Thursday, October 25th, 2018

Gjertrud Schneckenberg was scheduled to read tonight, at 7:30, but several weeks ago the Hammer Museum announced that her reading had been cancelled.

For those who had hoped to attend a reading on that evening, and who are willing to drive from West Los Angeles to Long Beach, the poet Katie Ford will be reading at the campus of California State University, Long Beach, at the Anatol Center at 7 p.m. on Thursday, October 25th. The Anatol Center is in the AS (“Academic Services”) building between the MacIntosh Building (the nine-story “toaster” building visible from Seventh Street) and the University Library. Parking can be a challenge, so I recommend coming early. The reading itself is free. I believe that my colleague David Hernandez arranged for her visit to CSU Long Beach.

She will also be reading at Beyond Baroque in Venice this coming Sunday, October 28th, at 4:00 p.m., and then reading on November 11 in Seattle with Rae Armantrout. Ford is currently a professor in the Department of Creative Writing at the University of California, Riverside, and is the director of its MFA program.

Here is a link to a representative selection of her poetry:
https://blackbird.vcu.edu/v8n2/features/ford_k/index.shtml

Her writing has received an unusual number of reviews and citations for its outstanding quality.

“In the short space of two collections, Katie Ford has emerged as one of the most recognizably thoughtful poets of her talented generation.” — David Rigsbee
For Rigsbee’s full-length review, go to:
http://www.cortlandreview.com/issue/56/rigsbee_e.php

“Ford’s work is strongly reminiscent of Carolyn Forche’s The Angel of History and deserves the same level of recognition.”—Library Journal

BLURBS FOR KATIE FORD
“Rarely is poetry of such extremity–extremity of experience, extremity of spiritual practice and insight–presented in a style which manages to both horrify, and still break the heart, and, if not soothe, then at least find those reaches in the reader where there is compassion so open it awaits no recompense. Here is a poetry of witnessing–theological, emotional, intellectual–a private end to a century’s horrors, a reminder that not all things begin again, and that from some reaches of experience instruction shines far less than the beauty of the survivor’s report.” ―Jorie Graham

“A distinct and powerful voice in American poetry…. This is a complex, rioting, and heartbreaking book.” — Jane Mead

Jane Mead is the author of four poetry collections, including World of Made and Unmade, and Money Money Money Water Water Water (Alice James Books, 2016 and 2014, respectively). Her honors include fellowships from the Lannan and Guggenheim Foundations, and a Whiting Award.

http://www.bookslut.com/features/2014_10_020898.php

BLURBS FOR JANE MEAD

“Jane Mead’s our Emily Dickinson, our most ambitious solitary. Her austere poems are brilliant: endlessly inventive, syntactically, tonally and emotionally rich. Alternately ironic and undefended, she never sacrifices compassion, justice, her quest for pleasure. In their longing and their loneliness, tending to the otherness of nature, the beauty of expression, these poems honor the frailty that makes us most human.”—Ira Sadoff

“With each of her books, Jane Mead develops a more economical, unique language for grief, and for the yearning toward wholeness. Confessional detail and philosophical argument are reduced to traces, but their resonance from underneath leaves no doubt that this work is serious. This is a book I will be living with for a long time to come.”—Alan Williamson

“Jane Mead penetrates grief with alacrity and burning self-scrutiny. This work enters the world like wild rain and lightning, an inheritance from Celan’s and Tsvetaeva’s stuttered lyricism. Those who can brave the revolutions in her music will choose life because of its difficulty.”—Jane Miller

Tuesday, October 23, 2018: “Who blurbed your book?”

The debut reading of The Headwaters of Nirvana went fairly well. Noel Alumit, the host of the reading, asked me to read 20 minutes. Gail Wronsky began her introduction at 5:07, and I started my reading at 5:10. I ended my reading at 5:31, without having checked the time.

For the record, here was the set-list for the Skylight reading:

“Rules for Building a Labyrinth,” which I dedicated to Lynn McGee
“One Miracle”
“Complexities”
“Real Days Off”
“Terrorism: The View from Century City”
“The Restoration”
“Answer”
“Why the Heart Does Not Develop Cancer”

I would have preferred to read eight more recent poems, but my job was to encourage people to buy the book, and five or so people in the audience did so. My thanks for their support.

I was about to leave the bookstore when suddenly I saw Shana Olson, who had missed the reading but had gotten there in time to congratulate me on the publication of my first full-length volume of poems, published in this country, in well over 30 years. I sat in a corner of the store and read a couple of poems to her out of the book, as a way of thanking her for making the effort to attend. She read along in a copy I loaned her; afterwards, she flipped to the back cover. “Who blurbed your book?” she asked out loud.

“No one,” I said, which seemed to surprise her. If she had thought it through, however, she would have been less perplexed. One only goes over 30 years without a full-length volume of poems in this country if one is extraordinarily marginal, and any blurb that tried to gloss over that fact would end up revealing its superficial knowledge of the political economy of U.S. literature. There may be a dozen or so poets I could have asked, but would it have been fair to them? It’s tough enough to write a blurb when you are friends with a poet, but it goes beyond an ordinary favor when the poet is someone only vaguely familiar — as how could I not be, since they have had no volume of my work to read for a very long time. It’s a circle with a rodeo-cinch grip on its leash.

For the record, here are the poets I would have been delighted to have had a blurb from. If you are one of these poets, and think to yourself, “Oh, I would have written one, if he had asked,” then please forgive my shyness. Also, since I have at various points published both poems by and reviews of Healy, Vangelisti, and Ostriker, it felt more than a little awkward to indulge in anything that gave the appearance of reciprocity.

Eloise Klein Healy
Ellen Bass
Juan Felipe Herrera
Marilyn Nelson
Anselm Berrigan
Marvin Bell
Paul Vangelisti
Rae Armantrout
Heather McHugh
B.H. Fairchild
Alicia Ostriker
Linda Bierds
Kim Addonizio
Denise Duhamel
Michael Lally

I realize what an odd list this will seem to a few poets I’ve known over the years, such as Cecilia Woloch, Ron Silliman, and Michael Davidson, who are all too often asked for blurbs. Well, just to make it more peculiar, I’ll add a few more names:

Michael Hannon
Sandra McPherson
Garrett Hongo
Kit Robinson
Michael McClure
Gerald Locklin

The average age of this score of poets is slightly older than I am; the brevity of my list may reflect how relatively few people my age began publishing over a half-century ago, and are still active. A few readers of this blog might wonder about the absence of all but a couple poets in Los Angeles. I rarely see those I worked with back in the 70s or 80s. Some, like Jim Krusoe, Kate Braverman, and Dennis Cooper, have become known for their fiction; others, such as Lee Hickman and Wanda Coleman, have died. Of all the poets named in this blog entry, in fact, they are the two poets whose blurbs would have been the most meaningful. If Tom Lux hadn’t died, I would have asked him for a blurb again. He wrote one back when Cahuenga Press had accepted a manuscript about 15 years ago that never got past the typesetting stage because I was such an obstreperous stickler about the type size. Mea culpa. What Tom wrote back then wouldn’t transfer to Headwaters, though, since it is on a different scale than the Cahuenga ms.

I’ve been asked to write blurbs fairly often the past dozen years. I don’t think it occurs to anyone who asks to wonder about how limited my options are in the current prevalence of that literary maneuver in this country. I suppose this is the source of my immense appreciation for the work that Jose Rico and Robin Myers did in translation my work and each writing some prose about it for the edition that Bonobos Editores published in Mexico in 2015. There is a blurb on the back cover of Headwaters, though it is somewhat submerged. It is in Spanish, and it comes from an article in which the best books of poetry published in Mexico were chosen by three different critics. Asking for acknowledgement in one’s own country seems somewhat superfluous, given that the challenge is always to be worthy of attention outside of the narcissism of one’s own culture.

Friday, September 21, 2018

Gala Tickets Now on Sale

Tickets to Beyond Baroque’s Gala 50th Anniversary Celebration are now on sale.

beyondbaroque50gala.eventbrite.com

If you want to know why you should splurge for an evening out in Los Angeles — in other words, what are you getting for your money besides knowing that you are supporting a nationally recognized literary arts center — then I urge you to take a peek at the page Beyond Baroque has set up about this event:

beyondbaroque.org/2018gala.html

Tickets for the table I am sponsoring — the PapaBachanalia Table — are now sold out. While there is still room at other tables, I wouldn’t wait too long to decide about attending. There will not be an encore event. I remember when Marie Ponsot read at Beyond Baroque, so many people showed up for the first show that she agreed to do a 10:00 p.m. reading, too.

The 50th Gala evening starts at 5 p.m., and will roll straight through at 10:00 p.m., at which point we will all go home and savor our luck at having been at a very special occasion.

See you there!

August 28, 2018

“Stylus to the Stars”

I hope the pun in the title is obvious enough. “What do you dislike in particular?” John Lennon was once asked. “Slow people,” he responded. I’m not sure that I would have been sufficiently up to speed for him or his friends, but even so, I can sympathize with his disdain.

I dedicate this sequence of photographs to Jamie Lund, who knows how hard it is to cut the hair of a diva-wannabe.

(copyright (c) Bill Mohr, 2018. All right reserved.