Lynn McGee, Susana H. Case, Carolyne Wright and I have already lined up two of the readers for the next installment of the W – E Reading Series. In addition to Suzanne Cleary, one of the readers will be the actress and poet Beth Ruscio, whose first book of poems, SPEAKING PARTS, won the most recent Brick Road Poetry Press prize. By chance, the W – E reading that took place this past Sunday also featured a winner of that prize.
The next reading will take place on Sunday, May 16th, at 4 p.m. (Pacific Time) / 7 p.m. Easter time.
In the meantime, I encourage you to take a look at three recent poems by Beth Ruscio that have just appeared in CULTURAL WEEKLY’s poetry column, which is edited by Alexis Rhone Fancher. There is also a short review of Beth’s book by John Brantingham.
Yesterday, Sunday, March 14th, marked the annual shift of an hour forward on the clocks as a way of imposing “longer” days” on people. It certainly didn’t make waking up this morning any easier, since I felt as if was behind schedule the second that I roused myself from bed.
Yesterday’s reading was exceptionally lively, though the unusually low attendance made us wonder if holding a reading on the day that daylight savings shifts is one of those days that one should avoid in scheduling public events (along with Thanksgiving and Mother’s Day).
Here, for your viewing pleasure, is the link to the reading:
Bill Mohr’s revised, slightly expanded revision of his introduction to Carol Ellis, on March 14th:
I first read some of Carol Ellis’s poems back in the early 1990s, when she was living in Southern California at the first of several academic appointments. The brushstrokes of her imagery immediately impressed me back then with their luminous subtlety of detail and I kept track of her writing as she moved further north in California and then on to Portland, Oregon, and I moved first to San Diego, then Long Island, New York, and finally to Long Beach, California. Among my projects since starting work at CSULB, my blog has been the thing that surprised me the most. I never thought it would keep going for more than five years. It turns out, however, that one of the advantages of sustaining a blog is that one’s reviews stay public long after being posted, and I like to imagine that my review of Carol Ellis’s collection from Finishing Line Press, I Want a Job (2014), helped encourage the readers at Beyond Baroque to take notice of the manuscript that won its 2019 poetry book prize.
In reading LOST AND LOCAL the other night, I realized once again the inadequacy of my blurb on the back cover, but how can one sum up even in a single paragraph – let along a single sentence — work that is as intimate as it is shy? I recollect that the original full-length version of my blurb spoke of how the graceful rhythms of her prose poems in particular quietly transform the quotidian with their slow-motion syntax. One finds oneself within her poems as if at the center of a somersault that is not aware of its illuminating trajectory and the radiance that lights up what appears to be beyond its circumference. No matter how often one of her prose poems turns within our consciousness, we only gain a surer footing in the permeating orientations of its metaphors. I have yet to write a full-length review of Lost and Local for my blog, and it is my expectation that I will soon do so with her voice reading poems today that linger in the ear of my mind. I present to you, the poet Carol Ellis.
*. *. *. *. *. ****
GRACE BAUER’s latest collection is Unholy Heart: New and Selected Poems (University of Nebraska Press, 2021). Previous books include: Mean/Time, The Women at the Well, Nowhere All At Once, Retreats & Recognitions, and Beholding Eye. She is also co-editor of the anthology Nasty Women Poets: An Unapologetic Anthology of Subversive Verse. Her poems, essays, and stories have appeared in numerous anthologies and journals. She is the Aaron Douglas Professor Emerita at the University of Nebraska, and facilitates workshops and manuscript consultations through Larksong Writers’ Group.
To buy Unholy Heart: New and Selected Poems, please visit:
CAROL ELLIS was born in Detroit, Michigan and lives in Portland, Oregon. She’s been around the academic block with her Ph.D. in English from the University of Iowa. In addition to two chapbooks: Hello (Two Plum Press, 2018), and I Want A Job (Finishing Line Press, 2014), a full-length collection Lost and Local won the 2019 Beyond Baroque’s Pacific Coast Poetry Series award. Her poems and essays are or will be published in anthologies and journals including ZYZZYVA, Comstock Review, The Cincinnati Review, Saranac Review, and Cider Press Review. In 2015 she spent time in Cuba writing a book and giving readings.
ERIN MURPHY is the author or editor of eleven books, including Human Resources (forthcoming from Salmon Poetry) and Assisted Living (Brick Road Poetry Prize, 2018), a collection of demi-sonnets, a form she devised. Her most recent co-edited anthology, Bodies of Truth: Personal Narratives on Illness, Disability, and Medicine (University of Nebraska Press, 2019), won the Foreword INDIES Gold Medal Book of the Year Award. Her awards include the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Prize, the Foley Poetry Award, the National Writers’ Union Poetry Award judged by Donald Hall, a Best of the Net award judged by Patricia Smith, and The Normal School Poetry Prize judged by Nick Flynn. She is Professor of English and Creative Writing at Penn State Altoona. www.erin-murphy.com
To buy Assisted Living, visit:
_______________________________________
SANDRA YANNONE grew up in Old Saybrook, CT, where she daily viewed Long Island Sound from the end of her street. She published her debut collection, Boats for Women, in part about the Titanic disaster of 1912, with Salmon Poetry in 2019; Salmon will publish The Glass Studio in 2022. Her poems and book reviews have appeared in numerous print and online journals including Ploughshares, Poetry Ireland Review, Prairie Schooner, Women’s Review of Books, Impossible Archetype, and Lambda Literary Review. She also has written essays on the intersections between poetry and social justice for Olympia, WA’s Works in Progress. She hosts Cultivating Voices LIVE Poetry on Facebook via Zoom on Sundays. Visit her at www.sandrayannone.com
Cody Lusby’s success in getting an alley-length mural of roses painted in the summer of 2019 has extended into another project in which the street-side portions of sidewalks in front of several houses in this vicinity now have a stenciled escutcheon. It was a pleasure to welcome Cody this morning to the front of where we live.
(Photograph by Linda Fry)
And this is the view of one of our neighbor’s front foliage across the street; she also has roses painted on the walk in front of her house.
(photograph by Linda Fry)
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DATE: SUNDAY, March 14, 2021
TIME: 4 p.m. (West Coast DAYLIGHT SAVINGS TIME)
(NOTE: Set your clocks ahead on Saturday night, March 13. Sunday is Daylight Savings: Spring ahead an hour.)
Join from a PC, Mac, iPad, iPhone or Android device:
Please click this URL to start or join:
https://nyit.zoom.us/j/95399– —-
Or, go to https://nyit.zoom.us/join
and enter meeting ID: 953 99– —-
IF YOU WISH TO OBTAIN THE FULL SET OF NUMBERS FOR THE URL OR MEETING ID, PLEASE WRITE:
William.BillMohr@gmail.com
Join from dial-in phone line:
Dial: +1 646 876 9923 or +1 301 715 8592
Meeting ID: 953 99– —- (Write William.BillMohr@gmail for the rest of the Meeting ID.
Participant ID: Shown after joining the meeting
International numbers available: https://nyit.zoom.us/u/aS9nO0TmF
************************************************
GRACE BAUER’s latest collection is Unholy Heart: New and Selected Poems (University of Nebraska Press, 2021). Previous books include: Mean/Time, The Women at the Well, Nowhere All At Once, Retreats & Recognitions, and Beholding Eye. She is also co-editor of the anthology Nasty Women Poets: An Unapologetic Anthology of Subversive Verse. Her poems, essays, and stories have appeared in numerous anthologies and journals. She is the Aaron Douglas Professor Emerita at the University of Nebraska, and facilitates workshops and manuscript consultations through Larksong Writers’ Group.
To buy Unholy Heart: New and Selected Poems, please visit:
CAROL ELLIS was born in Detroit, Michigan and lives in Portland, Oregon. She’s been around the academic block with her Ph.D. in English from the University of Iowa. In addition to two chapbooks: Hello (Two Plum Press, 2018), and I Want A Job (Finishing Line Press, 2014), a full-length collection Lost and Local won the 2019 Beyond Baroque’s Pacific Coast Poetry Series award. Her poems and essays are or will be published in anthologies and journals including ZYZZYVA, Comstock Review, The Cincinnati Review, Saranac Review, and Cider Press Review. In 2015 she spent time in Cuba writing a book and giving readings.
ERIN MURPHY is the author or editor of eleven books, including Human Resources (forthcoming from Salmon Poetry) and Assisted Living (Brick Road Poetry Prize, 2018), a collection of demi-sonnets, a form she devised. Her most recent co-edited anthology, Bodies of Truth: Personal Narratives on Illness, Disability, and Medicine (University of Nebraska Press, 2019), won the Foreword INDIES Gold Medal Book of the Year Award. Her awards include the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Prize, the Foley Poetry Award, the National Writers’ Union Poetry Award judged by Donald Hall, a Best of the Net award judged by Patricia Smith, and The Normal School Poetry Prize judged by Nick Flynn. She is Professor of English and Creative Writing at Penn State Altoona. www.erin-murphy.com
To buy Assisted Living, visit:
_______________________________________
SANDRA YANNONE grew up in Old Saybrook, CT, where she daily viewed Long Island Sound from the end of her street. She published her debut collection, Boats for Women, in part about the Titanic disaster of 1912, with Salmon Poetry in 2019; Salmon will publish The Glass Studio in 2022. Her poems and book reviews have appeared in numerous print and online journals including Ploughshares, Poetry Ireland Review, Prairie Schooner, Women’s Review of Books, Impossible Archetype, and Lambda Literary Review. She also has written essays on the intersections between poetry and social justice for Olympia, WA’s Works in Progress. She hosts Cultivating Voices LIVE Poetry on Facebook via Zoom on Sundays. Visit her at www.sandrayannone.com
The Australian band MIDNIGHT OIL had a great song in 1987, “Beds Are Burning.” I had been working at Radio & Records for two years at that point and was pleased to see it listed on the charts we published. As the industry’s most reliable newspaper (and our chart rankings were not for sale in any way), it felt like a tiny moment in which the cultural work of planetary protest over climate change was part of my day-to-day work, too. One of the artists in Long Beach who has long been concerned with the transmogrification of the planet is Terry Braunstein, whose work I first became familiar with around that time. She recently sent out an announcement about a project that the artists Victor Raphael and she have been working on for the past few years.
The online publication CULTURAL WEEKLY will be featuring their series of photomontages during the next few months, one image each week.
The first work, from our Climate Change series is “House on Fire.” If you would like to see it (and the ones that will follow), the links are below.
Cultural Weekly was founded in 2011 to be “a working example of culturally-centered participatory civic media — an opportunity for diverse voices and perspectives to be shared from our curated platform. ….. Each edition is a hyper-curated and eclectic mix to stimulate your cultural passions. Cultural Weekly is a “digital magazine”: we don’t kill any trees, but we do inconvenience trillions of electrons. Cultural Weekly posts late Wednesday night or early Thursday morning, depending on your time zone.”
Cultural Weekly is published by Next Echo Foundation, an independent 501(c)3 charitable organization. We welcome your tax-deductible donation to continue and expand our work. In fact, we need your donation to survive, especially now, when the need for strong creative voices has never been more important. Donate here: https://www.culturalweekly.com/donate/
Cultural Weekly is the proud home base of the Jack Grapes Poetry Prize, which accepts submissions June through July.
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I only have an old-fashioned flip phone that barely functions enough to have conversations with other people. When it was updated a couple years ago by Verizon because their technology required me to shift to a different platform, it eviscerated my message service and now the phone’s ringer doesn’t even work. Of course, I have long wanted to get all this rectified, but the pandemic kicked in just at the point when I had conceded that it was time for a more current model.
I got my second vaccination shot this past Tuesday and hope to feel safe enough to visit a store by the end of month. I’ve heard of course that I could order a phone online and set it up myself, but I would have a chance to take a look at various models and ask questions about them face-to-face. I am looking forward to having a bit more capacity to take photographs and post them to various outlets.
In the meantime, I asked Linda this morning to use her phone to snap a photograph of a neighbor’s cat that occasionally visits our garden. It’s been at least a month since we’ve seen Minnie Mooch, as Jill calls this feral cat who hangs around their house across the street from us. It was lovely to see her again. She reminds me of Rupert, of course. How I miss him, and Cordelia, too!
Post-Script: By the time we left for a walk, she had enjoyed at least a two-hour nap in the sun.
When the moon isn’t full, I sometimes walk outside at night in winter months and look for Orion. When I lived in Ocean Park forty years ago, the ambient light in Los Angeles was maybe only half of what it is now. Orion was so easy to see. Now I’m lucky if I can spot even a single star in that constellation.
However, the full moon still has a way of letting one release that nostalgia and live in the present tense of its glow. Alexis Rhone Fancher sent me a photograph last week of the full moon over Long Beach, as seen from the balcony of the apartment in San Pedro she shares with Jim Fancher. With her permission, I post this photograph.
(copyright 2021 Alexis Rhone Fancher. All rights reserved.)
Support your local bookstore and bakery!
PAGE AGAINST THE MACHINE BOOKSTORE
2714 E 4th Street
Long Beach, CA 90814
Phone: (562) 588-7075
(Open Tuesday through Sunday)
GUSTO BREAD
2710 E 4th St, Long Beach, CA 90814
Hours: 8am – 1 p.m.
Wednesday through Sunday (Call to pre-order on Wed. and Thursday)
Menu: gustobread.com
Order: gustobread.shop
Phone: (562) 343-1881
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If you don’t want to be called an “Eugenics Collaborator,” then wear a mask!
I have given some thought to my recent categorization of non-maskers as “virus terrorists” and I hope terrorists everywhere will forgive my appropriation of their hideous behavior. My bestowal on anti-maskers of the term they have worked so hard to give historical legitimacy should not have been casually handed out like a Golden Globe trophy.
In fact, the dismaying behavior of anti-maskers during the pandemic is closer to that of those who unfortunately connive and consort with any invasion of one’s community, e.g., people in France and Holland during World War II who were perfectly comfortable collaborating with the Nazis who had invaded their countries.
The covid virus is an enemy of all human beings on this planet, and anyone who voluntarily facilitates the transmission of this virus should more accurately be categorized as a collaborator; that term should be applied without hesitation to those who refuse to wear masks.
What is their motive, though? As I walked over to Page Against the Machine bookstore this afternoon, it occurred to me that the preference of right-wingers to challenge the wearing of masks is a reflection of “rugged individualism.” The strong — and only the strong — deserve to survive, The weak deserve to perish. It is a way to cull the herd.
As I was talking to the bookstore’s owner, Chris Giaco, our faces lit up as we simultaneously had the same idea: it’s not true that conservative Republicans don’t believe in science. They profoundly believe in it. It’s just that their science is called “eugenics.”
Chris and I had talked about how lovely it was to talk in person, face to face, and how the conversation we had just had about the politics of the pandemic never would led us to the realizations that we mutually hit upon if we had been texting each other. It was the kind of insight that happens with in person, instantaneous exchanges of words.
Thank you, Chris. If you live in Long Beach, please support his store, which is right next to Gusto Bakery!
PAGE AGAINST THE MACHINE BOOKSTORE
2714 E 4th Street
Long Beach, CA 90814
Phone: (562) 588-7075
(Open Tuesday through Sunday)
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What part of WEAR A MASK do people not understand? Over a year has gone by since the covid-19 virus began dismantling normal life in one country after another, and still people act as if they had total immunity from the consequences of their actions.
If you don’t wear a mask, as far as I’m concerned, you are no different than a person driving around in a car with gelignite in the trunk and back seat.
If you resent me saying this, you are no different from the person in Central Park who didn’t think that she should have to put her dog on a leash, and then when she is called out on it, plays the victim and acts as if she is being attacked. You are the guilty party here. I am wearing a mask. You are not.
I don’t care about what race or ethnicity you belong to, or what your gender identification or affiliation is. I don’t care if you are working-class or middle-class.
If I am walking along the sideway and you pedal up on your bicycle behind me and tell me to get out of your way, and I start to stumble off the sidewalk as I hurry not just to avoid being run down by you, but to avoid any possibility of being infected by the covid virus because you have decided that you are too special to wear a mask, then I am going to call you for what you are: a virus terrorist.
For over a year, I have been enduring the hateful behavior of young people who don’t believe that they need to change any of their daily routines in order to stop this virus from doing so much damage to my generation. And it is hate on their part. There is no other word for it. It is a hate crime not to wear a mask.
I may not be able to call the police to defend my right to walk outside and briefly escape from this endless house arrest without being being assaulted, but I am going to call this behavior for what it is: calculated, vicious contempt for my life and well-being. If you expect me to regard it in any other way, then you are totally and hopelessly clueless.
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Suzanne Lummis just called me on the phone to announce that Lynne Thompson has been appointed the new Poet Laureate of Los Angeles. I am very delighted to learn this news. Last June, the W – E Bicoastal Poet of the Pandemic Poetry Reading Series featured her along with Laurel Ann Bogen and Alexis Rhone Fancher.
Here is my brief introduction for Lynne at that zoom reading:
“Lynne Thompson, who was born, raised, and thoroughly educated in Los Angeles, turns familial history into a poignant cross-examination of the politics of identity. Thompson’s documentary poetics enjoins the eminent domain of irony to accentuate and contextualize accounts of personal memory so that they remain viscerally pertinent to the always already festering crisis of this nation’s patrimony. Along with Bogen’s and Fancher’s poems, every future anthology of American poets will have to reckon with her writing. I present Lynne Thompson.”
Eloise Klein Healy, Luis J. Rodriguez, and Robin Coste Lewis were the previous laureates. I can’t think of a better successor than Lynne Thompson. I have been fortunate enough to hear Lynne read several times and cherish even more the memory of reading with her at an event organized by the Poet Laureate of West Hollywood, Kim Dower (“Route 66 through the Eyes of Poets” / Wednesday, April 25, 2018). In addition to Lynne, that event included such fine poets as Brendan Constantine, Elena Karina Byrne, Yvonne M. Estrada, and Laurel Ann Bogen.
Best of luck, Lynne. The poets of Los Angeles wholeheartedly support your appointment!
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About Bill Mohr