe, Doren Robbins, Wanda Coleman, Exene Cervenka, Kate Braverman, David E. James, Jed Rasula, Bob Crosson, Max Benavidez, Paul Trachtenberg, and David Trinidad. This, too, is one context within which THE COYOTE CYCLE should be absorbed.

Here is the official announcement from Padua Hills about the documentary film on THE COYOTE CYCLE.

“This feature-length film provides an in depth look at the seminal theater production (1978-1985) by Padua’s founder, the playwright and director Murray Mednick.

“Created by Guy Zimmerman and Bradford L. Cooper, The Coyote Cycle features a narration by Ed Harris, interviews and performances by the original cast of the plays—Darrell Larson, Norbert Weisser, Priscilla Cohen and Christine Avila—along with interviews with Peter Stathis and A. Martinez.

“Murray Menick and his cast delve into the formal investigations that fueled this groundbreaking theater project, as well as Murray’s relationship with prominent indigenous activists such as Leonard Crow Dog, who embraced the project as a way to draw attention to the Hopi prophecy of environmental destruction and collapse. Prophetic and profound, the film brings us back in time to draw inspiration from a more hopeful cultural moment–come join us in celebrating the positive energies of revolution and renewal!”

https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/the-coyote-cycle-documentary-finishing-funds–2#/

FIELD NOTES FROM THE PADUA HILLS THEATER WORKSHOP AND FESTIVAL

In 1977 and 1978, I wrote three full-length plays that all received public readings, the first of which was at a venue organized by Oliver Hailey. He liked what I had written well enough to attend the second one, which was held at Beyond Baroque. The play was about a serial killer in a small beach town in California whose victims were children; that part was read by Leland Hickman. Hailey and his spouse left after the first act. “You don’t have children, do you?” they asked me as they left. “If you did, you would never have written this play.” Jim Krusoe’s reaction after the reading was different: “I kept wondering why all these poems were in a theater script.”

Shortly after I finished the third play, I saw a notice in the L.A. Times that I wish I had seen the summer before: a project called the Padua Hills Theater Festival was looking for participants. I ended up spending a month in the foothills of Claremont, taking workshops with Marie Irene Forces and Michael McClure and helping out with production work. One of the playwrights I grew close to that month was Walter Hadler, who was also an actor as well as playwright.

My own experience at Padua was transformative in ways that were different from anyone else’s who ever took part in that experiment. After that summer, I realized that I would never fit into the world of theater. I wasn’t a theater person. My life was in poetry, though I have hardly been someone who fit comfortably in that world either. To be a poet on the West Coast of the United States is most often to remain at odds with the prevalent canon of the east coast. Even as I began a renewed dedication to publishing the books of other poets in the late 1970s and early 1980s, I still couldn’t resist the pull of Padua. Every summer I attended their festival of plays and I began to regard my attendance as a kind of sacred pilgrimage. It was at this festival that I was introduced to playwrights such as John Steppling, whose play “The Shaper” remains one of the most important plays I have ever seen, Martin Epstein, and Leon Martell. I had always known of the work of Forness and Mednick, though their plays I saw at Padua (Mednicks “Coyote Cycle” and Fornes’s “Mud” and “Fefu”) were astonishingly hypnotic.

Padua Hills, in its first incarnation, lasted until the mid-1990s, and I recollect at least four other sites where the festival took place. It has since resurrected itself closer to the center of Los Angeles, but I have been too busy with my late-in-life academic career to visit it. What recently stirred my heart, though, has been the publication of a book about the Padua Hills Festival founded by Murray Mednick in the late 1970s. It is collection of essays, poetics, commentary and memoir that deserves to be read by anyone who aspires to commit themselves to a life permeated by the imagination. My sense was that the best person to review this book, “OUTLAW THEATRE,” would be another poet, and so I asked Paul Vangelisti to take a look at it. His essay has just appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books and it is the best possible introduction I can offer you to this book.

My only wish about this book is that Walter Hadler could have been more present. The plays he had staged as part of the Festival are not even included in a list of the work presented over the years.

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/off-off-broadway-west-on-guy-zimmermans-outlaw-theatre-field-notes-from-the-padua-hills-playwrights-workshop-and-festival/

“Off-Off-Broadway West: On Guy Zimmerman’s “Outlaw Theatre” by Paul Vangelisti

:

(Amy Gerstler hold the Unsung Masters book, BERT MEYERS; clockwise, Daniel Meyers; Ari Sherman; Quentin Ring, director of Beyond Baroque; Michele Raphael; Dana Levin, co-editor of the book.)

A little over a week ago, Beyond Baroque presented a celebration of a volume of writing by and about Bert Meyers (1928-1979), edited by Dana Levin and Adele Elise Williams. This book is one of the essential collections of verse and commentary to be published in 2023. Meyers was one of the young poets who studied, at least informally, with blacklisted poet Thomas McGrath in Los Angeles in the 1950s as part of his apprenticeship as a poet. Like the poet Hart Crane, Meyers was a high school drop-out, but he read enough on his own to eventually be appointed a professor at Pitzer College, where he taught young poets such as Garrett Hongo, Amy Gerstler, Dennis Cooper, and Maurya Simon. Several of these poets contribute short essays to this volume, which also reprint several of Meyers’s best-known poems. In Simon’s case, a longer version of her essay can be found on-line, and it’s worth looking up.

The gathering was particularly memorable for the speech given by Meyers’s son, Daniel Meyers, whose resemblance to his father was so strong that it startled me when Daniel rose from his seat in the front row. Daniel spoke of the close bond they shared as father and son and the entire audience could feel how the warmth of that relationship still was present in his life.

As far as I know, Meyers’s poems only appeared in one major anthology in his life, which was titled with a rare sense of humor: JUST WHAT THE COUNTRY NEEDS, ANOTHER POETRY ANTHOLOGY. If you want to understand part of the context for the reception of Meyers’s poetry when he was alive, you should look up the anthology, which contains several other poets whose work has not received enough attention.

Wednesday, June 28, 2023 — 5:00 p.m.

This morning’s edition of the L.A. Times contained a column by Sesshu Foster, one of this city’s most incisive poets, in which he pays tribute to Amy Uyematsu. It is the best thing I have read about her in the days since her passing, and so I am posting the link to it with the hope that those of you who don’t tend to read the L.A. Times will learn of it.

https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/books/story/2023-06-28/appreciation-pioneering-l-a-poet-amy-uyematsu-showed-that-words-could-move-mountains

(This photograph taken on Ohio Avenue in Long Beach, June 20, 2023, three days before Amy’s passing. Let the burgeoning blossoms of two of L.A. best-known plants serve as my floral offering to her passage.)

By chance, I had two young poets who are also songwriters in my MFA seminar this past semester, and their interests in the work of other songwriters whose lyrics at the very least overlap with poetry, if not in fact constitute a part of the contemporary canon of poetry, led me to offer them a chance to peruse my personal collection of recordings on vinyl. Shortly after the semester ended, I invited them over to the front porch of the house Linda and I rent and gave them a chance to pick out which records they would most like to own. I haven’t yet decided how many of their choices I will actually be able to bestow on them, but we had a lively, memorable conversation about music and our favorite songwriters.

I hope their choices as well as the list of the records they had to pass on because of budgetary limits serves as a reference tool for other young poet-songwriters. “Put Your Ears On!”

Jacob Belkin (left); John Mroc (right)

JAKE

Pat Methney / Ornette Coleman – Song X

Arthur Blythe – Basic

Memphis Minne – I Ain’t No Bad Girl — $21.00

Holst – The Planets

Sonny Rollins (Featuring Jim Hall) – Quartets

Kenny Neal – Big News From Baton Rouge $60 – $75

Ahmad Jamal – Live at the Montreatl Jazz Featival. — $25.00

The Beatles at Hollywood Bowl

Rolling Stones – Beggars Banquet; Exile on Main Street

David Bowie – Scary Monsters

David Bowe – Double Album (LIVE)

David Bowie – Ziggy Stardust

Dire Straits – “Down to the Waterline”

Simon & Garfunkel – Bookends

XTC – Drums and Wires

Aretha’s Greatest Hits

Harry James – Vol. 2

Pioneers of the New Age

JOHN MROC

The Roots of Rock n Roll – Rockabilly

Round Midnight – Various Artists

Sugarcubes – Life’s Too Good

Joni Mitchell – Miles of Aisles

Cream – Wheels of Fire

Elmore James – Oriinal Folk Blues

Leonard Cohen – The Best Of

John Prine – Sweet Revenge

Pere Ubu – Dub Housing

Talking Heads – Three Albums

The Clash – London Calling

The Clash – Give Em Enough Rope

The Minutemen – Double Nickle on the Dime

Tom Waits – Nighthawsks at the Diner (Douhle Live)

The Blasters

Rolling Stones – Got Live If You Want It! (LIVE)

Sonny Rollins – Way Out West

Patti Smith – Horses

Devo – Are We Not Men

The Zombies

X – Los Angeles

R.E.M./ — Fall on Me

Brian Eno – Ambient 3

Oingo Boing – Dead Man’s Party

The Fall – Telephone Thing

Stevie Rauy Vaugh – A Double Trouble

Bob Dylan – Infidel

X – Live Double Album at the Whiskey

The Screaming Blue Messiashs – Totally Religious

The New Percussion Group of Amserdam

Billy Bragg – Help Save the Youth of America

Green on Red – Down There

LONG LIST OUT OF WHICH THE ABOVE RECORDS WERE SELECTED BY JACOB AND JOHN

Morton Gould – Billy the Kid/ Rodeo

The Teddy Charles Tentet

The Allan Botschinsky Quintet – The Night

PUBLIC ENEMY – What Kind of Power We Got

Danny Gotlieb – Whirlwind

John Kilzer – Memory in the Making

Frank Morgan – Mood Indigo

Hayden – Symphonies No. 88 and 100

Psychedelic Furs – All of This and Nothing

Psychedelic Furs – Should God Forget

Lyle Mays – Highland Aire

Deborah Harry – I Want That Man

Fine Young Cannibals – Suspicious Minds

Was/Not Was – “Walk the Dinosaur”

Herbie Hancock – Vibe Alive

Xymox – Blind Hearts

Witchcraft — The Book of Love

Tiny Lights – Hazel’s Wreath

Anything Box – Living in Oblivion

Brad Eisenberg – Songs that Nice People Won’t Sing

Figures on a Beach – Accidentally Fourth Street

Patti Smith – Easter; Wave

David Sylvan –Holger Cukay – Plight Premonition

Jean-Loup Lognon and His New York Orchestra

Oingo Boingo – Out of Control

Bangles – Different Light

Steve Earle – Three Song EP

Rickie Lee Jones – Chuck E.’s In Love

Joni Mitchell – For the Roses

Rolling Stones – Hollywood RCA Sessions

Phyllis Nelson – 1986 – I LIKE YOU

Judy Tenuta (November 7, 1949 – October 6, 2022)

Laura Nyro –(in concert) Season of Lights

EUGENE CHABOURNE – The President He Is Insane

Stan Ridgeway — Camouflage

Suzanne Vega – Solitude Standing

Jill Sobule – Things Here Are Different

Cheryl Wheeler – Half a Book

Devo – Fredom of Choice

Revenge of the Killer B’s

John Cougar Mellencamp – Scarecrow

Dave Samuels – Living Colors

Lions and Ghosts – Mary Goes Round

George Winston – Winter into Spring

Joan Armatrading – The Shouting Stage

John Welsey Harding – God Made Me Do It

Prefab Sprouts – Two Wheels Good

SPK – Machine Age Voodoo

The Creaturees – Standing There

Stephen Sills – Stephen Stills

Boz Scaggs – Moments

Jon Stewart – Punch the Big Guy

Neil Young – Neil Young

Kim Kashkashian and Robert Levin – Elegies

Timbuk Three – Greetings from Timbuk3

Deborah Iyall — Strange Language

John Hiatt – All of a Sudden

John Hiatt – Two Bit Monsters

Talking Heads – Fear of Music

Talking Heads – Little Creatures

Los Lobos – La Pistola y la corazon

Michael Hedges – Aerial Boundaries; Strings of Steel; Watching My Life Go By; Live on the Double Planet

Breakfast in the Field

WALL OF VOODOO — Dark Continent; Call of the West

Wim Mertens – Maximizing the Audience

Wim Mertens – Struggle for Pleasure

Biko Drum

Arthur Brown – The Crazy World of Arthur Brown; Glactic Zoo Dosier

Keith Richards – Talk Is Cheap

Devo – Duty Now For the Future

B-52s – Wild Planet

It Bites – The Wild Lad in the Winill

Warren Zevon – Bad Luck streak in Dancing School

Red Kross – Teen Babes from Monsanto

Phil Woods Quartet – Warm Woods

Joni Mitchell – Dog Eat Dog

Patti Smith – Dreeam of Life

Laura Nyro – The First Songs

Bob Dylan – Sam Shepard – Brownvsville Girl

Tim Buckley – Blue Afternoon

Gordon Lightfoot – Don Quixote

Gordon Lightfoot – Sundown

Bruce Springateen – Darkness on the Edge of Town; The Wild, The Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle;
Born to Run’ Greetings from Asbury Park; Tunnel of Love; The River

X – Ain’t Love Grand

Brian Eno – Music for Films III

The Alley Cats

John Hiatt – Slow Turning

XTC – Black Sea; White Music; English Settlement

K.D. Lang – Shadowland

K.D. Lang – Angel with a Lariat

The Pretenders

The Steelye Span Story

Paul Simon – Still Crazy After All these Years

Elvis Costello – Trust; Get Happy; Taking Liberties; Imperial Bedroom