Bill Tremblay is not a poet who is associated with the West Coast poetry renaissance of the past 75 years, and yet I would be sorely tempted to include him in any anthology that attempted to survey that movement. In large part, his eligibility for such an anthology would be based on expanding “West Coast” to potentially include those poets whose books exist because of the devotion of a West Coast publisher to their work. While Bill Tremblay first caught my attention in the early 1970s with a book from the University of Massachusetts Press (Crying in the Cheap Seats), the vast majority of his subsequent books have been issued by Lynx House Press. Given the number of books he has published and the quality of his work, one has to wonder why he is not better known as a poet. Then again, I have the same question about Christopher Buckley, who also is a poet I would strongly identify as a major contributor to the West Coast poetry renaissance.

For those who are fans of Tremblay’s poetry, I would call attention to an interview with him in issue number 4 of Resonance magazine along with a half-dozen recent poems. In particular, I would urge poets to consider the conversation that Tremblay cites between Dick Hugo and himself about the career advantages of achieving a recognizable style. I myself side with Tremblay’s position, though I have often pointed out to students the same thing that Hugo mentions. My example, though, is Deborah Butterfield’s horse sculptures. This is not to say that I don’t immensely respect and admire poets who have attained such a recognizable curvature to their work that it almost becomes a legal signature: Paul Vangelisti, for instance, and Rae Armantrout. Of those poets who are more deliberately evasive, however, Bill Tremblay is among my favorite.

Here’s the link:

https://www.resonance-journal.org

For those of you who are not at all familiar with Tremblay’s work, here is a list of some of his titles:

Second sun : new and selected poems
Seattle, Wash.] : L’Epervier Press ; Berkeley, Calif. (1985)
(52 libraries)

Rainstorm over the alphabet : poems, 1990-2000
Portland, Or. : Lynx House Press ; Berkeley, CA (2001)
(75 libraries)

Walks along the ditch : poems
Spokane, Washington : Lynx House Press, Seattle, WA : University of Washington Press (2016)
“These poems represent a turn in Bill Tremblay’s long, distinguished career. The political and social concerns are still present, as well as the powerful lyric invention that has marked his previous collections. What’s new is the poems’ meditative interiority, the sense of a man alone with his faiths, failures, feelings, and thoughts as he walks daily along the irrigation ditch near his house, the Rocky Mountains and great Colorado sky in the background, dwarfing all that anyone ever thought, did, or believed. The whole book has about it a passionate, mesmerizing calm.” — COVER DESCRIPTION
(45 libraries)

Crying in the Cheap Seats
Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1971
(219 libraries)

Note: The number of libraries in which each book can be found was accessed at World Cat Advanced Search.

FROM “ROSEBUD” TO MARILYN MONROE: Laurence Goldstein as poet and critic / John Fante and “Ask the Dusk”

Many poets in Los Angeles have some connection with the film business. Harry Northup, for instance, has had an outstanding career as an actor and has a resume that includes significant roles in some of the most revered films ever made. He continues to blend the world of poetry and film through the production facilities at his current residence, MPTF in Thousand Oaks. Numerous other poets come to mind who also are embedded in this town’s best known cultural work, including Jack Grapes, Suzanne Lummis, and Michael Lally.

One of the most prominent advocates of the value of poetry that has been written in Los Angeles in the past 80 years is Laurence Goldstein, whose book from the University of Michigan Press in 2015, POETRY LOS ANGELES, considerably expanded the discourse between the worlds of film and poetry. Professor Goldstein has just published an essay on the impact that Orson Welles’s classic film, “Citizen Kane,” has had on the imaginations of contemporary poets. I would urge you to set aside time immediately to read this exceptional essay.

“Rosebud and Poets’ Fascination with Citizen Kane”:
lfq.salisbury.edu

In addition, I would like to call attention to a poem by Laurence Goldstein that was recently reprinted in the anthology, I WANNA BE LOVED BY YOU.
With his permission, I am reprinting that poem along with a brief introduction he composed but which does not appear in the book.

Arthur Miller As Muse
by Laurence Goldstein

Part of Arthur Miller’s legacy is the inspiration he has given to poets and fiction writers, who have borrowed his plots, his themes, his landscapes, the rhythms of his dialogue. What follows is a poem of mine that pays homage to Miller by versifying the narrative line of a short story he wrote in 1960, “Please Don’t Kill Anything,” a recollection of an afternoon at the beach with his wife Marilyn Monroe. The story is reprinted in Presence: The Collected Stories of Arthur Miller (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2009).

UNTIMELINESS (after Arthur Miller)

They sauntered at shoreline, where the breakers fell,
pensive husband and glamorous wife.
Today, Sartre had it right: hell
was other people who preyed on their life.

Distant objects relieved the eye:
four fishing boats by the peach-
colored horizon, gulls in the sky,
and, suddenly, trucks on the beach.

A turning winch raised a net
bulging with fish, the sea’s produce,
and dumped for transport the ill-fated
thrashing creatures, a silvery sluice

of never-ending energy, flowing west
into the insatiable guts of mankind.
“They know they’re caught,” she gasped, in her best
movie voice, and he, resigned,

steered her from what was more heartless,
the workers heaving aside inedible
sea robins, their corpses-to-be an artless
mosaic on the strand: waste as incredible

to tender souls as extinction of species
or triage in the traffic and brute neglect
of displaced persons, gypsies, refugees —
fish out of water fishermen reject.

“Why don’t you put them back?” she said.
“Would they live again if they had water?”
Bending her beautiful body, she laid
fingertips on the day’s slaughter —

too slippery! He intervened, a hero
flipping junk fish to the waves,
one by one, back to a perfect zero.
He emptied all their sandy graves.

“They’ll live as long as they can,” she laughed.
“That’s right, they’ll live to a ripe old age
and grow prosperous,” he chaffed
her as they strutted merrily offstage,

he blessing her, hope in his eyes.
“Oh, how I love you,” she said,
thinking, For the moment nothing dies,
Nothing on this shoal of time is dead.

Tuesday, April 12th, 2022

David Garyan is an American poet who has been living and working in Italy for several years. One of the ways he has stayed connected with poets on the West Coast is through working as an editor on INTERLITQ (International Literary Quarterly), for which he compiled a multi-part anthology of California poets. He has also interviewed several of those poets at length, the most recent of which is Phoebe MacAdams.

As Phoebe mentions in her interview, I met her through Harry Northup and Holly Prado, the latter of whom she was studying with in a private workshop that Holly conducted for several decades. Harry had asked me to take over the reading series at Gasoline Alley coffee shop, but I told him that I wasn’t willing or able to do all the work by myself, and I would only take it on if I could share the duties with someone else. Harry approached Phoebe, who said she was willing to add running a poetry series to her already busy life of teaching at Roosevelt High School in East Los Angeles. We did the series for about two years, after which I began to concentrate on producing a video series of readings through Century Cable. Many of these recordings are at the Archive for New Poetry at UCSD.

One of the things I most appreciate about David’s interview with Phoebe is the way that her poems are interwoven with references to books about the history of Bolinas. I only visited Bolinas once, and while it was long after the glory days of its poetry scenes, it was enough of a visit to help me fill the visual mise-en-scene of Phoebe’s reminiscences in the interview. If I had known that there was a cemetery there, I most certainly would have made a visit. Phoebe said in the interview that Lewis MacAdams’s ashes will soon be interred there. On whatever hour and day that bestowal takes place, I hope to be able to pause in whatever I am doing and feel “the wheel of Mutability” enclose us all in its unbroken circle.

“Fates, be kind.”

Interlitq’s Californian Poets Interview Series: Phoebe MacAdams, Poet, Educator, interviewed by David Garyan

In the course of the interview, Phoebe and David cite the work of several other poets who lived in Bolinas in the 1970s, including her husband at that time, Lewis MacAdams, as well as Ellen Sander and Aram Saroyan. It is the presence of these poets in Los Angeles at various points in the past thirty years that significantly contributed to the major organizing concept of an anthology I co-edited with Neeli Cherkovski, CROSS-STROKES. That anthology set out to demolish the notion that there was no immersibility between poets in Southern California and Northern California. Rather, Checkovski and I wanted to show how the flow of poets up and down the coast part of what sustained the poetic ecology of this enormous domain within the Republic of Poetry.

This anthology, which also includes Kevin Opstedal, whom Phoebe also mentions, as well as others who lived in Bolinas after she left, such as Joe Sadie, is still available from SPD Books. My design of its cover remains one of my satisfying moments in book production.

As a poet in my mid-70s, it is very gratifying to see that some of my students at CSULB have continued to get their work published and recognized. In particular, I am proud of Jax NTP, who has just been featured in the Crab Creek Review:

https://www.crabcreekreview.org/crabcreekrevblog/poetry-month-feature-jax-ntp

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

I just received the following announcement from the Heide Duckler Dance:

We are bringing our beloved Ebb & Flow festival back to the Los Angeles State Historic Park in Chinatown on June 25th and 26th. Ebb & Flow is a free, site-specific community festival of local artists integrating dance, visual arts, music, and technology to explore climate change and its impact on the environment and consequently our health.
We are looking for 7 dance makers to create 8-10 minutes of multidisciplinary performance works in the park that explore the relationship between nature, humanity, climate change, and health! Artists will receive a stipend for their work and participation.
APPLICATION DUE DATE: April 25th

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScI6NztHdImZYib7-JqM3lzvBJVx3ClceIfTO3sp10VVc00zw/viewform

Will Smith has resigned from the Academy of Motion Pictures. He did the right thing, and I am certain he will return the Oscar trophy that the Academy will strip him of. Next to the official records for this year’s Best Performance by an Actor will be the word “Retracted.”

Unfortunately, there’s no way that Kid Rock can permanently retract his words. They sneer in the stage of memory, in a tape loop that mocks another person for being “disfigured.”

Oh, I forgot: it was a “benign joke.” I guess with the Academy’s full approval it’s back to the schoolyard again, with its merciless taunts of anyone different. I suggest that the Academy make sure that its rectitude is on full display next year. The president of the Academy should stand on stage on awards night and lead the entire audience in a prolonged chant of “G.I. Jane! G.I. Jane! G.I, Jane!” At least thirty seconds long. Such a show of organized unity will thereby obviate any doubt that it was anything other than a “benign joke.” If the Academy is fully convinced that it is in the right, then I see no reason for it to hesitate in reiterating the legitimate appropriateness of its humor. As part of the punishment for Smith’s offense, why should the Academy not drive home its point by piling on?

One notices, too, that the person who wrote the joke has not come forward to claim credit for it. Why not? What’s the hesitation? If you had written one of the most provocative jokes in the history of modern entertainment, wouldn’t you want credit for it? Or is there something you’re ashamed of? Something you can’t retract?

Come to think of it, it’s not the president of the Academy who should lead the chant next year. That person should be joined on stage by the joke writer who came up with it, just so that person gets his or her moment of glory. And just for the record, of course, it would be interesting to learn the race of the person who wrote the joke.

It was around this point in typing out this post that I thought of the title. The first part, of course, comes from a song by John Lennon on “The Plastic Ono Band” album. I suddenly realized, however, that it’s not just one joke writer or comedian or actor who’s crippled inside. It’s the entire society’s insatiable desire for public honor. It’s a feeding frenzy of aquatic predators that want to devour everything — even the ocean in which they swim — in hopes of greater acclaim.

Somehow I miss the joke that humanity is playing on itself, and even if I got the punch line, it probably would be too pathetic in its suicidal self-deprecation to laugh.

I guess it’s time to reread “Day of the Locust.”

******

https://variety.com/2022/film/news/will-smith-resigns-academy-oscars-slap-chris-rock-1235221041/

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/will-smith-resigns-from-academy-membership-1235123801/

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-60963054

March 24, 2022

THE ORIGINS OF A PROTEST IMPERATIVE

If the overwhelming majority of countries belonging to the United Nations are appalled at the war crimes being committed by Russian troops in Ukraine, then let us remember that things were not much different in the 1960s. Does anyone really think that other countries weren’t equally disgusted at the appalling tactics used by the U.S. government?

Out of the protests that happened in this country, an imperative gained popular circulation:

“Make Love, Not War.”

This morning I began to wonder if there was any evidence of the authorship of that phrase:

04: Make Love Not War (1965)

I myself am inclined to believe that Diane Newell Meyer deserves credit for having first publicly gotten the phrase into the public sphere, whereas Penelope Rosemont deserves our gratitude for commodifying it. It’s possible that the activists in Chicago came up with this proclamation all on their own, but they cannot prove that they had not already absorbed it from news accounts at the time.One could say that it was “in the air,” and it’s certainly not surprising that this binary found such compressed urgency.

As a contrast to the recent post on the war in Ukraine, I post therefore a link to a poem by Alexis Rhone Fancher, “Ode to My Husband’s Perfect French.”

http://www.macqueensquinterly.com/MacQ12/Rhone-Fancher-Ode-French.aspx?fbclid=IwAR1KD9s7hK4Iq8xXOh8nMaMzBqnvoT9cwtW9tH6-Z0Nzh1ydEDfO94fU1xA

The humor at the end of her poem should not distract from one of the aspects that makes this poem so successful: the plasticity of the scene. I know my students tire of me emphasizing how imagery is at its best when it conjures a three-dimensional space. In this instance, it is the implied motion of each finger in turn. The reader who speeds through the numbers in rote recitation will lose over 99 percent of the erotic charge. Each number is a sentence unto itself, wiggling with the specificity of its desire.

For those who would like a “side-dish” of a short film, I recommend “I Only Know What I Know Now.”