February 24, 2022

“History is approaching a speechless end,
As Henry Adams said. Adams was right.”
— John Berryman, “The Moon and the Night and the Men”

I remember reading Berryman’s poem in 1969 and thinking that it met Pound’s demand for “news that stays news.”

http://www.blueridgejournal.com/poems/jb2-moon.htm

Friday, February 18, 2022

ART AND CAKE: A Contemporary Art Magazine with a Focus on the Los Angeles Art Scene would like to see dual submissions from poets who also paint, sculpt, or in some way engage in the domain of art.

CALL FOR POET ARTISTS!!
Submit a poem with a work of art for “Art of Poetry” a new article for Art and Cake
(1 submission per poet artist)
Deadline February 28, 2022

I contacted the magazine to find out if the poem must never have been published before. ART AND CAKE is accepting previously published poems. The only requirement is that you be the author of the poem you send along with the image of your work of art.

Here’s the link to the form you should use
https://forms.gle/yrMCp3eNFYtL1qh9A

* & * & * & * & * & * & * & * & * & *

Art and Cake

https://artandcakela.com/
@artandcakela
artandcakela@gmail.com

Located at the Brewery Artist Complex in Los Angeles which is on Chumash, Kizh, and Tongva land

Friday, February 11, 2022

I recently received the following publicity release for this year’s edition of the Writers Week at UC Riverside. As was the case last year, when the events were presented through Zoom, this year’s festival will be broadcast so that anyone with a computer can listen in. It certainly reduces the carbon footprint of all the mileage that would have to be driven to attend in person.

Go to this link to register now! The following link, which takes you to the schedule, will also provide an embedded link to register.

https://writersweek.ucr.edu/schedule22

Event passes are now available for the 45th Writers Week 2022
Entering its 45th year, UCR’s Writers Week Festival is the longest-running,
free literary event in California and features the most renowned authors of
our day alongside those at the start of promising careers.

The week of virtual events is open to the public and includes readings,
conversations, panels, and social activities focused on the varied and
exciting work of our participants, many of them among UC Riverside’s
powerhouse Creative Writing faculty. *CC/ASL Interpreted.

This year’s presenters and performances include:

Luis J. Rodriguez, as the *D. Charles Whitney Reader*
Cornelius Eady, as the *Stephen Minot Lecturer*
*Featured Writers* – Emily Rapp Black, Kate Bonnici, Joy Castro, Anthony Cody, Lewis deSoto, Steve Erickson, Molly Fisk, Carribean Fragoza, Sesshu Foster, Edgar Gomez, Kimberly Guerrero, Daisy Hernandez, Gordon Lee Johnson, John Kinsella, Diane Lefer, Antonio de Jesús López, Tom Lutz, Isabella Madrigal, Sophia Madrigal, Juanita Mantz, Chloe Martinez, Rupa Marya, Rajiv Mohabir, Amanda Moore, Ibrahim Nasrallah, Daniel Olivas, Jamaica Heolimeleikalani Osorio, Jasmine Elizabeth Smith, Susan Straight, Kim Shuck, Moheb Soliman, Richard Van Camp, Elissa Washuta, Kyle Lucia Wu, Luo Ying, anthology contributors from XLA Poets & Tlaculix, and musical guests The Cornelius Eady Trio & April & The Fishes!

Each year, along with the Los Angeles Review of Books (LARB), we collaboratively honor distinguished writers for lifetime achievement, celebrating the ways they contribute to and change contemporary writing through their fearless originality.\\\\

https://writersweek.ucr.edu/schedule22

While the work of some of these writers, such as Susan Straight, Steve Erickson, Molly Fisk, and Sesshu Foster may be familiar to many of this handful of readers, very few may know the work of Amanda Moore, a poet whose work I first encountered at the summer writing camp of the Community of Writers in the Sierra Nevada. Her first book of poetry, REQUEENING, was published this past October as part of the National Poetry Series. Ocean Vuong was the judge who selected her volume of poems.

I am especially looking forward to hearing the Cornelius Eady Trio!

Late last summer, Netflix released a series called “The Chair,” which many of my colleagues at CSULB were quite enthusiastic about. I, on the other hand, found myself dismayed that such a lackadaisical effort could sustain their attention. Outside of the acting, what was there in fact to justify the praise of critics?

“The Chair” could have been a compelling examination of academic politics (and thereby a reflection of large-scale social conflicts), but the two women (Amanda Peet and Annie Julia Wyman) who came up with the idea for this series utterly failed to investigate their topic.The superficiality of their research was so obvious that I couldn’t bear to watch more than an episode and a half. How could Peet and Wyman not realize that almost every Department of English in this country depends upon the enrollment of creative writing students to keep itself afloat? Where on the faculty depicted in “The Chair” is at least one actress or actor portraying a nationally known fiction writer and a poet? It’s made out to seem as if this “contemporary” Department of English has a faculty consisting only of professors who are throwbacks to the 1950s.

Pray tell, Ms. Peet and Ms. Wyman, where is the creative writing faculty? Now perhaps the creative writing “option” within the English major has taken its show on the curriculum road at this fictional college and been awarded departmental status. If so, then this explanatory backstory involved an academic civil war in which the secessionist faction won a serious turf war. As a result, the Department of Creative Writing will have its own chair, and its own budget, all of which sets up some serious possibilities of dramatic conflict when the chairs of all the departments in the College of Liberal Arts have their weekly meetings with the Dean. I truly can’t figure out why Peet and Wyman didn’t do some basic research.

My guess is that it never occurred to these writers that they needed to do research. They thought “the concept” was enough. Hence, a superficial script that only grows more improbable with each passing moment. The sad part is how easy it would have been for a very fine set of scripts to have left their mark on “the concept.” There are so many other dramatic possibilities that were overlooked that it leaves me shaking my head in disbelief. It was obviously a smart move to cast an Asian-American actress as the chair, but the show revealed little about how “smart” the new chair is. Now it is true that sometimes faculty get tenure with relatively little publication, and from that point they take advantage of the lack of interest in being chair by their colleagues to land the job themselves. I didn’t at all get that career trajectory in “The Chair.” Professor Ji-Yoon Kim seems to be someone who has done a fair amount of scholarship and who still wants to accomplish yet more. Are you telling me that she didn’t feel reluctant to give up (even if for a few years) her research agenda? Does the script give even a hint about the choices Professor Kim has to make to attain this position in academic politics? Didn’t Peet and Wyman ask themselves what percentage of professors who serve as chairs continue to do significant research? The number is all too close to zero, which is about the score I give Peet’s and Wyman’s imagination. I just don’t find the character of Professor Kim believable, and in fact I regard the show as being sufficiently dismissive of Professor Kim’s past academic accomplishments as to suspect “unconscious bias” on the part of the scriptwriters. In “The Chair,” we are given a one-dimensional character whom we are supposed to accept at complete face value. If you enjoy superficial drama, fine. Help yourself. but don’t ask me to sit here and applaud mediocrity.

For a different “take” on “The Chair,” see https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/tv/story/2021-08-20/the-chair-netflix-sandra-oh-amanda-peet