I know that I am supposed to floss if I want to maintain good gum strength for my teeth, but I just can’t make myself do it. Instead, I compensate by getting my teeth cleaned every three to four months. It’s usually four times a year, but this year has been a tough one, with so much teaching happening on Zoom, and yesterday I snagged the final appointment that my dentist had for the year to get my teeth cleaned. On my way there, I heard the news on the radio that Joan Didion had died.
Just now, perfusing various notices, I saw that Vogue magazine had reprinted her early essay, “On Self-Respect.” I had never read it before, or at least don’t particularly recall it as the high point of “Slouching toward Bethlehem.” It is a very precocious essay, but afterwards, I thought to myself, “It’s so Prufrockian. It sounds very much like an essay that someone very influenced by Eliot would write as a prose example of how Prufrock experiences his self-awareness.” Look at the opening: “Once, in a dry season,….” If that isn’t an intonation of Eliot in all his “Four Quartets” grandeur, then I’ll contribute a hundred dollars to whatever charity Didion’s closest friends would prefer that I support.
In contrast, I think of another writer who also attended the University of California, Berkeley, just after Didion graduated from there in 1956. Diane Wakoski is a poet who, like Didion, was born in California and who also has seen herself as an “outsider.” Yet if Didion managed to make being an outsider seem like an experience a reader could become familiar with through the intrepid sinuousness of her syntax and insights, Wakoski’s best poems remain unfamiliar even after repeated readings. “Smudging” is one of the great poems of the 20th century. Didion deserves all the attention that her passing has stirred up, but she is not an unrepresentative figure in the same way that Wakowski is, and those are the writers I am most intrigued by.
On Self-Respect: Joan Didion’s 1961 Essay from the Pages of Vogue
(According to a prefatory note by Vogue, Didion “wrote it not to a word count or a line count, but to an exact character count.” Here are the stats I came up with:
9,081 characers (with no spaces)
10,898 characters (with spaces)
1,843 words
15 paragraphs
122 lines
*****
https://www.npr.org/2021/12/23/375431790/joan-didion-obituary
by Susan Stamberg Updated December 23, 20212:25 PM ET
At the beginning of this month, I read a report in the news that Joni Mitchell was one of the recipients of a Kennedy Center Honor, along with Berry Gordy, a songwriter who was the founder of Motown Records in Detroit. Motown Records was a formative cultural encounter for many young poets in Southern California. Just ask Amy Uyematsu or Stephen Kessler, if you don’t believe me. So, too, back in the 1970s, Mitchell’s lyrics and musical experimentation caught the attention of poets in Los Angeles, many of whom thought of her as being part of our imaginary community of synchronized one-man bands, “playing real good for free.” If Dylan’s work intermittently faltered in that decade, Mitchell’s poetry set to music in contrast recalibrated the tensions in that dialogue of words and chords as classically as anything written by Thomas Campion. By including her lyrics, Stephen Axelrod’s anthology of postmodernist poetry, published by Rutgers University Press a couple years ago, serves as a rare instance of long overdue recognition by an academy other than that of “Recording Artists.” Axelrod and his co-editors deserve our smiles of complicity in their subversion of canonical keywords such as “tradition.”
About a half-dozen years ago, there were vague reports about her health that left her admirers wondering how much was unfounded rumor, or if the hints of a catastrophic malady had some truth to their widespread circulation. I gather that the occasion at the Kennedy Center was recorded and was broadcast on CBS last night, and though I didn’t watch it, it is gratifying to learn that Mitchell’s determination to regain a measure of personal equilibrium is still brimming over.
That Berry Gordy, who was responsible for a renaissance in African-American music that has yet to be fully recognized by the intellectual academy, was honored along with Mitchell made this tribute more than a retrospective honor. Instead, it proffers a legitimate indulgence in nostalgia that somehow reverts into a present tense event when their recordings release their cadenced fragrances.
LUIS CAMPOS — Papa Bach Bookstore reading — Dec. 21
(or was it Beyond Baroque?)
Fifty years ago, on this date, at either Papa Bach Bookstore or Beyond Baroque, four poets read. Somewhere I have a flyer for that reading, but until I find it I won’t be able to confirm exactly which place was the venue. I had thought it was Papa Bach until I started typing up this post. All I can remember is that it was one of those two places. One of the poets was Luis Campos. I’m fairly certain of that. I believe another was Dennis Holt, a poet who also did some translating.
Both Luis and Dennis were original members of the Wednesday night poetry workshop, founded by Joseph Hansen and John Harris. Two years after the reading on this date, I would suggest to Ted Reidel that John Harris would be a good successor to me as the poetry editor of BACHY magazine. John took over that job for about five issues, by which time he ended up buying the store. Fortunately, he continued to use a good chunk of the store’s profits to continue publishing the magazine, as well as to publish books by Bert Meyers and William Pillin.
Paul Vangelisti once said to me that Papa Bach was the real center of poetry in Los Angeles in the first half of the 1970s, and it would be hard not to agree. As prominent as Beyond Baroque became between 1975 and 1985, it was Papa Bach Bookstore that was a crossroads for poets in L.A. back then: four walls in a rear room under a huge loft were lined with nothing but books of poetry. It was there that I first talked with Peter Levitt, who turned out to be an Ocean Park neighbor.
For anyone working on an anthology of Los Angeles poets between 1950 and 2020, I would urge you not to forget to include Luis Campos. He has been part of “the scene(s)” for quite some time, although I rarely see him included in various compilations of this area’s poets.
Here is the list of poets who appeared in the first poetry anthology associated with the Venice Poetry Workshop:
Luis Campos
Richard Eiden
Ed Entin
Joseph Hansen
John Harris
Dennis Holt
Jane E. Newton
Harry Northup
Anne Marie Ross
Andrew V. Salmins
Lynn Shoemaker
Barry Simons
Phil Taylor
It is worth noting that two of the above poets (Joseph Hansen and Lynn Shoemaker) went on to win creative writing fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts. While that award is not inherently a guarantee that a writer’s work will have enduring value, it is often touted as a significant acknowledgement of a writer’s stature and quality. How many clusters of MFA seminars with a dozen of so students meeting every week end up having two of their contingent winning such an award?
That workshop, of course, was soon to see the arrival of many other poets, including NEA award winners Jim Krusoe, Jack Grapes, Paul Vangelisti, Wanda Coleman, and Bob Greenfield. Lee Hickman, Kate Braverman and Tom Waits also attended the workshop in the early years, and by the mid-1970s Exene Cervenka and John Doe were in regular attendance. Hickman ended up being the primary editor of Bachy magazine during the last several years of its run, and then went on to edit the legendary magazine, TEMBLOR. It was at Papa Bach that Hickman gave his first major poetry reading in Los Angeles. One of the people in attendance was a clerk at the store named William Iwamoto, who would soon start up on the other side of town his own bookstore (CHATTERTON’s, which is now the site of SKYLIGHT BOOKS). Among other poets I first heard read at Papa Bach was Michael C. Ford, whose book THE WORLD IS A SUBURB OF Los Angeles I would publish years later. Poets also worked at the cash register at Papa Bach’s front counter: Doren Robbins, for instance.
Ford was one of the few poets to get a nod of appreciation from Lionel Rolfe, a journalist whose book LITERARY L.A. got quite a bit of attention back in the early 1980s. Rolfe subsequently wrote a long article for the L.A. READER went that was a fairly dour assessment of then-current crop of writers and poets in Los Angeles. He didn’t have much to say about any of the poets I’ve mentioned except for Ford, and even that seemed begrudging. Nevertheless, his article reluctantly conceded that L.A. might some day defy all expectations and become a literary capital. When Rolfe died in 2018, there seemed to be more than one jury still debating that notion.
I believe I missed taking notice of Rolfe’s passing back in 2018. Here is the link to Mike Sonksen’s fine appreciation of one of L.A. first literary champions.
David Garyan began editing a series of installments in INTERLITQ magazine about a year and a half ago that featured a selection of California-based poets. The majority of the poets he focused on have primarily resided in Southern California. Garyan has followed up on his on-line anthology by conductive a series of interviews with some of the most prominent of these poets, including current Los Angeles Poetry Laureate Lynne Thompson. The interview with me is now posted, and joins the company of some of my favorite poets in this region: Clint Margrave, Suzanne Lummis, Harry Northup, Ron Koertge, and Alexis Rhone Fancher.
In addition, by the way, to being the current poet laurete of Los Angeles, Thompson is also serving as co-editor of Spillway magazine. The most recent issue, number 29, features poems by Alexis Rhone Fancher, Suzanne Lummis, Clint Margrave, Jan Wesley, Susan Terris, Lee Rossi, Ann Keniston, Kimberly Esslinger, and Jeffrey Alfier. The upcoming submission period begins on January 1st and runs through March 31st. Details at www.tebotbach.org.
Dinner Banter with the Fanchers, at the Loft in San Pedro, on Friday, 12/17/21
The nights are getting longer, and colder, too, even in Long Beach, California. It got down to 35 degrees last night, and by the end of this week the low temperatures just 70 miles north of here will be under the freezing point. And that’s at less than a thousand feet above sea level. Anybody in these parts who craves a bit of snow on Christmas Day and temperatures dropping to the mid-20s can always drive to 5000 feet above sea level in Idyllwild.
As one of many celebrations of the Winter Solstice’s approach, Linda and I had dinner with Alexis and Jim Fancher at our studio at the Loft in San Pedro. One of the highlights of the evening was a discussion that focused on Otis Redding’s version of “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction,” shortly after which Jim Fancher pushed back from the table suddenly, and stepped to center stage. I was completely floored by his shoes, which I hadn’t seen earlier because they arrived as I was hustling off to get our order of food from our favorite local restaurant, Senfuku. I didn’t have time to say more than a quick hello and scoot around the corner as Alexis and he ascended the Loft’s rear ramp, which was minimally lit.
I’m not much into fashion, but these shoes were gorgeous. As my readers well know by now, I am not interested in using my blog to build any kind of advertising base. This image and link, therefore, owe their presence only to my admiration for footwear that makes me wish that Marcel Duchamp were around to present it as a “ready-made.”
https://www.nike.com/flyease/go-flyease
How attractive were Fancher’s shoes? Two poems immediately popped into mind: Laurel Ann Bogen’s “For Love of Shoe” and a piece I first heard recited back in the early 1990s: “Please Don’t Steal my Air Jordans.”
I recently received an email letter from a friend on the East Coast who commented about how busy I must be right now since “there hasn’t been anything on your blog for several days.” I wasn’t planning on posting anything today, since in fact I will be wrangling student portfolios for the remainder of the week, not to mention getting overdue books returned to the campus library. Things are getting done, however. The M.A. comprehensive exams I was assigned to evaluate have officially been taken care of. I also stepped up this past week and did the “heavy lifting” of revising a report that wasn’t actually my job to do, but got it done by the deadline and feel pleased with the results of my effort.
She was a writer I was late in discovering. I think the first time I bought one of her books (“Teaching to Transgress”) was at Groundwork Bookstore, which has operated on the campus of UCSD for close to 50 years. I don’t recollect any of my professors at UCSD ever mentioning her name in the seven years I was there, but on the other hand no one ever recommended that I read Cornell West, either. Perhaps it’s not simply a coincidence that they ended up collaborating on a book (“Breaking Bread: Insurgent Black Intellectual Life”). Of course, lots of people didn’t make it onto the syllabi I was handed in grad school: Emily Dickinson, for example. I wasn’t assigned a single poem by her. Still, for a university to “omit” cultural workers of the stature of West and hooks is a bit puzzling, especially given her impact on the conversations regarding intersectionality. “I think of bell hooks as being pivotal to an entire generation of Black feminists who saw that for the first time they had license to call themselves Black feminists,” Kimberlé Crenshaw, a law professor at Columbia, said in an interview. “She was utterly courageous in terms of putting on paper thoughts that many of us might have had in private.” (This quotation appeared in the New York Times’ obituary for bell hooks, the link to which refuses to load.)
hooks was quoted as saying that she lower-cased her pen name so that readers understand that the content of the book mattered infinitely more than her identity as an author.
In taking notice of her passing, therefore, I will conclude with a list of some of her books.
Teaching to transgress: education as the practice of freedom. 1994.
hooks, bell. All About Love: New Visions. (2000)
Feminism is for everybody: passionate politics. 2000.
hooks, bell. Where we stand: class matters. (2000)
hooks, bell. Salvation: Black people and love. (2001).
hooks, bell (2002). Communion: the female search for love.
Teaching community: a pedagogy of hope. New York: Routledge. 2003.
Rock my soul: Black people and self-esteem. New York: Atria Books. 2003.
The will to change: men, masculinity, and love. New York: Atria Books. 2004.
We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity. New York: Routledge. 2004.
In the fall of 1986, Doren Robbins and I made a trip together to St. Paul to attend and participate in the Loft’s 70th birthday celebration of Tom McGrath. (For those not aware of the Loft, it is Minnesota’s version of Beyond Baroque in Los Angeles, or the Poetry Project in NYC.) While we were certainly not the only poets in California who admired McGrath, Doren and I seemed to have been the only ones from the West Coast who made a personal effort to honor him near the end of his life. Phil Levine did send a heartfelt message that was read at the main event by the organizers of the tribute, but one has to wonder why other poets — especially those in the Bay Area involved with Left critique if not political action itself — would not also have used this occasion to remind people of the sacrifices made by poets such as Don Gordon and McGrath during the McCarthy period.
I am reminded of this trip because McGrath is one of the poets Philip Levine cites in his praise for Doren Robbins, whose SYMPATHETIC MANIFESTO: Selected Poems 1975-2015 was published earlier this year by Spuyten Duyvil. Robbins is indeed one of the most inspiring poets that a young, politically attuned poet could read if they/she/he wanted to grasp the multiple layers of the personal and political that can be brought to bear on one’s outrage over the planet’s plight and the ability of those responsible for those conditions to evade any accountability. I have long admired Robbins’s poems, which I published both in my magazine (Momentum) and in “POETRY LOVES POETRY: An Anthology of Los Angeles Poets” (Momentum Press, 1985).
For those who would like to hear Doren Robbins read some of the poems in SYMPATHETIC MANIFESTO, here is a link to a very recent POETRY FLASH reading he did with Susan Suntree.
One of the poems (“Tamale Place”) was reprinted in an anthology I edited with Neeli Cherkovski back in the middle of the past decade, CROSS-STROKES: Poetry between Los Angeles and San Francisco. Among other places, Robbins has lived in both Northern and Southern California, and thus was eligible in appear in our anthology.
*********************************
PRAISE FOR SYMPATHETIC MANIFESTO:
“He comes out of another tradition, one we forget in these indifferent times at our own peril, the tradition of the aforementioned Villon, of Corbiere, Celine, Henry Miller, Tom McGrath, and most recently Gerald Stern, the great outsiders who bless our daily lives with their boundless love and rage.” —- Philip Levine, U.S. Poet Laureate
“(R)emarkable, fiery poems. Poems that would urge any poet on, language that tears open reality.” —Adrienne Rich
“I admire the gritty, original, uncompromising voice that drives these rich, furious poems.” -— Dorianne Laux
“One listens to Doren Robbins’s poems as if pressing a forbidden radio receiver to one’s ear in order to learn the news of our actual day-to-day living conditions. Here is a poet whose fervent, anarchistic monologues overflow with poignant vulnerability. Of his generation of poets, very few have as forthrightly brought the alternative canon of West Coast poetry into substantial dialogue with the present crisis and made that conversation worth rereading until it’s fully absorbed. Memorable poetry is rarely this fearless or as candid about the consequences of risking one’s life in devotion to “whoever it is I’m / always talking to in my head;” and in our heads, too, reiterating the desire to free ourselves from our mind-chained manacles. In the illuminated vortex of these searing poems, a road of possibility emerges. Prepare to meet not just a comrade, but an amazingly eloquent visionary whose writing you will cherish for its extraordinary audacity.”
––Bill Mohr, author of HOLDOUTS: The Los Angeles Poetry Renaissance, 1948-1992
“(H)e’s writing the best political poems I know.” —- Gerald Stern
“Doren Robbins’ Sympathetic Manifesto is in the tradition, aesthetics and vision of Whitman, Williams, Rexroth, Neruda and other great poets while being uniquely his…. Robbins’ liberating poetry moves the way we move through our trapped lives, but despairingly see freedom. He gives hope as does his original, superb art.” — Sharon Doubiago
Doren Robbins is a poet, mixed media artist, and essayist. His work has appeared in many publications, including The American Poetry Review, Another Chicago Magazine, Exquisite Corpse, Lana Turner, Otoliths, Sulfur, Kayak and The Iowa Review. His books have been awarded the Blue Lynx Poetry Award 2001 and the 2008 PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Poetry Award. In 2020 Spuyten Duyvil Press published his monograph, Apocalypse Contemporary, on Sharon Doubiago’s book Naked to the Earth; and highmoonoon books published Not Fade Away: Poetic Prose Monologues, Three Sequences. Sympathetic Manifesto, Selected Poems, 1975-2015 is his fifteenth book. He is Emeritus Professor of Creative Writing and English at Foothill College.
PART TWO: SUSAN SUNTREE’S “DEAR TRAVELER” (FINISHING LINE PRESS, 2021)
If Robbins is in the mold of McGrath, then Susan Suntree is aligned with Gary Snyder, a West Coast poet whose influence has exponentially grown since the emergence of ecopoetics as a primary artistic practice and critique. (He is also the last survivor of the Six Gallery poetry reading in San Francisco in 1955.) Suntree’s SACRED SITES: A Secret History of Southern California is the perfect complement to Robbins’s project of assiduous resistance to the nefarious degradation of the political environment by radical right-wing agitators on corporate boards.
While we turn our attention away from their perversities at our peril if we linger too long with alternative narratives, it is essential that we do read such accounts, and none does a better job at presenting such a resourceful alternative than Susan Suntree in SACRED SITES. With support from admirers of this project, an audio version of her book is now available and I can’t think of a more pertinent holiday gift to give a young person who is curious about the land’s relationship with the evolution of our imagination.
Suntree’s reading with Robbins in a Poetry Flash event was her first public celebration of her most recent collection of work, DEAR TRAVELER. She, too, has received praise from poets I have long respected and admired, including Marsha de la O, Peter Levitt, and Phoebe MacAdams. Levitt, in particular, is a poet whose generosity in entrusting his work to my rudimentary publishing skills in the mid-1970s still flourishes in my memory. His poems appeared in both of my first two anthologies, and it was his meditation on love and longing (TWO BODIES DARK/VELVET) that was the first title published by Momentum Press.
“Dear Traveler is a gorgeous poem-cycle as well as a journey we all must make.”
—Marsha de la O, author ofEvery Ravening Thing
“The poems in Susan Suntree’s Dear Traveler …. emerge from the poet’s years of deep listening …. , and leave their echo in the reader’s heart. But there is something more here for you to discover; in some mysterious way, Suntree’s poetry itself listens. It listens without ears, and speaks without a mouth.” —- Peter Levitt, author of One Hundred Butterflies, Within Within; translator (with Kazuaki Tanahashi) The Complete Cold Mountain: Poems of the Legendary Hermit Hanshan
“These are everyday journeys, celestial journeys:
journey of soul
journey of body
journey of mind
Who is the Traveler? It is us
revealed in these dazzling, dancing poems.”
— Phoebe MacAdams, author of The Large Economy of the Beautiful
“Susan Suntree powerfully adds her work to the travel poem traditions of her Classical Japanese predecessors, Saigyo and Basho. Dear Traveler is a Postmodern travel diary taking us on a journey through “a fevered civilization.” These poems shine with moments of quiet astonishment as they guide us into the interior of the self during these turbulent times. Her poems remind us “Your wild life is listening.” — Alan Soldofsky, author of In the Buddha Factory and Director of the MFA Program in Creative Writing, San Jose State University
“These finely crafted poems map onto the Pacific Coast a quest for balance and self-possession. “This road is a welcome,” writes Suntree, and that’s a fact: whether humorous or bleakly prophetic, they draw us in with considerable clarity and force. These poems remind us that though the journey’s stakes are high and the risks great, every step takes us closer to ‘awakening love’s beloved body’.” – Tom Laichas, author of Empire of Eden.
“Like the music of the tall grass and dry sticks that Susan Suntree writes about, these poems sing. Her writing here is spare, her economy of language admirable; there’s not an extraneous word or piece of punctuation anywhere. Each tiny poem floods dark corners with light. Tight as a coiled spring, these pieces test the limits of compression. Each is a jewel.” – Jana Harris, author of Horses Never Lie About Love (memoir) and You Haven’t Asked About My Wedding or What I Wore (poetry)
Sacred Sites: The Secret History of Southern California
University of Nebraska Press, 2010; Updated paperback 2020; Audio Book 2021
A history that is equal parts science and mythology, Sacred Sites offers a rare and poetic vision of a world composed of dynamic natural forces and mythic characters. The result is a singular and memorable account of the evolution of the Southern California landscape, reflecting the riches of both Native knowledge and Western scientific thought.
AUDIO BOOK NOW AVAILABLE! //https://shop.authors-direct.com/collections/suntree-sacred-sites-audiobook
Featuring contemporary photographs by Juergen Nogai of rarely seen landmarks along with meticulous research, Sacred Sites provides unusual insight into how natural history and mythology, and scientific and intuitive thinking combine to create an ever-deepening sense of a place and its people.
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I saw a notice that Robert Bly died and wondered how many poets under the age of forty would be able to talk about a single one of his poems that are not found in anthologies published since 1980. I’ve only read one of the obituaries so far, so it’s hardly a large sample, but it’s my guess that very few if any of them will mention that he was one of the first poets in the early 1970s to write a significant number of prose poems. It’s easy to forget how little prose poetry was being written in this country fifty years ago. I’ll grant the limitations of the persona that often was piloting the narrative of the prose poems, but it must be conceded nevertheless that Bly’s work in that area helped acclimate a line-bound ecology in American poetry to the possible condensations available to a paragraph impacted by a poetic scouring.
His translations, too, will probably not get enough mention. It was thanks to Bly that I became aware of the work of Juan Ramon Jimenez, for instance. While obviously other poets, such as Clayton Eshleman, worked exceptionally hard to call attention to César Vallejo, very few translators were working on both Jimenez and Vallejo. Bly had a stronger ability to disown his own tendencies than most other translators of poetry back in the 1970s. I suspect that the growth of translation as a field will make Bly’s work recede into the discarded, but the influence of his translations on a generation of baby boomer poets will still be visible to those who read carefully enough.
Not enough can be said about his willingness to be public in his poetry about his opposition to the Vietnam War. Together with poets such as Allen Ginsberg (“Wichita Vortex Sutra”),the anti-war movement allowed poetry to demonstrate once again its cultural power at a moment of national crisis. Young poets may only be vaguely familiar with how poets ignited the opposition to the war in Iraq after the invasion had taken place and it seemed pointless to protest. We older poets saw that convergence of protest by poets and actual social consequences as simply a continuation of poetic efficacy upheld by figures such as Bly.
It’s possible that someone posted a tweet citing this article in which Bly’s “The Teeth Mother Naked at Last” was mentioned as a contextual political poem. I thought about it when I first read the article, but I tweet far less often than I write in my blog, so it didn’t happen. Now, however, it does seem appropriate to link that poem and this recent report of yet another atrocity by American imperialism.
Finally, let us not forget that Bly’s issues of “The Fifties” and “The Sixties,” though few and often far between as little magazine production goes, were immensely inspiring to many young poets just beginning to work as editors and publishers themselves.
I confess that I haven’t read a new poem by Bly in many years, or at least I’ve haven’t read a new poem that was a memorable experience, but several of the ones I read years ago still remain fresh in my memory: the one about the dried up corn cob, for instance, with its scathing rebuke of Christian belief in an afterlife. If you don’t know that piece, look it up, and then search for your equivalent.
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“PLEASED TO MEET YOU, BEASTMASTER 666”: Jack Skelley’s Hybrid Undercurrents of Sunset Blvd.
DENNIS WILSON AND CHARLES MANSON
by Jack Skelley
(Illustrations by Brian Walsby)
Fred & Barney Press, 2021
Laurence Goldstein’s POETRY LOS ANGELES: Reading the Essential Poems of the City (University of Michigan Press, 2014 is without doubt the best book-length commentary about poems that use Los Angeles as a trope. Goldstein’s concisely eloquent phrasing, acute analysis, and knowledge of the city make the book a pleasure to read, even when the subject of a given poem focuses on the grimmest aspects of the so-called counterculture of the 1960s. In Chapter Two, “Hollywood: Here and Everywhere,” for instance, Goldstein contextualizes David Wojahn’s harrowing poem about Charles Manson’s aborted songwriting career as a postmodernist version of Yeats’s “Second Coming.” Instead of vatic apocalypse, however, Wojahn’s music producer protagonist, Terry Melcher, makes history (Wojahn’s italics) a matter of a speech act in popular culture. As Goldstein points out, though, Manson’s conversion of Yeats’s sphinx-like monster into “Beastmaster 666” is not meant to be more profound than any other ideological stick-figure taunt. It is merely a “verbal prop, the sign of a hostile attitude marketable to a bored and rebellious counterculture.”
If it turned out to be a house that Melcher leased in which Manson’s followers carried out his orders for mayhem and carnage on August 8, 1969, it was in the residence of a much better-known pop culture figure that Manson first wrangled an abbreviated audition in the corporate music industry. For several months during the previous year, Manson and his entourage had informally squatted at the Sunset Boulevard home of Dennis Wilson, a singer in the Beach Boys band. The relationship between Wilson and Manson is the focus of a long, documentary-style story with a poetic coda by Jack Skelley that has been published by Fred and Barney Press in Culver City. It is heartening to see Skelley’s return to literary projects, after the long imposition of having to work as a journalist and public relations specialist.
First, though, a bit of literary history: Skelley was part of the Dennis Cooper “gang” at Beyond Baroque that was recently featured in an exhibit at the Huntington Library as part of “MADE IN L.A 2020.” The choice of Manson as a subject for Skelley’s return to literary work is perhaps not without a link to that brief but notorious scene in Venice, California that also included the late performance artist/poet Bob Flanagan as well as poets such as Amy Gerstler and David Trinidad. Skelley’s initial literary successes were as a poet published by Cooper’s small press venture, LITTLE CAESAR. Skelley’s first book of poems, Monsters, was one of the notable first books of poems published in the United States in the early 1980s, and he also became renowned for his adaptations of Kathy Acker’s writing. In addition, Skelley was in bands such as Planet of Toys and Lawndale. Many, many, many, many, many years later (cf: “Flanagan’s poem “Fear of Poetry”), Skelley’s selection of a notorious criminal responsible for several murders as one of his eponymous characters brings to mind Dennis Cooper’s novels, which have been primarily concerned with serial killers or at the very least draw upon our familiarity with such real-life instances.
In contrast with Cooper’s homosexual domain, Wilson’s and Manson’s mise-en-scene in Skelley’s rendition is thoroughly heterosexual and patriarchal in its gender dynamics. “Sexy Sadie,” the opening scene of DWCM reads almost like a parody of a scene that one might imagine at Hugh Hefner’s Playboy Mansion a half-century ago. Though it would seem to be the case that Wilson ended up encountering Manson only because of a brief dalliance with two of his followers, whom he picked up while they were hitchhiking, it is difficult to feel sorry for Wilson, whose id has been done no favors in return for attaining success in the music industry. Like those who win millions in a lottery only to die emotionally and financially destitute, Wilson’s life only takes a turn for the worse after serving as a host for Manson’s parasitical self-absorption.
Skelley’s book itself feels like a truncated Elizabethan tragedy in which acts two, three, and four have been lost. The first three scenes of Act I all take place in the late 1960s, whereas the last two scenes all occur in the final month of Wilson’s life. This temporal collage works to Skelley’s advantage: one doesn’t feel the need to have the intervening years filled out. If they are blotted out, it is because they are obscene in the etymological sense of the word: that which is kept off-stage because mimesis will only harm the viewer.
The most compelling portion of the story is in part three, in which Manson is given a monologue that might well serve as an audition monologue for any actor brave enough to give it full-throated utterance. One can easily imagine Arthur Brown’s hit song “Fire” playing in the background. Skelley has given Manson an equally operatic intensity. As with Milton’s Satan (not to mention Mick Jagger’s), Skelley’s Manson is hard to take our eyes off as his rant breaks water like a shark fin.
When I finished Skelley’s “Dennis Wilson and Charles Manson,” I felt as if I had read a major novel. For those who believe compression can be equal to any epic, this book should find its way to the pile of books on your nightstand, though you should turn on your bedstead lamp only if you prefer to have your nightmare before you fall asleep rather than in 3D REM.
You can order a copy of this book at:
Fred & Barney Press
10768 Northgate Street
Culver City, CA 90230
CONTENTS PAGE FOR “Dennis Wilson and Charles Manson”:
“Sexy Sadie” – Summer, 1968. 14400 Sunset Blvd., Pacific Palisades
“Apple Pan” – Fall, 1968. 10452 Bellagio Road, Bel Air
“Rise” – Spring, 1969. 10050 Cielo Drive. Benedict Canyon
“Birthday” – December 4, 1983, 14400 Sunset Blvd., Pacific Palisades
“Reverb” – December 28, 1983. Marina del Rey
“Epilogue Remix: Beach Boys Villanelle”
(Note: The Hammer Museum provided the other half of the exhibition space “Made in L.A.” In the case of Beyond Baroque, Its complementary programming included interviews with Dennis Cooper, Amy Gerstler, Sheree Rose, David Trinidad and Benjamin Weisman, as well as Jack Skelley interviewing “Beyond Baroque” installation creator Sabrina Tarasoff.)
Finally, here is an interview with Jack Skelley by Michael Silverblatt of KCRW’s BOOKWORM:
https://www.kcrw.com/culture/shows/bookworm/jack-skelley-dennis-wilson-and-charlie-manson
In the 1980s, bumper stickers were still fashionable enough that one could market a clever one and make a little money. I have no idea of whether poet and publisher Peter Shneidre made any significant profit on my favorite bumper sticker of that period: “Metaphors Be with You.” Given his hand-to-mouth existence as a West Coast independent press publisher, even a tiny profit would have been helpful. In any case, not many bumper stickers from forty or so years ago still have a shelf life. Several years ago, however, Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Center appropriated Peter Shneidre’s wistful aphorism for a T-shirt, so someone at L.A. leading literary arts center must have believed in its continuing pertinacity. Although the cinematic catch-phrase it is based on has begun to recede into a cultural footnote, Shneidre’s benediction still has a poignant caress lingering in its intonation and I am pleased to see it still in circulation. It would be nice if he got credit for it.
Of all the poet-editors in Los Angeles since World War II, Peter Shneidre has probably received the least critical attention. I would have loved to have given Illuminati Press more attention in HOLDOUTS: The Los Angeles Poetry Renaissance 1948-1992, but the University of Iowa Press insisted that I cut one-fourth of the manuscript after it had been assessed and provisionally approved by two outside readers. Fortunately, one can at least point future scholars toward a cache of archival material that will deserve extensive quotation in any literary history of Los Angeles poetry that will provide a more comprehensive account of late 20th century endeavors. Here, for the Academy’s consideration, is a list of some of the titles and authors that Shneidre published:
Laurel Ann Bogen — Do Iguanas Dance in the Moonlight (Photo by Lisa Powers) — copyright 1982, 84, 87 — $7.95 — 49 pages, 32 poemsl, including “The Night Grows Teeth”; “I Eat Lunch with a Schizophrenic”; “The VW Guide to Rock Collecting”; “Guarding the Fire” (For Anya Cronin); “Three Years Later I Still Send Anonymous Postcards to You” (Pages 15-16); “Last Postcard to Harley” (Page 37)
LAUREL ANN BOGEN – “The Projects” (Although Laurel Ann Bogen is primarily known as a poet, “The Projects” is nine prose pieces.) 1987
Michael C. Ford — Goddess Latitudes – The Great American Grab-Bag of 1945 – 2 American Plays
Laurie Fox – Sweeping Beauty, or Notes on Cinderella (1982, 1984, 1986)
Janet Gray – “I Hate Men” – 1984 and 1987 – 4 pages – 3rd edition
Janet Gray – Flaming Tail Out of Ground near Your Farm – 1987– 40 poems
James Krusoe — ABCD – September, 1984 — 225 copies
Jim Krusoe – HOTEL DE DREAM — August 2, 1988
(This was Jim Krusoe’s final published book of poems. From this point forward, he concentrated on novels and short stories. It was around this time that he founded the SANTA MONICA REVIEW, which has become one of the best known literary magazines in the country. The current editor is Andrew Tonkovich.)
Greg Kuzma – A Horse of a Different Color – 1983 (all prose poems) – 62 pages
Nichola Manning – All Down to a River — 62 pages – 1984 — $4.95
Herbert Morris — Afghanistan – (1984) 225 copies, May, 1984
F.A. Nettlebeck — Americruiser 1983 – 50 pages
William Pillin — To the End of Time – 1980 – 43 pages
William Pillin – Another Dawn — 1984
Jerry Ratch — Lenin’s Paintings — – 10 pages –
Tall Tales chapbooks
Laurel Ann Bogen
Jascha Kessler
Laurie Fox
Charles Webb
David Trinidad
Jack Skelley
Gerald Locklin
Amy Gerstler
Richard Meltzer
In addition to literary magazines such as MARILYN and ORPHEUS, Peter Shneirdre also published three issues of a magazine with a name meant to echo a famous New York literary publishing house.
NUDE ERECTIONS — #1 – 1984
NIchola Manning, Bill Mohr, Robin Carr, Richard Meltzer, Amy Gerstler, Gerald Locklin, Bob Flanagan, Jack Skelley, Janet Gray
NUDE ERECTIONS 2 – 1985
Janet Gray, Douglas Goodwin, Henry Rollins, Nichola Manning,
NUDE ERECTIONS — #3 – 1986
Charles Bukowski, Dave Alvin, Nichola Manning, janet Gray, LA Bogen, Doug Kbott, Kenneth Funsten, Steve Richmond
Finally, it should be noted that Peter was a fine poet whose work appeared in many magazines and outlets, including Exquisite Corpse, Santa Monica Review, Paris Review, Antioch Review, Shenandoah, Western Humanities Review, and Rolling Stone. His poems also appeared in my anthology, “POETRY LOVES POETRY” (Momentum Press, 1985).
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About Bill Mohr