Leslie Simon’s second novel, THE DIVINE COMIC, was published last year by Spuyten Duyvil, an independent press project based in New York City that is rapidly closing in on its 40th anniversary of operations. I had the honor of being the first editor to publish Simon’s poetry, and it seems appropriate as I look back on myself a half century ago, and feel bemused at the audacity of a 24 year old believing he could pick out the writers whose work would continue to be pertinent in the decades ahead, that I should conduct an interview with one of the poets who appeared in the first issue of BACHY magazine, published by Papa Bach Bookstore.
Leslie Simon is the author of Jazz is for white girls, too (Poetry for the People); I rise / you riz / we born (Artaud’s Elbow); High Desire (Wingbow Press); and Collisions and Transformations (Coffee House Press). She co-authored (with Jan Johnson Drantell) A Music I No Longer Heard: The Early Death of a Parent (Simon & Schuster). She has also published essays on film, politics, and literature, and taught at various colleges in the San Francisco area for many years.
Bill Mohr: Although you have lived and worked as a poet, writer, and educator in San Francisco most of your life, you lived in Southern California at one point in your youth. Specifically, you lived in Venice in the early 1970s, a period that saw the return of the best-known poet of the Venice West scene, Stuart Z. Perkoff, to Venice. Poets who were living in Venice at the time included Jack Hirschman, Jim Krusoe, and Lynn Shoemaker. How did you happen to end up living in Venice back then? Did you first meet Jack Hirschman there?
LESLIE SIMON: I came to Los Angeles, from Chicago, in 1969 for a master’s degree in African Studies at UCLA. It was probably one of the few master’s programs in the country that offered free tuition. Reagan would soon put a stop to that. I lived in Santa Monica and fell in love with Papa Bach Bookstore on Santa Monica Boulevard, so I was thrilled when the first poems I ever sent out for consideration, to the first issue of Bachy, which you edited, were accepted. At a Papa Bach’s reading, I also met my life partner, who was living in Venice. When I moved in with him, we got a bigger place at the end of Rose Street, right off the Boardwalk. I didn’t know Jack then, or any of the other writers you mention, though I did get a kick out of my Bachy poems appearing on the pages right after Charles Bukowski’s, whom I had heard of.
I went from grad school to teaching high school English in South Central LA. Though I had a lot of fun nurturing the writing talents of some of my students, I was still pretty much a closet poet myself. I met Jack soon after I moved to the Bay Area at a party in some kind of converted old warehouse in what was left of San Francisco’s factory district. By then I had started to read my poetry at a bar near our place in Berkeley. Years later, when I realized that Jack had also made his way north after a Los Angeles sojourn, I went back to that old Bachy, thinking Jack might have shown up there, and he did. It made me smile to know that I had been in his company all those years ago.
Bill Mohr: When did you decide to move to San Francisco? Was it more of a personal decision or did it involve a preference for a different kind of literary milieu than Los Angeles provided?
LESLIE SIMON: It was definitely the anticipation of a denser poetry scene that sent me north. Someone talked about Jack being drawn to the “literary vibe” up here, which describes what I felt. I had visited Berkeley when I was living in L.A., and the poetry scene on Telegraph Avenue alone was enough to pull me up here. Then when I arrived, though the live poetry everywhere apparent in Berkeley didn’t disappoint, my Chicago city girl background nudged me across the bridge to what some people call the “City of Poets.”
Also, I was lucky that, in 1975, a class I invented, “Poetry for the People” (June Jordan later established a class of the same name 15 years later at UC Berkeley), successfully landed in the curriculum at City College of San Francisco. I need to say that Glenn Nance, then the African American Studies chair, who had been active in the Third World Strike at San Francisco State University, made that landing possible. I’ll never forget what he said to me the first night of the class when he checked in to make sure there were enough students (we needed 15, and 28 showed up): “I don’t even like poetry,” he confided, “but it sounded like a good idea to me.” Yes, those were the days. The class still draws students. Lauren Muller and others, poets Tehmina Khan and Ben Bac Sierra, have kept it alive.
Bill Mohr: You have recently had a novel published, (The Divine Comic, Spuyten Duyvil, 2020) but it’s not the first novel you wrote. When did you decide to undertake writing a novel? Are there any special challenges that a poet faces in shifting verse to prose narrative?
LESLIE SIMON: My first novel crept up on me. I was in my mid-20s proclaiming I didn’t have a novel inside of me and then started writing one. My favorite high school English teacher had written in my yearbook that she expected a novel from me by age 25. But another teacher had accused me of plagiarizing an essay. I had worked so hard on that thing, seeing myself as a writer, that it turned me against majoring in English in college. I didn’t want people like that teacher to kill what I loved most. It was a good decision, I think, because university English departments were then, and still are to a lesser degree, places of conservative confinement. “Poetry for the People” found its home in Interdisciplinary Studies, not English. After all, UCLA kicked out Jack Hirschman. Though he was apparently and unsurprisingly a beloved English professor, the university did poetry a big favor. Once Jack started roaming the streets of San Francisco and other cities across the planet, inserting his voice and vision into our brains, the universe knew it had made its own right decision.
But back to the core of your question: how do you go from writing poetry to building a novel? I eased my way into it by creating meditative passages at the start of each chapter in that first novel. I was reading a lot of Virginia Woolf at the time, and though my style does not resemble hers, the permission she gives to move between prose and poetry opened me up. I wrote a poem called “Dreaming Mrs. Dalloway,” and I think the title explains how I made the transition. But here’s the thing. For me the creation of a novel, and I have a third and final one brewing, is like the invention of a long and mysterious poem. At Jack’s funeral procession, through North Beach a few weeks ago, I saw two of my main characters. A sign that the conjuring is working.
Bill Mohr: How long did you work on The Divine Comic? What was the most surprising, unexpected shift in the narrative during the early stages? Did any major changes occur in the final drafts?
LESLIE SIMON: The idea for this novel, which explores the relationship of two Jewish American sisters to each other and to Israel, poked up one morning many years ago. My husband and I and our two young children were spending the night, somewhere in the 1980s, at the Santa Cruz home of poets Alma Luz Villanueva and Wilfredo Castaño, and their son. Just as I was climbing out of our sleeping bag, rolled out on their living room floor, the title for the novel appeared along with its main question. My kids were both under ten. The Divine Comic found its way to publication 30+ years later. I was never much for patience, but I do know how to persist. For starters, I knew I had to make a trip to Israel-Palestine before I could write it. So there was that, and then there was my eventual full-time teaching job. I didn’t start seriously writing The Divine Comic until 2006, and then it was summers only. It took about three or four of them to get it to its first decent draft. There weren’t many surprises to me early on since the story had been with me for so long. But there was a major shift in the structure of the novel after I sent it to Spuyten Duyvil Publishing for their consideration. Editor Aurelia Lavalee performed the kind of magic that every writer dreams of in an editor. She told me what it needed, and then let me have a free hand to accomplish what I thought she was after. Luckily, it worked.
Bill Mohr: Your epigraphs include the obvious nod (Dante Alighieri), but also include two other poets, C.P. Cafavy and Muriel Ruykeyser. At what point did you decide on the epigraphs?
LESLIE SIMON: Muriel Ruykeyser remains one of my favorites, so she was there from the start. She published the poem, “Letter to the Front” during World War II. “To be a Jew in the 20th Century,” the excerpt I use in my epigraph, references the holocaust, of course. She had been to Spain and set a novel there. Yet, the question of Zionism was alive, and Rukeyser supported it in other writing at that time. It is the internal question in these lines, however, that moves me. As Jews, do we go invisible? Do we assimilate? Do we hide in secret? How do we survive? She said we make choices. A secular Jew, Rukeyser died in 1980, apparently more identified with Zionism than not. But her life-long battle against racism and other injustices, including colonialism, would, I think, haunt that choice if she had lived longer. Her poem in some ways allows for the conflict the two sisters engage in not to tear them apart. Though the “gift” Rukeyser offers be “torment,” we “[dare] to live for the impossible.” Neither sister refuses that challenge.
C.P. Cavafy came through in a more melodious vein, but no less deep. How could I not think of Danny and Emma, the “beloved” dead whose voices guide Beatrice and, with not a little bit of irony, foster her mental health, each time I read his poem? I was midway through the first draft when I realized that it belonged there. The idea of poetry and dreams nurturing this novel goes back to your question about how does a poet embark on a novel.
Bill Mohr: The New York Times Book Review does interviews with writers in which the featured authors are always asked about book recommendations. One question is the classic “What is on your nightstand?” Another involves books that are your secret favorites. You don’t need to answer these questions, but should you be inclined, I for one would enjoy any reading suggestions you might have. If it helps, I’ll start by saying that I just finished Paul Auster’s The Brooklyn Follies and am now reading When We Cease to Understand the World.
LESLIE SIMON: I’m going back and forth between the essays collected in Jessamyn West’s The Fire This Time and the most recent poetry of Hilton Obenzinger (Witness 2017-2020) and Arisa White (You’re the Most Beautiful Thing That Happened). After teaching women’s literature for many years, I’m catching up on the male writers I neglected (so thanks for reminding me about Auster). Right now I’m reading Nathan Englander’s Dinner at the Center of the Earth.
My favorites are not so secret: Toni Morrion’s Beloved, Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping, and Grace Paley’s stories–any and all of them.
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