On Sunday, we took the afternoon off (pronounced somewhere no doubt as “offternoon off”) and drove down to Laguna Beach to see our friends Jim McVicker and Terry Oats. On Sunday afternoon the art festival is free and open to the public, so we had a chance not only to see Jim’s work, but to meet other artists, including Ryan Jensen, who has been working up in Humboldt County for the past couple of years. One of Jensen’s paintings was of McVicker painting, and I was tempted to buy it, though it was a bit out of my price range.

We had last seen Jim and Terry in Laguna Beach two years ago, just a few month before the pandemic launched itself around the globe. After visiting the exhibition, we went and had dinner together and talked about art, politics, and movies. I delivered the portrait that Jim had painted of Cathay Gleeson, my first wife, to him so that he could work on cleaning and restoring it. Jim and Terry will be down in Southern California in early November, by which time he hopes to have the painting back in something close to its original condition. I was surprised at the date of the painting. I had remembered it being done in the late 1980s, but it was dated in the early 1980s, and had been done when Jim was just returning for his year-long sojourn to Wyoming and stayed with us for a couple days in our apartment in Ocean Park.

In addition to McVicker’s and Jensen’s work, here are the four paintings that particularly made me pause and absorb their accomplishment:

Suzi Baker – “Sycamore Sun & Shadow”

Debra Huse – “Historic Shpyard”

Don Demers – “Laguna Awakens”

Daniel Marshall – “Fading Light”

Some other paintings that I took note of were by Calvin Liang, Michael Obermeyer, Jed Dorsey, Terry Miura, Wendy Wirth, Jane Hunt, Carl Bretzke, and Richard Boyer.

In a certain way, the Laguna Plein Air Invitational is like the Community of Writers project that meets in the Sierra Nevada every summer. In both case, the task of the artist or writer is to produce work on site. One is not allowed to bring work done prior to showing up at the gathering. On the whole, the level of technical skill is far higher at the Laguna Plein Air Invitational, and one can only wish that writers worked harder at mastering the basic techniques of their craft.

For some reason, visiting art shows ends up with one returning to one’s car about an hour before dusk begins. Here is some parking lot shadow choreography from two different recent occasions.

Saturday, October 9, 2021

Postmark Culture versus Cancel Culture

When my mother’s house had to be sold in order to provide for her care during her last three years, my brother and I were faced with the challenge of cleaning it out. Among the few things I retained from that project was a small plastic storage container piled with loose mid-20th century U.S. postage stamps. Their face value ranges from a single penny to six cents. One of the most expensive was also a reminder of the “southern roots” of my upbringing. The Stone Mountain Memorial stamp was, in fact, was the only stamp with more than one instance of a block of four with the issue number attached. One will note the block numbers: 32261 and 32263. My guess is that one of my parents bought several sheets of this stamp and retained the most valuable part of the sheet because she or he was quite certain it would be worth more than its purchase price someday. Even though that is the case (the block of four is worth about $5.00 now), I doubt the purchase was made only out of philatelist economics. My mother spent several years of her childhood in Georgia, which is where the Stone Mountain Memorial serves as a distillation of the valor of the Confederacy. It is additionally known as being the symbolic cynosure of the KKK.

I must say that I was surprised to find that a stamp had been issued in honor of the SMM. After all, what is the likelihood of Germany issuing a stamp of a work of sculpture valorizing three major Nazis? The question is who made the decision to issue this stamp? I’m not kidding. I want the details. What are the names of those who proposed and approved this stamp? Should not their names be publicly revealed so that their responsibility in this matter does not recede into forgetfulness of history? One can certain that no postage stamp was proposed at this time to recognize the successful boycotts of segregated bus systems. The SMM stamp is meant to be a cultural counterattack on the civil rights movement. Nor should one imagine the “Law and Order” stamp, which preceded the SMM stamp by a couple of years, to be any less of an effort to advertise hegemonic whiteness.

Should anyone wonder how the myth of “The Lost Cause” managed to perpetuate itself with such seeming ease, one need only look to the ordinary instances of its reiterations. Some of us may be repulsed by how the aftertaste of the stamp’s glue was meant to be a sacramental reminder of the ideals of the successionist states, but let there be no doubt that that was the intention of those who championed its circulation and foregrounding on envelopes. And let there be no doubt that this stamp’s implicit postmark is also the watermark of my grade school education in Norfolk, Virginia, in which the history textbooks I read gave an account of the civil war to my all-white classroom that was meant to indoctrinate us. And it did.

https://www.latimes.com/archives/story/2021-10-03/the-blame-must-be-shared-many-blacks-fear-police-are-the-enemy

Friday, October 8, 2021

The new issue of MacQueen’s Qunterly is now available. This magazine is a follow-up project to editor and publisher Clare MacQueen’s KYSO (Knock Your Socks Off). Issue number 10 (October, 2021) of MacQueen’s Quinterly contains poems and prose poems by Bob Lucky, Betsy Marrs, Robbi Nester, Linda Nemec Foster, Ruth Bavetta, Rose Mary Boehm, Elaine Mintzer, Emilee Kinney, and Guy Biederman.

http://www.macqueensquinterly.com/MacQ10/Contents-MacQ10.aspx

To give you a hint of its contents, here are the contributor notes for four of its most representative poets: Cynthia Anderson, Emilee Kinney, Bob Lucky, and Jonathan Yungkans.

Cynthia Anderson is co-editor of the anthology A Bird Black As the Sun: California Poets on Crows & Ravens (Green Poet Press). She makes her home in the Mojave Desert near Joshua Tree National Park.
Author’s website: www.cynthiaandersonpoet.com

Emilee Kinney hails from the small farm-town of Kenockee, Michigan, only a couple miles from one of the Great Lakes: Lake Huron. She received her BA in Creative Writing and History from Albion College in Albion, Michigan and is currently pursuing her MFA in poetry at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. Kinney is an editor for Crab Orchard Review and MAYDAY and maintains her own website featuring contemporary poetry and book recommendations:
https://www.emileekinneypoetry.com/

Bob Lucky is a regular contributor to haiku, haibun, and tanka journals. His fiction, nonfiction, and poetry have appeared or are forthcoming in Flash, Rattle, Modern Haiku, KYSO Flash, MacQueen’s Quinterly, SurVision, Haibun Today, The Haibun Journal, and Contemporary Haibun Online (the latter for which he served as content editor from July 2014 thru January 2020). His chapbook of haibun, tanka prose, and prose poems, Ethiopian Time(Red Bird Chapbooks, 2014), was an honorable mention in the Touchstone Book Awards. His chapbook Conversation Starters in a Language No One Speaks (SurVision Books, 2018) was a winner of the James Tate Poetry Prize in 2018. He is also the author most recently of a collection of prose poems, haibun, and senryu, My Thology: Not Always True But Always Truth (Cyberwit, 2019); and an e-chapbook, What I Say to You (proletaria.org, 2020)

Jonathan Yungkans is a Los Angeles-based writer and photographer with an MFA from California State University, Long Beach. His work has appeared in San Pedro Poetry Review, Synkroniciti, West Texas Literary Review, Gleam: Journal of the Cadralor, MacQueen’s Quinterly, and other publications. His second poetry chapbook, Beneath a Glazed Shimmer, won the 2019 Clockwise Chapbook Prize and was published in February 2021 by Tebor Bach.

http://www.macqueensquinterly.com/MacQ10/Yungkans-Variation.aspx

The classic image of artists in NYC in the 1940s and 1950s was that they converted abandoned or “discarded” commercial spaces into artistic studios. The Loft in San Pedro is a current example of a reconfigured warehouse that is currently being used by a dozen or so artists for studios or for exhibitions. Michael Stearns’ Gallery, which is on the second floor, has shown such artists as Maggie Tennesen and Cody Lusby.

In recent years, the Loft served as a shipping company warehouse, but an earlier designation was as a “customs warehouse.” Here is some of the surviving, publicly visible evidence of that use.

“The Loft”

SOLO SHOW: “LENSES AND OTHER LARGE WORK”

Artist: Linda Fry

Opening Reception: Thursday, October 7th, 2021
Closing Reception: Saturday, October 30th, 2021

Time: 5:00 p.m. – 8 p.m. (both dates)

Place: THE LOFT

401 South Mesa Street

San Pedro, CA

Exhibition Run: through October (for visiting hours, contact William.BillMohr@gmail.com)

“Lenses and other large work” will be Linda Fry’s first solo exhibition of work at the Loft Studios and Galleries in San Pedro, where she has been working since early 2019. This exhibition will bring together several large canvases which she says “were invited to speak to me. I listened for ideas about colors, shapes, and energies. I hope they speak to you, too.” She graduated from California State University, Long Beach with a BFA and has also shown her work at other public venues and galleries in Southern California.

About the Artist

Linda Fry graduated from California State University, Beach in 2012 with a BFA in Drawing and Painting. For the past three years, she has been working out of a studio in the Loft in San Pedro and focusing on larger canvases, such as “Night and Day,” which will be appearing this month in issue number 10 of MacQueen’s Quinterly (edited by Clare MacQueen). Linda has lived in Long Beach, California for the past 15 years and occasionally asks her poet husband Bill Mohr to pose for her. Along with an artist’s statement, one of these portraits can be seen at her website: LindaFryArtist.com.

Her work has also been shown at:
DA Gallery, Pomona
Vacant Storefront @ Gallery Expo, Long Beach
Vision Gallery, Los Angeles
Hellada Gallery, Long Beach
Artist Co-Op Gallery, Long Beach Open Studio Tour

I have no doubt that there are poets who have an accurate list of all the significant poetry readings they’ve taken part in. I have only intermittently kept track of such occasions. In recent years, sorting through my literary archive, I’ve run across flyers that remind me of occasions that need to be added to my list. Here is an example of such a flyer from 30 years ago, back in the very early days of Cahuenga Press. The six founding members were James Cushing, Phoebe MacAdams, Harry Northup, Holly Prado, Cecilia Woloch, and me. I was still living on Hill Street in Ocean Park, so the trip to the venue was conveniently brief. If I remember correctly, Michelle T. Clinton was at that reading and told me how much she liked an image in a poem I read that ended up being published in California Quarterly, which was being edited by John Brander. Time and money kept me from remaining an active member of Cahuenga Press, and not long after this reading I dropped out. Originally, when Cahuenga Press was founded, Holly Prado had proposed that my book be its first title, but I was reluctant to agree because my most recent work (in the late 1980s) was simply not as good as the poetry I had written between 1970 and 1985. I also feared how cavalier and self-serving it would seem to the other members of the group if they put out my book and then I couldn’t continue with the project until at least all of them had one of their own books also issued by Cahuenga Press. In the end, it was a good decision to forego being the lead-off publication, since indeed my personal life became too turbulent to make being part of a poets co-operative a practical option. In 1993, my marriage broke up and I lost the apartment I had lived in for 20 years; in 1994, my father died and my mother began a quarter-century campaign of demanding and absorbing more and more of my attention; and in 1995 I lost my typesetting job. Years later, Cahuenga Press generously offered me a chance to have a large collection of my poems come out under their aegis, but I turned out to be a prickly ingrate, and the book fell through cracks of my own making. Fortunately, we all eventually reconciled, and it gives me pleasure to find flyers of other events in which I read with Harry and Holly, such as the New Alliance event at Dutton’s Bookstore a few years after the Cahuenga event at the Sculpture Gardens.

Harry Northup was recently interviewed by David Garyan about his career as an actor as well as about being a poet and literary activist. Harry’s show at the MPTF, “Creative Chaos,” has been the kind of presentation of working poets in Los Angeles that I would have expected of an institution such as Beyond Baroque during the past 18 months. Considering the resources that each has available to support such activities, Harry’s activism is worthy of the highest praise. As a poet, too, Harry scours the patterns of conscious dailiness for the reticent symbols that lurk just at the edge of transformative articulation.

INTERVIEW OF HARRY NORTHUP by David Garyan:

Interlitq’s Californian Poets Interview Series: Harry Northup, Actor and Poet, interviewed by David Garyan

Onward!

September 24, 2021

Twenty five years ago, I found myself in a most peculiar and unexpected place: The Getty Research Institute. What was an unemployed typesetter (permanently unemployed in that profession, in fact, due to computers replacing me) doing at the Getty Research Institute, given that he had only a B.A. in Theater Arts, and almost everyone else around him had either a Ph.D. or was working on one? I was indeed the luckiest of the lucky.

The previous winter the Getty Research Institute had realized that it couldn’t hold its usual seminars on classical art and its preservation, and so it decided to organize a year-long seminar on Los Angeles as a cultural site and signifier. I was desperate for any kind of paying gig, and so I floated the notion of a literary history of L.A. poets. Much to my astonishment, they accepted it, and for two months I lived a life of academic luxury. It was a turning point in my life, as I went on to “re-invent” myself, as several friends described the process of turning into a college professor.

One of the people who has been very supportive of my work in the past decade is Nancy Grace, who recently edited a collection of essays that is beginning to receive critical attention. She is a terrific editor to work with and it was an honor to be included in her most recent project, which has just received its first major review.

The article I wrote has its origins in the time during the Fall of 1996 that I was able to spend at UCLA’s Special Collections, going through the journals of Stuart Z. Perkoff. That research would not have been possible without the support of the Getty Research Institute.

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

THE BEATS: A TEACHING COMPANION, Edited by Nancy McCampbell Grace
The Beats: A Teaching Companion, Clemson University Press in association with Liverpool University Press, Beat Studies series, 2021.

A review by John Shapcott

THE BEATS: A TEACHING COMPANION, Edited by Nancy McCampbell Grace

By way of contrast, William Mohr’s ‘Teaching Venice West, Lawrence Lipton, and California’s Literary Canon’ is very much a micro-focused rehabilitation of Venice West as an Utopian Beat outpost. A guarded appreciation of Lawrence Lipton’s self-promoting The Holy Barbarians (1959) kick-starts Mohr’s reversal of the 1970s/1980s critical neglect of Venice West in Beat scholarship. Nevertheless, some 60 years on, Lipton’s pioneering book remains eminently readable whilst open to introductory classroom critique on a number of levels. Mohr makes a convincing case for looking at Lipton’s transcriptions of conversations with Venice West poets such as Stuart Perkoff, Bruce Boyd, and Charley Foster. Mohr is to be commended for drawing attention to Perkoff’s ‘Feasts of Death, Feasts of Love’, which he reads as the first long, experimental poem written about the holocaust, and which makes for a fascinating comparison with Gary Snyder’s ‘Praise for Sick Women’, published alongside it in Donald Allen’s anthology The New American Poetry, 1945-1960 ( 1999 reprint). In referencing Perkoff’s 1950’s poem, ‘untitled’, taking the Three Stooges on to the Venice Boardwalk , Mohr convincingly links Venice West to a much broader polity that includes Kerouac, popular culture, homosocial bonding (quoting the work of Michael Davidson), and the politics of the street.

THE BEATS: A TEACHING COMPANION, Edited by Nancy McCampbell Grace

Sunday, September 19, 2021

In early night, a little over twelve hours ago, I went out to check how Jupiter had “shifted” in the sky relative to the moon’s transit. The sky seemed unusually clear, and I could faintly detect several stars in what I later learned was the constellation Aquarius. One of the stars is named Sadalsuud, and it is about 540 light years from Earth. I gather that its name means “the luckiest of the lucky.”

In looking at some recent photographs before I went to sleep, I noticed a series I took back on September 7th, of a man pruning a palm tree. It occurred to me that the 4.3 earthquake could just as easily have occurred ten days earlier, in the morning, as the man was finishing the second tree and starting to descend. As the palm tree became a kind of seismic tuning fork, I would not have wanted that man’s job. My guess is that he, too, felt the jolt on Friday night, but that it immediately had a different context of alterity that is more commonly felt by those who do the risky tasks in our society. At least for once, luck was with him, as a gift in advance from Sadalsuud.

The evening of Friday, Sept. 17th, 2021

I was just about to go outside and see if Jupiter was as bright in the sky as I hoped it might be when a temblor centered in Carson, about two miles from Long Beach, registered at 4.3. It was a solid jolt to the house, but nothing fell off any shelves. After two or three seconds of intermittent swaying, it seemed as if the shaking headed inland, with some other appointment in mind. Eventually, I went outside and enjoyed the fierce glow of Jupiter, which I could identify as that planet because of Earthsky.org’s fine work in keeping me abreast of what is happening in our solar system, not to mention both near and distant galaxies.

I highly recommend the site, to which I have just now made a modest contribution as it strives to raise $130,000 to keep afloat. Please join me in supporting the poets of science: our comrades in astronomy.

Moon, Saturn, Jupiter September 15 to 18

I stopped by Page against the Machine Bookstore on my way home from the grocery store yesterday evening and found a flyer announcing a protest rally against “W” on Monday, September 20, at the Legacy Theater in downtown Long Beach, where the former President will be presented as part of a “Distinguished Speaker” series. Granted, the protest is warranted, though the lingering echoes of outrage over an unjustified invasion of Iraq in March, 2003 only prove the futility of rational objection to paranoid foreign policy. Did I know for certain that Hussein did not possess weapons of mass destruction? Yeah. As a matter of fact, I would have bet my life on it. If one invades a neighbor’s house on the belief that they possess a bomb that is going to be place in your driveway, and you start killing people in that neighbor’s house, and then you don’t find a bomb, well, you better expect that you will be charged with first-degree murder. Bush, of course, is hardly the only one to be responsible for the travesty of the invasion of Iraq, and I’m not talking about just Cheney and Rumsfeld. Joseph Biden voted to authorize that invasion in October, 2002. How can he not claim to be an accomplice?

The cruelty of willful ignorance has come full circle recently with the bungled withdrawal from Afghanistan. It may be the case that very few Americans are calling their congressional representatives to demand accountability for the deplorable lack of gullibility on Biden’s part. How could he have served so long in the U.S. Senate and not learned a basic lesson about our intelligence operations. They almost always get it wrong, and one is best off planning with a worst-case scenario. Did I expect the Afghanistan government to hold out for several months against the Taliban? Are you kidding? Six days, maybe, at the most, and withdrawal planning should have been calibrated with that likelihood in mind.

Both Bush and Biden: guilty of willful ignorance.

Even so, at least their advisors are aware that Long Beach is a relatively safe place to visit at this point in the pandemic. According to the most recent edition of the Grunion Gazette, almost 78 percents of eligible adults in Long Beach have received one dose of a covid vaccine, and 65 percent are fully vaccinated.

Meanwhile, in Idaho, health care is being rationed. It’s my understanding that only around 40 percent of the eligible population in Idaho has been vaccinated. What I can’t figure out is why anyone who has refused to get vaccinated should be given medical attention ahead of someone who is having a heart attack or has been seriously injured in a car crash?

Imagine this: two ambulances arrive at a hospital in Boise, Idaho.

One has a critically injured woman whose car was hit by a repeat offender drunk driver. She is 72 years old, and a widow whose children have moved to Seattle and Portland. She was in the car by herself when the drunk driver hit her car.

The other ambulance is conveying a self-employed carpenter who is the father of three children. He is 40 years old, and in otherwise good health. He has repeatedly refused to get vaccinated.

Which person gets the last ICU bed?

If you are a male doctor in Idaho, it won’t take long to make your choice. The man will get the ICU bed, even though the woman’s injuries are perfectly treatable in “normal” times. Perhaps the woman lives, although the agony she endures and slow recuperation only aggravate the memories of how she has been deliberately discarded by a system designed to hide its evil intent.

And if you don’t see the connection between that doctor’s choice and the invasion of Iraq coupled with the bungled withdrawal from Afghanistan, then I assure you that we don’t have much to talk about, do we? If you do see the connection, then let do more than simply protest Bush’s latest effort to charm people’s memories. Let us remember that we can never let down our guard. There are forces at work in this country that intend to do us harm, often under the guise of judicial neutrality in enforcing constitutional law. Unlike those who claimed that Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, I am not imagining things. Let us, therefore, not be willfully ignorant of the scale of the threats that well-educated individuals are facing in this country.