Sunday, August 14, 2022

Yesterday afternoon, on the day after Mr. Rushdie was stabbed ten times in an assassination attempt meant to intimidate every resident (both writers and readers) of the Republic of Literature, the poets of Los Angeles gathered at the behest of Lynne Thompson, the poet laureate of Los Angeles, at the downtown branch of the Los Angeles Public Library to read one poem each. Originally, Lynne’s intent was to start a way of involving poets in raising funds to assist refugees in the Ukraine war, but the shocking violence of the day before ended up amplifying the cultural context. Given the number of poets reading, one can only attribute the self-discipline shown by the poets in keeping to time limits to the admiration we have for our current poet laureate in Los Angeles. My only question for Lynne is: Why didn’t you read a poem, too?

Attendance at this reading was for the most part limited to the poets who were reading and poets (such as Lyn Bronstein) who would have been reading had there been more open slots. For those who want to watch a recorded version of the reading, it is now available at the following link:

It should be noted that another Southern California poet laureate, Grant Hier, as Lynne Thompson’s most important assistant in organizing and presenting this event. Thank you, Grant! And thanks to John Szabo, head librarian for giving the green light to this event.

THE POETS

Luis J. Rodriguez (Los Angeles poet laureate predecessor)
Conney Williams
Michelle Bitting
Janel Pineda
Veneta Flagg
Steve Reigns
Lois P. Jones
Briana Munoz
Amy Shimshon-Santo
Ron Koertje
Donna Spruitj-Metz
Chloe Marinez
Carine Topal
Ron Dowell
Teresa Mei Chuc
Kim Dower
Suzanne Lummis
Shonda Buchanan
Jerry Garcia
Judith Pacht
Angelina Saenz
Rick Lupert
A.K. Toney
Lin Nelson Benedek
Bridgette Bianca***
Donny Jackson
Peggy Dobreer
Dare Williams
Ceci Peri
Peter J. Harris
Mike Sonksen
Victoria Chang
Luivette Resto
George Hammons (“Black Paper, White Ink”)
Sarah Maclay
Clint Margrave
David Judah Oliver
Aruni Wijeshinghe
Eric Morago
Pam Ward
Bill Mohr
Linda Ravenswood (“What is the opposite of a poet?” she asked in her poem.)
October Blu
Rich Ferguson
inda Albertano
Derek D. Brown
Elline Lipkin
Billy J. Burgos
Bart Edelman
Armine Iknadossian
Amaud Jamal Johnson
Alix Pham
Lester Graves Lennon
Laurel Annn Bogen
Iris de Anda
Lisabeth Colman
Jan Wesley
Alicia Vogl Saenz
Brendan Constantine (with a poem that ended the event perfectly!)

ps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UNEO76Jmkpo

The Eastsider: The poets among us
https://www.theeastsiderla.com/eastsider_on_the_go/arts_and_culture/the-poets-among-us/article_b7b00e10-1f57-11ed-a69a-9fd2c00d4805.html

NBC4: A Day of Poetry in Los Angeles

Los Angeles Public Library photos. (Please add Photo Credit: Los Angeles Public Library, if you share any of them.)
https://photos.app.goo.gl/hHyHt56eikTdnCTG8

The entire poetry reading can be found on the Los Angeles Public Library YouTube.

And on the LACityView YouTube channel.

Friday, August 12, 2021

I drove down to San Diego on Thursday morning to deliver the first increment of my literary archives to the Special Collections section of the Geisel Library of the University of California, San Diego. I wish to acknowledge n public my gratitude to Lynda Claassen, whose work as a librarian the past 40 years at UCSD has championed the writing of many poets working in Southern California, including Paul Vangelisti, Dennis Phillips, Mark Salerno, Holly Prado, and Harry Northup. For all of us to have our archives at one institution is an extraordinary confluence.

When I returned home early this afternoon, I should have been able to savor this development in my old age, but instead I found out that Salmon Rushdie had been attacked on Friday morning by a knife-wielding fanatic who is alleged to have sympathies with the Revolutionary Guard in Iran.

I will spare my readers the obvious commentary.

Instead, I will merely share the irony of receiving an email proof copy of an upcoming anthology, “BEAT NOT BEAT, edited by Rich Ferguson. My poem in it is entitled, “Good Work, If You Can Get it.” The poem begins, “I work for the secret service / of the Imagination.” If only I had been on duty…..

I’m afraid that we authors only have our reluctance to appear in public to save us from the perfidy of those who hate the Imagination. Except in my poem, there is, unfortunately, no secret service of the imagination to prevent acts of terrorism that should be prosecuted as intentional assaults on the Republic of Literature. I call on all authors to demand accountability from those ultimately responsible for inspiring this attack on Rushdie. Even as we focus on Rushdie, however, let us continue to remember that an American journalist-in-exile, Jamal Khashoggi, was murdered and dismembered at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, Turkey, in October, 2018.

As articles have pointed out, the fatwa issued in 1989 has already had horrific consequences. In 1991, one of Rushdie’s translators, Hitoshi Igarashi was stabbed to death in an unsolved murder, and an Italian translator that same year was also stabbed by an assailant. Toward the end of the last century, the Iranian government claimed that it was retracting the fatwa, but obviously its ideological stench still is capable of agitating a religious fanatic..

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/8/12/author-salman-rushdie-attacked-on-stage-in-new-york

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2022/08/12/nyregion/salman-rushdie-stabbed-new-york

I hope I do not have to revise the headline for today’s post by taking out the word “attempted.”

On 2 October 2018, Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi dissident, journalist, columnist for The Washington Post, former editor of Al-Watan and former general manager and editor-in-chief of the Al-Arab News Channel, was assassinated by agents of the Saudi government at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, Turkey.

Monday, July 25

I wandered over to Page Against the Machine bookstore the other day and bought a couple book, including Mike Sonksen’s “Letters to My City.” After I got home, I looked at the back cover and noticed that there was a blurb by Mike Davis, author of CITY OF QUARTZ: “A genuine people’s poet and historian, as well as tour guide nonpareil, he focuses our attention on the grassroots experiences that keep the un-embalmed arts militantly alive in the city’s diverse neighborhoods…. What Whitman was to Brooklyn, Poet Mike is to contemporary LA.” Former Los Angeles poet laureate Luis J. Rodriguez also contributed an enthusiastic blurb.

Sonksen’s volume of essays and poems should be mandatory reading in every high school and college in Los Angeles County. The only chapter missing from this volume is some commentary that was also missing from his recent essay on spoken work in Los Angeles: where is Harvey Robert Kubernik? If anyone deserves credit in a volume dedicated to calling attention to the cultural activists who have championed the “grassroots” “diverse” artists and writers of this city, it’s Harvey!

I was pleased to note that Sonksen included one of my favorite poems of his: “The Riots Were the Week Before the Prom,” which was a line he spontaneously said to a classroom of my students several years ago when I invited him to read his work at CSULB. I said to him, “That’s a line for a poem,” and he went home and wrote it. Sometimes poetry truly is more dialogic than Bahktin wanted to concede (though Donald Wesling’s book does a superb job of rectifying that theoretical wobble).

Today, Lynell George dropped the community a link to an article on the sad news of Mike Davis’s deteriorating health, though he remains in good spirits. Here is the link to that story:
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-07-22/mike-davis-conversation-doom-hope?consumer=googlenews

“Mike Davis has terminal cancer. But his big worry is what is happening to our world” by Gustavo Arellano

Sunday, July 24, 2022

When I asked the Poetry Foundation in Chicago if they would consider listing me, I was flat our refused as not worthy of such a distinction. I don’t see any evidence that every poet they list who resides in the United States has had their poems translated into four languages and that they have a stand-alone volume of their poems published in another country in a bilingual edition. It remains the greatest honor of my literary life that Bonobos Editores in Mexico published PRUEBAS OCULTAS and that I made three trips to Mexico to read my poems in Mexico City, San Luis de la Potosi, and Veracruz. I wish to thank my translators Robin Myers and Jose Rico for taking on the challenge of translating my poetry and Anthony Seidman for his longstanding appreciation of my poems.

For those who are curious about these translations, you can find them in an edition published in 2018 in the United States as THE HEADWATERS OF NIRVANA (What Press). My thanks to Gail Wronsky and Chuck Rosenthal for her advocacy.

http://www.elem.mx/obra/datos/211263

Pruebas ocultas
La mirada aguda y generosa de un poeta como Bill Mohr sólo podría ser preservada en un lenguaje vital, directo, nacido de una curiosidad incansable. Y así es. La música sutil de Prue- bas ocultas, sus registros cotidianos y lo inusitado de sus metáforas concurren para poner en escena la memoria: vemos a la madre que plancha ropa mientras bebe cerveza, a un amigo poeta muriéndose solo en el hospital, el drama sordo de un auto robado, la habitación de Vallejo, un gato viendo la lluvia desde un alféizar: seres que crecen y crecen aunque la propor- ción del universo a su tamaño sigue igual. Estos poemas francos y coruscantes, poemas que buscan vivir de manera sincera su propia proporción, han sido traducidos por José Luis Rico con minucia, y logran, en español, la misma inmediatez que luce el texto original. Pruebas ocultas nos ofrece “la bendición de atestiguar cómo mi evasión aluzará calmadamente / los retazos de una sed constante”. En ese sentido, hay sed tanto como agua para saciarla: ¿qué es la poesía sino eso? Robin Myers
* Esta contraportada corresponde a la edición de 2015. La Enciclopedia de la literatura en México no se hace responsable de los contenidos y puntos de vista vertidos en ella.

PRUEBAS OCULTAS — Bonobos Editores (2015)

Wednesday, July 20, 2022

“Invisible Strings”: “The Pleasure of Return”

Yesterday afternoon, I had a long phone conversation with the poet Genet Bosque, whom I have seen in person only once in the past 25 years. That occasion was about three years ago, when I had driven from Long Beach to Cecilia Woloch’s apartment to talk with her and another friend about a job interview application at an out-of-state college. I got up in her area early enough to swing by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art to see an exhibit I had read about that included a handwritten transcription of Allen Ginsberg’s “Wichita Vortex Sutra” in a huge painting. As I wandered into a nearby gallery, I heard a voice say, “Bill!” It turned out that Genet was working as a gallery attendant, which caught me off guard because I thought she was still living up north. We exchanged phone numbers and emails, but did not end up contacting each long until recently, when a brief e-mail exchange led to yesterday’s chance to catch up with each other.

Last night, appropriately enough, I spent an hour reading INVISIBLE STRINGS, an extraordinary book of poems by Jim Moore, a poet who has living and worked in St. Paul, Minnesota for most of the past half-century. I published Jim’s second collection, WHAT THR BIRD SEES, in 1978.

Today, the “invisible strings” continued to guide me along. Just four hours ago, I was at my storage unit, going through boxes of my archives to prepare them for being taken down to UCSD, and I found a carbon copy of a letter I wrote back in early 1978 to Sandra Tanhauser. The letter primarily concerned the attendance of Los Angeles poets at the publication party for issue number 10 of BACHY magazine at Papa Bach Bookstore. In the letter, I mention how I showed copies of Jim’s book to Holly and Harry.

Lo and behold, when I got home I found an email from Harry in which he says that Jim Moore’s review of Holly Prado’s book, “WEATHER,” can be found at the following link (Times Times 3):

https://timestimes3.blogspot.com/?fbclid=IwAR3yzywked7nLcjpzUupOuj7OvLH1u7w9wKegLGM-3mW-AQbXr7Ix7JB0ck

“Invisible Strings,” indeed. “The pleasure of return,” as Jim Moore says in his review.

The Library of Congress has named Ada Limón as the 24th national poet laureate. She’s the first woman of Latino heritage to serve in the role.

I would much rather have seen Lorna Dee Cervantes chosen for this public role, but these discussions are not something I am permitted to contribute to, other than in the commentary of this blog. For those who are unfamiliar with Cervantes’s writing, I would recommend taking a look at it within the context of Steve Axelrod’s excellent anthology of poetry, “POSTMODERNISMS,” from Rutgers University Press. It’s only within such a comprehensive overview that one can truly begin to appreciate the distinctive accomplishment of Cervantes and how her work refuses to accommodate itself to narratives of unforgivable trauma. Instead, she reinforces the depths of the inflicted wounds of genocide and neocolonialism. Over twenty years older than Limón, Cervantes has more than earned the honor of being our nation’s next poet laureate. I would point out that she is also capable of bringing together factions of poetry that are not always seen as sharing much common ground: https://lithub.com/lorna-dee-cervantes-on-allen-ginsberg-and-the-interplay-between-beat-and-chicano-poetry/

For additional context for Cervantes’s work, consider an anthology that came out in 1993, when Limón was still a teenager. How would Limón’s work hold up if it were retrospectively inserted into the following line-up in the revised version of NO MORE MASKS, edited by Florence Howe?

Pt. 3. Loving in the War Years / Cherrie Moraga / Lorna Dee Cervantes, 1940-. Beneath the Shadow of the Freeway 1981. Poem for the Young White Man Who Asked Me How I, an Intelligent, Well-Read Person Could Believe in the War between Races 1981 / Judy Grahn, 1940-. Ella, in a Square Apron, along Highway 80, from The Common Woman 1970. My Name is Judith 1978. Hannah, from Helen You Always Were/The Factory 1982 / Toi Derricotte, 1941-. The Feeding 1978. On the Turning Up of Unidentified Black Female Corpses 1989. Poem for My Father 1989 / Irena Klepfisz, 1941-. About My Father 1975. Perspectives on the Second World War 1975. Der mames shabosim/My Mother’s Sabbath Days 1990 / Robin Morgan, 1941-. The Invisible Woman 1970. Heirloom 1982. Damn You, Lady 1988 / Alta, 1942-. Bitter Herbs, 1969. Euch, Are You Having Your Period? 1970. First Pregnancy 1970. Penus Envy 1970. Euridice 1975. from Theme & Variations 1980 / Marilyn Hacker, 1942-. The Muses 1968. Sonnet for Iva 1976; 1980. Mother II 1985. Ballad of Ladies Lost and Found 1985. Nearly a Valediction 1990 / Janice Mirikitani, 1942-. Soul Food 1987. Breaking Tradition 1987 / Sharon Olds, 1942-. Solitary 1980. That Year 1980. The Language of the Brag 1980. Pajamas 1984. What If God 1988; 1992. The Girl 1988. First Sex 1988 / Carolyn M. Rodgers, 1942-. U Name This One 1969. Some Me of Beauty 1976. Feminism 1978 / Tess Gallagher, 1943-. Instructions to the Double 1976. On Your Own 1978. Spacious Encounter 1992. I Stop Writing the Poem 1992 / Nikki Giovanni, 1943-. Seduction 1968. Adulthood 1968. Legacies 1973

In looking at this list, I can see more than one other name that would have truly excited me to see as the recipient of this honor: Judy Grahn. Dream on, Bill. Dream on. And Ellen Bass would make a great poet laureate, too!

***********
As for the Axelrod, et al., anthology, here is some background information:
The New Anthology of American Poetry: Postmodernisms 1950-Present (Volume 3)
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0813551560
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0813551562

“Steven Gould Axelrod, Camille Roman, and Thomas Travisano continue the standard of excellence set in Volumes I and II of this extraordinary anthology. Volume III provides the most compelling and wide-ranging selection available of American poetry from 1950 to the present.”

Review
“A Choice magazine ‘outstanding title,’ featuring over 1800 poems, along with introductions and notes, this three-volume set offers the most compelling and wide-ranging selection from the nation’s beginnings to the present day; also available in individual volumes.” ― LitHub

About the Editors:
STEVEN GOULD AXELROD is a Distinguished Professor of English at the University of California, Riverside. He is the author of Robert Lowell: Life and Art and Sylvia Plath: The Wound and the Cure of Words and coeditor of Robert Lowell: New Essays on the Poetry.

CAMILLE ROMAN is a visiting scholar at Brown University and Emeritus Professor at Washington State University, Pullman. She is the author of Elizabeth Bishop’s World War II-Cold War View and coeditor of The Women & Language Debate: A Sourcebook and a music book series.

THOMAS TRAVISANO is a Professor of English at Hartwick College. He is the author of Elizabeth Bishop: Her Artistic Development and Midcentury Quartet: Bishop, Lowell, Jarrell, Berryman and the Making of a Postmodern Aesthetic. He is the principal editor of Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence of Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell.

Fifty years ago, the first issue of Bachy magazine was published by Papa Bach Bookstore. At the age of 23, I had been appointed its first poetry editor, and critiquing and choosing the poems was like running a poetry workshop. I had, in fact, started attending a poetry workshop at Beyond Baroque in Venice, which was at the time located on West Washington Boulevard (now called Abbot Kinney Blvd.), and begun meeting some of the poets who would become the authors I published when I started Momentum Press.

Unlike Bachy, which published fiction and photography, another Los Angeles-based magazine, INVISIBLE CITY, was devoted just to poetry and poets. INVISIBLE CITY was already well established by the summer of 1972, when its sixth issue appeared, Bachy‘s first issue came out at the same time as the sixth issue of Invisible City, featuring the work of Antonin Artaud, as translated by Jack Hirschman, arrived for sale at Papa Bach. Two friends who had met as undergraduates in San Francisco, Paul Vangelisti and John McBride, had started their magazine a couple years earlier; the knowledge of poetry that they brought to Invisible City easily made it even at that point a major resource for working poets on the West Coast.

Among the poems in Invisible City that directly spoke to the political context of the United States in the early 1970s, it was a translation of a poem about translation (“ars translatio”? / “ars transferendum?”) that most impressed me. Franco Fortini’s “Translating Brecht” caught the haunted tenor of being a poet in a country that would overwhelmingly approve of Richard Nixon’s viciousness in prolonging the Vietnam War. I would note, however, that my admiration for Fortini’s poem was not out of hero worship of its subject. I knew and admired both Brecht’s poems and his plays, but not uncritically, thanks in part to the bracing lesson of a play about Brecht’s life in East Germany after World War II, “The Plebeians Rehearse the Uprising.”

I am always amazed at how few contemporary poets know Fortini’s poem, but I truly shouldn’t be surprised or caught off-guard by American poets’ preference for their familiar, home-grown poetics. As Willis Barnstone says in a recent interview with David Garyan, contemporary poetry is largely “a circus,” and the publication-contest prize game has proved to be a debilitating distraction for too many aspiring poets.

Here is a link to the interview with Tony and Willis Barnstorm as well as Fortini’s poem.

http://www.interlitq.org/groves/willis-tony-barnstone/job.php

‘Translating Brecht’