Category Archives: Books

Books

Bill Mohr joins Twitter

January 29, 2016 – 12:26 pm

Friday, January 29, 2016

You can follow me on Twitter now, @billmohrpoet. I just sent my first tweet:
Harry E. Northup, poet and actor, will read from his newest book, Memorial to Reason, at Beyond Baroque on Saturday, 1/30, at 8 p.m.

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Books Performance Poetry

Bob Flanagan – On the 20th anniversary of his death

January 4, 2016 – 1:24 pm
Photo (c) by Rod Bradley
Photo (c) by Rod Bradley

THE KID IS THE ULTIMATE MAN: Bob Flanagan (1952-1996) and Sheree Rose

Today is the 20th anniversary of the death of Bob Flanagan, although this post happening to appear today is the result of pure accident. The photograph of Flanagan accompanying this post is from a set taken by Rod Bradley at a publication event for issue number 11 of Bachy magazine at Papa Bach Bookstore in the mid-1970s; I spotted the CD Bradley had given me with the photographs at my office last week and took another peek at them over the holiday weekend, at which point I decided to start work on a long overdue tribute to Bob Flanagan and his artistic collaborator, Sheree Rose. When I looked up Bob’s dates to get an exact bearing on his chronology, I found the anniversary of his death to be rapidly approaching, so I redoubled my efforts. It should be noted, by the way, that the title of this post is a reference to the words on the cover of a book in the lower left hand corner of the photograph.

Flanagan began reading his poems around Southern California beginning in the mid-1970s, when he was still in his early 20s. In point of fact, I attended a festival of poets that included Flanagan in what had to have been his first reading in any venue that got public attention whatsoever. The “festival” took place in an unfinished, multi-story office building somewhere near downtown Los Angeles. I suppose it would be possible to dig through my archives and find the name of the hapless organizer and the exact address, but this was not an event that merits much more citation than Flanagan’s appearance, which stood out because of the contrast between his earnestness and the abundance of clichés in his poems. Flanagan was not born with a natural flair for vivid imagery. I distinctly remember listening to him read at that festival and thinking to myself that he had as little talent as any young poet I had ever heard. The old truism that talent is mostly hard work is certainly demonstrated in Flanagan’s case, for it was due to his determination to become a good writer that he matured into one of my favorite poets. In addition to his willingness to work very hard at becoming a better writer, he also had the advantage of being a member of the Beyond Baroque workshop, where poets such as Jim Krusoe and Jack Grapes continued his education in poetry outside of the academy.

I published some of his poetry in Momentum magazine and was impressed enough by his first book, “The Kid Is the Man” (Bombshelter Press, 1978) to write a review of it. It was the first formal public notice that Flanagan’s writing received. “The Kid Is the Man” contained all of the poems that Flanagan had made famous within several coteries at work in Los Angeles back then. “Love Is Still Possible” and “The Bukowski Poem” remain two of the earliest instances of poems that deserve to be in the Hall of Fame for the Stand Up school, a point to which I will return in a moment. Nor did Flanagan cease to write poetry even as he increasingly began to focus on music, theater, and performance art as outlets for his creative impishness and considerable wit, not to mention his legendary masochism. When it came time to choose his poems for Poetry Loves Poetry (1985), the work was all from the period after his first book was published and included another stand-up classic, “Fear of Poetry.” He went on to publish several collections, including “The Slave Sonnets” and a superb collaboration with David Trinidad, “A Taste of Honey.”

Given all of this poetry by Flanagan and the degree of his visible presence through frequent readings in Los Angeles, it is astonishing to realize that he is absent from all three editions of “Stand Up Poetry,” the first of which appeared in 1990 as a project co-edited by Charles Harper Webb and Suzanne Lummis. I suppose one has to take on faith the sincerity of the editors when one reads in the first slim volume (84 pages) that the 22 poets appearing in the book are merely representative of the Stand Up poetry movement and are not intended to be seen as the essential members of its first wave. However, Flanagan does not appear in either of the subsequent volumes, either. In fact, Flanagan is also absent from “Grand Passion,” which was also co-edited by Webb and Lummis, and which appeared in 1994, while Flanagan was still alive.

I find Flanagan’s absence from this evolving series of anthologies to be nothing short of astonishing, especially since Flanagan had a generous selection of poems in my anthology, “Poetry Loves Poetry,” which appeared in 1985 and which contained the poems of Webb and Lummis, too. In other words, his work was right there in front of them. Now it’s true that by 1990 Flanagan was primarily known as a performance artist, but he was still active as a poet. In fact, Flanagan was one of the primary poets who ran the Beyond Baroque poetry workshop between 1985 and 1995. Despite the way that his notoriety as a “Super-Masochist” began to overshadow his poetry, I certainly regarded Flanagan as worthy of consideration as a working poet in the early 1990s; and when I asked him to be a guest on my poetry video show, “Put Your Ears On,” he did not hesitate to accept. It turned out to be one of my most successful shows. We had a monitor on stage with a video of David Trinidad reading his lines from A Taste of Honey that alternated with Bob reading his lines live in the studio. His wit was on full display: when I asked him if he ever considered moving to NYC, where he had been born, he responded that he “preferred his creature comforts, and New York is mostly creatures.”

In addition, his poems in “Poetry Loves Poetry” were among the very best one in that anthology. “Fear of Poetry” remains a classic example of a metapoem that should be studied by every young poet. It should also be mentioned that Flanagan’s prominence within the poetry community in the mid-1980s because his lover and artistic collaborator Sheree Rose was a very fine photographer. When I decided that full-page photographs of the poets should be included in “Poetry Loves Poetry,” it was Sheree Rose who drew the assignment of persuading several dozen poets to relax enough to let their private masks become somewhat visible in a public portrait. She did a superb job and I hope some day that Beyond Baroque can have a retrospective of her work.

Finally, to square the paradoxical circle of his absence, I would also note that Flanagan studied at California State University, Long Beach, where Gerald Locklin taught for 40 years. Locklin and his colleague Charles Stetler are the poets known for using the title of Edward Field’s book, Stand Up, Friend, with Me, as the basis for a moniker to describe a kind of poetry that became increasingly popular in Southern California in the years after the Beat scenes in Los Angeles and San Francisco began a period of diminishing returns. Both Locklin and Stetler are in the first volume of Stand Up Poetry, along with another CSULB professor, Eliot Fried, whose poetry I had also published in the first issue of Bachy magazine in 1972.

The line-up of poets in the first volume of “Stand Up Poetry” (Red Wind Books, 1990) is very impressive: Laurel Ann Bogen, Charles Bukowski, Billy Collins, Wanda Coleman, Edward Field, Michael C. Ford, Elliot Fried, Manazar Gamboa, Jack Grapes, Eloise Klein Healy, Ron Koertge, Steve Kowit, Jim Krusoe, Gerald Locklin, Suzanne Lummis, Bill Mohr, Charles Stetler, Austin Straus, Charles Webb, and Ray Zepeda. There are also two poets named Ian Gregson and Viola Weinberg. That the poems of Bob Flanagan and Scott Wannberg should have been there in place of Gregson’s and Weinberg’s is obvious now.

The importance of Bob Flanagan’s writing and art and of his collaborations with Sheree Rose recently was recently confirmed by the acquisition of his archives by the University of Southern California. You can access information about that archive at:
http://one.usc.edu/bob-flanagan-and-sheree-rose-collection/

On the 20th anniversary of his death, I would urge those who are looking for material to analyze through the lens of disability theory or queer theory to consider visiting that archive and to get to work. In doing so, it would also be worth remembering that Flanagan is an exemplary Stand Up poet and one of the primary members of the original core group. Those of us who were here in the early and mid-1970s know the accuracy of that statement, even if editors who didn’t arrive in Los Angeles until the late 1970s prefer a version that might reflect a fear of being tainted by Flanagan’s transgressive art. In equally emphasizing his stature as a Stand Up poet, critics might also consider how his writing fits within the Confessional school of poetry, which is all too often viewed as a movement with no important contributors after 1980. How about someone taking on an article with a stark contrast: Sharon Olds versus Bob Flanagan. Now that would generate an incandescence worthy of the audacious risks that Flanagan took and lived to tell about, far longer – decades longer – than anyone ever suspected he would, even those of who feel very lucky to have heard him read his poetry or to offer up his body to the demons of pain. Suffering is not redemption, but it is hard to know what is worthy redeeming if one does not suffer to test those boundaries. Flanagan’s art and poetry offer us a chance to redraw our boundaries and set off anew.

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Books Poetry Translation

David Ulin and “Wide Awake”

January 1, 2016 – 6:28 pm

January 1, 2016 — Top Ten Picks of David Ulin; The Monolingualism of American Literature

LA Times Book Critic David Ulin has edited several anthologies himself, a fact that deserves underlining when he includes Suzanne Lummis’s Wide Awake: Poets of Los Angeles and Beyond as one of his ten favorite books published in 2015. One doesn’t have to have edited an anthology of poets to gauge the value of such an effort, but it certainly tends to make one a more judicious reader of anthologies. Lummis, too, is a veteran of this kind of editorial project; she co-edited an earlier anthology with almost the same subtitle back in the early 1990s. The high marks that Ulin gives Lummis’s latest anthology are much appreciated in the Los Angeles poetry community, if only because L.A. poets have not always had a smooth ride in the L.A. Times. In particular, one can recollect that Robert Kirsch once anointed my first anthology, The Streets Inside: Ten Los Angeles Poets (Momentum Press, 1978) as an indication of a “golden age” of Los Angeles poetry. Unfortunately, not everybody who worked at the LA Times Book Review agreed with Kirsch’s assessment, and poets were regarded as cultural orphans of their own success. I’ll put it simply: it’s nice to be appreciated again. Ulin implicitly suggests the exponential growth of the diverse scenes here by pointing out that Wide Awake is “magnificent” both in quantity (it contains “the work of more than 100 poets”) and quality (it “reveal(s) the depths and power of the city’s poetic sensibility”). That David Ulin appreciates the efforts of the diverse communities of poets in this city enough to award Lummis’s anthology a top ten pick is very gratifying, and I hope Suzanne Lummis is savoring the acknowledgement.

The last paragraph in Carolyn Kellogg’s end-of-the-year commentary in the LA Times is also worth further consideration. In referring to the choice of a Russian writer for the Nobel Prize in Literature this year, Kellogg cites an article that appeared back in 2008 in which a member of the Nobel selection committee commented that American writing is “too insular.” The charge is true, I’m afraid, though the full quotation I’ve been able to dig up is even more revealing:

“The U.S. is too isolated, too insular. They don’t translate enough and don’t really participate in the big dialogue of literature,” (Horace) Engdahl said. “That ignorance is restraining.”

The real gripe that the Swedish academy has with American writing lies in the evidence of its insularity: “They don’t translate enough.” This could be translated, so to speak, as “You don’t care about us; so why should we care about you?” Fair enough, and it brought to mind how I recently found that my most widely distributed posting in this blog for the entire year of 2015 was “Against the Monolingual Torture of Writers,” which was originally posted back in early September. For some reason, it took off in December, and had over 300 pageviews, with 161 human visits, of which 149 were new visitors to my blog. My post was firmly on the side of the Swedish academy, and perhaps it caught the attention of someone in Europe who was surprised to find an American writer at odds with his peers.

Fortunately for me, my blog is not dependent on American book publishers for advertising in order to keep itself going. If it were, I could see retribution heading my way lickety-split. Believe me, I’ve seen it happen. The announcement earlier today of the death of Natalie Cole recoiled with references to “Unforgettable,” a song that her father had made famous and which the daughter reprised by having a version in which her voice was blended in a duet with his. Back when the father-daughter version was soaring up the charts, the newspaper I was working at as a typesetter started running cartoons with a slightly satirical edge to them about the music industry. The publisher must have thought it would make his paper “different” from the other trade papers. What he didn’t count on was that you can only get away with making fun of something that everybody shares a dislike of (i.e., politicians). The music industry takes itself very seriously, and when the front page ran a cartoon of Natalie Cole saying to a skeleton figure of her father, “Hey, Dad, you’re stepping on my lines,” (or something similarly sarcastic), the music label that released Cole’s remake let my paper know that it wasn’t just cancelling advertising of that particular song in the next issue or the issue after: all advertising by that label was forthwith cancelled. Or at least that’s the version that I heard in the hallway. I do remember some rather tense editorial and salespeople faces walking past me for a week or so until the crisis was resolved. The first thing to go, of course, was the contract with the cartoonist, nor was a replacement sought.

So, yes, once again, it would make American literature more interesting if the writers here asked themselves at some point if what they are writing would at all interest someone who can only read Spanish or Chinese. Are you saying something profound enough or insightfully witty enough to merit the travail required to translate it? I do appreciate how hard it is to attain that level of writing. My first book of poems in another language has only been published after over 40 years of writing. Surely, though, those poets who have won so many more awards that I have during that time have some explanation for why their work does not seem to make a transition beyond the wall of American monolingualism.

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Books

Ten of my favorite poems (for Harry Northup)

December 25, 2015 – 8:17 am

Harry Northup recently asked me to send him a list of my ten favorite poems. With the semester wrapped (except for writing letters of recommendation), I finally got around to sorting through the poetry equivalent of stacks of .45 records. Harry had already asked several other poets to make such a list, so my citation of “this conversation” refers to similar lists by poets such as Michael Lally, S.A. Griffin, Holly Prado, Jonathan Cott, Sandra Giedeman, and Charles H. Webb.

Ten of My Favorite Poems (as opposed to my Ten Favorite Poems)

There’s little point in being redundant in this conversation. James Schuyler’s “The Morning of the Poem” and Randall Jarrell’s “Death of the Ball Turret Gunner” both made my original top ten list, too, but since others have listed those poems, I might as well take advantage of the fact that there’s no shortage of willing substitutes. It’s a team with a very, very deep bench. Given Ginsberg’s multiple nominations, I also discarded him from my list, though my preference would have been “Wichita Vortex Sutra.” It should also be noted that anyone I published under the aegis of Momentum Press (either as a stand-alone volume or in my anthologies) or in an issue Momentum magazine was ineligible for this list. Obviously, that means Charles Bukowski’s “The Souls of Dead Animals” had to be left out, as well as any poem by Paul Vangelisti (“Days Shadows Pass” would have been my choice); several of my favorite poems by Eloise Klein Healy also were relegated to the semi-final roster as a result of that rule. It was an exceptionally difficult choice between Blake’s “London” and Bob Dylan’s “Desolation Row.” Other photo-finishes involved Ron Silliman’s “Ketjak” and Michael McClure’s “In the Antechamber of the Night” in the tie for tenth and final entry.

I have listed the poems in order of my first reading of them.

“The Listeners” — Walter de la Mare (1964)
“The Ecstasy” — John Donne (1966)
“Dimanches” (“Le ciel pleut sans but, sans que rien l’émeuve”) — Jules LaForgue (1966)
Henry IV, Part 1 — William Shakespeare (1966)
“London” — William Blake (1968)
“Lady Lazarus” — Sylvia Plath (1968)
“Masses” (“When the battle was over….”) — Cesar Vallejo (translation by Clayton Eshleman; 1975)
“When the World Ends” — Mark Van Doren (1999)
“Montage of a Dream Deferred” — Langston Hughes (the book-length poem; 2006)
And tied for tenth:
“A Woman is Talking to Death” — Judy Grahn (2011)
“A View of Things” — Edwin Morgan (2013)
“On the Lake” — V. Sackville-West – (2013)
Also, tied for tenth: a thousand three hundred and seventy eight other poems.

If someone were to insist on only ten:
“The Listeners” — Walter de la Mare (1964)
“Dimanches” (“Le ciel pleut sans but, sans que rien l’émeuve”) — Jules LaForgue (1966)
Henry IV, Part 1 — William Shakespeare (1966)
“London” — William Blake (1968)
“Lady Lazarus” — Sylvia Plath (1968)
“Masses” (“When the battle was over….”) — Cesar Vallejo (translation by Clayton Eshleman; 1975)
“When the World Ends” — Mark Van Doren (1999)
“Montage of a Dream Deferred” — Langston Hughes (the book-length poem; 2006)
“A Woman is Talking to Death” — Judy Grahn (2011)
“On the Lake” — V. Sackville-West – (2013)
— Bill Mohr (12/23/15)

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Books

Flash Fiction List from Zebulon Huset

December 3, 2015 – 10:39 pm

Zebulon Huset has sent me a link to a list of flash fiction outlets and asked me to spread the word about the increasing interest in this compressed variation.

http://l.facebook.com/l/7AQEmNPQlAQGHsSVApDFRKxhPUw0d63206ZGqm0wNo8XEoQ/notebookingdaily.blogspot.com/2015/11/zebulons-guide-to-flash-fiction.html

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Books Poetry

From Monterey to Mexico

August 3, 2015 – 7:10 pm

The first set of galleys for Cross-Strokes has arrived from Rebecca Chamlee, the book designer for the final volume of what has proved to be a trilogy of anthologies. When I first got involved with publishing books back in the mid-1970s, I didn’t have a clue as to what I was getting involved with. I just knew that I wanted to get the work of some older poets I admired into print. By 1977, it was clear to me that the slim, but substantial anthology edited by Charles Bokowski, Paul Vangelisti, and Neeli Cherkovski back in 1972 needed a follow-up, and I put together a book I entitled The Streets Inside. I made a number of mistakes in editing the book, not the least of which is that I tried to give each of the ten poets the same number of pages. The decision to give Leland Hickman the lead-off position in the volume with a total of 25 pages left me in an awkward position. I certainly felt that several other poets I wanted in the anthology were no less deserving of an equally large sample of their work, and so it wasn’t long before the book had filled up its allotted size. The focus was on poets I had published in Momentum magazine, and I ended up leaving out poets I should have included. I especially regret not including Manazar Gamboa, Ron Koertge, Wanda Coleman, John Thomas, and Paul Vangelisti. I should have limited the page number for each poet to 15 pages maximum, though ten would have been even better. The Streets Inside: 15 Los Angeles Poets would have made for a more comprehensive look at a scene that was already so vital that Robert Kirsch claimed my book portended “a golden age of Los Angeles poetry.” If I had included Charles Bukowski, Jack Grapes, Bert Meyers, John Harris, Joseph Hansen, Alvaro Cardona-Hine, and Aleida Rodriguez, and upped the ante close to two dozen poets, Kirsch’s assessment would have been exponentially underwritten.

Perhaps it is the fate of editors of anthologies to struggle with regret. My second anthology, “Poetry Loves Poetry” (1985) left out Scott Wannberg, and I rebuke myself to this day for that error. In Cross-Strokes, I have already launched my self-recriminations for failing to take note of Juan Felipe Herrera’s eligibility for this book. At least, though, the book is approaching the finish line, and there is considerable gratification at being able to include poets I’ve never had a chance to include in an anthology before, such as Richard Garcia. If you have not yet read any of his books, then you have a chance to surprise yourself with metaphors that goes beyond the ordinary logic of poetic playfulness.

This is a very busy time: not only did I just return from two exhausting weeks of work at CSU Monterey Bay, but I must also get my talk written for the “Modernities” conference in Dijon, France in late November. Next week I leave for Mexico to give three readings there as part of the celebration of the publication of Pruebas Ocultas. My students at CSU Monterey Bay gave me a beautiful journal and a lovely ink pen to write with at the end of their reading on Friday, July 24th. I don’t know that I’ll be able to write much in this blog while I’m in Mexico, and I hope to fill this journal with entries about my journey there. In the meantime, I have already begun having to attend several committee meetings for the upcoming year at CSULB, including a Dean’s Review Committee and a job search committee.

On a personal level, I have found myself beginning to mediate more and even on occasion to pray. Let me be clear on one point: I have no desire to belong to a church. Too much evil has been done in the name of religion for me to accept being immured in the kind of communal identification. One challenge in praying is to disengage with any notion that prayers have a cause-and-effect efficacy, though they do seem to have a value that goes far beyond what I would attach to other speech acts as performative gestures. My act of praying, for instance, has altered my nominative perception of myself and enabled me to envision deeper relationships with others who share this kinship. As I told a friend the other day, why do we not have a word for one who prays? A prayer is what a person says who is praying. But what is the name of a person who utters a prayer? I wonder if in fact Stuart Perkoff is pointing at that odd ambiguity in the first line of an unfinished sonnet: “The morning utters stillness like a prayer.” Maybe he means not only the words said, but also the one who utters the prayer. The morning utters stillness as if it were one who says a prayer.

 

 

 

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Books Poetry

Serving House Journal – Steve Kowit

May 1, 2015 – 8:40 pm

Clare MacQueen at Serving House Journal has posted my two recent entries on the late Steve Kowit. I want to thank her for including me in this publication’s tribute to a wonderful poet whose place cannot be taken. The circle he is part of has not gone through its cycle yet, and many other points remain to be filled in within its arcs. His point, though, is marked with the footprint of one who stops somewhere, waiting for us.

By “us,” I am referring to people (and especially poets) who knew Steve far better than I did, and several of them have their recollections of Steve included in this special issue. These contributors include Deborah Albritain, Peter Bolland, Duff Brenna, Tim Calaway, Brandon Cesmat, Rebecca Chamaa, Anna DiMartino, Bill Hardin, Jackleen Holton Hockway, Peter J. Lautz, Sylvia Levinson, Lynda Riese, R.A. Rycraft, Ron Salisbury, and Al Zolynas.

Here’s the direct link to her posting:

http://www.servinghousejournal.com/MohrTwoTributes.aspx

This issue of Serving House Journal also includes an extraordinary showcase of Steve Kowit’s poetry. Although it includes such classic poems by Kowit as “Lurid Confessions,” which has to rank as one of the top 10 Stand Up poems of the past four decades, but “Cutting Our Losses,” which is as grimly hilarious as anyone could for.

 

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Books Poetry

Wide Awake: Two-thirds of the Poets of Los Angeles

April 25, 2015 – 7:42 pm

Saturday, April 25, 2015

WideAwake_FRONT

A reading to celebrate the publication of Wide Awake: The Poets of Los Angeles and Beyond will be held at Beyond Baroque on Saturday, May 9th, at 4:00. According to an e-mail I received this afternoon from Suzanne Lummis, about half of the poets in the book will be there to read one poem each. My MFA students are giving a reading in Long Beach that same afternoon, and I have decided to give the best overall class of students I have ever worked with their well-deserved final round of pedagogical applause. From that day forward, those students will be my peers, and not my subordinates; they have earned the recognition that only my presence that day can bestow. I am certain that the gathering at Beyond Baroque on May 9th will be a boisterous occasion, and I would love to celebrate the latest iteration of L.A.’s most visible poets. I regret especially that I will not be there to hear Liz Gonzalez read her poems. I am fortunate at my age to have a job, however, and doubly fortunate to have such good students. I have cast my lot in Long Beach.

Suzanne Lummis has done a solid job in assembling a representative selection of L.A. poets for her most recent anthology, and the book deserves to have a substantial audience. On the whole, though, the book seems to homogenize the various scenes in Los Angeles, so that one has little sense of how disparate the poetics of many poets in this city have been during the past three decades, let alone the past half-century. There have been at least a dozen anthologies of Los Angeles poets since 1960, beginning with “Poetry Los Angeles” (which is not to be confused with Laurence Goldstein’s marvelous study of poems about Los Angeles, published by the University of Michigan Press in 2014). Not one of these anthologies has followed the lead of Donald Allen’s or Ron Silliman’s anthologies and included some critical commentary by the poets that articulates their specific poetics. The need at this point is for a book that has fewer poets and more reflection in prose on the poems.

In truth, I have yet to have a chance to give Wide Awake a close reading, but even at first glance the book is rather startling in how it constitutes a census of the decimation of the L.A. poetry scenes since 1985 (only a handful of the poets in Wide Awake were active in Los Angeles a decade earlier). As good an anthology as Wide Awake is likely to turn out to be, it is a touch disheartening to realize how many poets have either left the scene, died, or remain unaccounted for as still being present and active as poets in Los Angeles. In writing the first review of Wide Awake, David Ulin has made the proper choice in focusing on the poets who are included in Lummis’s anthology rather than dwelling on the absent figures. Even so, it is perhaps indicative of this aporia that the second sentence of David Ulin’s commentary on Wide Awake cites four poets who made an initial impact on his literary knowledge of Los Angeles, and the only one of these four who is in Wide Awake is dead. (“I got to know Los Angeles through its poetry. Even before I lived here, I experienced a different, human, side of the city through the works of Wanda Coleman, Michelle T. Clinton, Amy Gerstler, David Trinidad.”) Olin’s article can be found at the following link:

http://www.latimes.com/books/jacketcopy/la-et-jc-in-wide-awake-suzanne-lummis-gathers-the-poets-of-los-angeles-20150421-story.html

At the risk of being seen as a dour, nostalgic grouch, I have decided that too many poets are absent from Wide Awake not to let the absentees (or their surviving friends and family) know that they deserve to be in some future anthology of Los Angeles poetry, one that will give a comprehensive picture of the 200 best poets to work here since the end of World War II. To lead off, I mention Alvaro Cardona-Hine and Jack Hirschman, both of whom were in both anthologies of L.A. poets worked on by Paul Vangelisti in the early 1970s. Along with Clayton Eshleman, John Harris, Victor Valle, and Joseph Hansen, Cardona-Hine and Hirschman represent strains of poetry that have made Los Angeles a particularly complicated arena for the contemporary practice of an ancient art given renewed reverence by its most renitent adherents. Let the roll-call commence, and let it be emphasized that this is not some definitive list. I have not listed, for instance, any young poets who have studied with me at CSU Long Beach and who have begun publishing their work.

Living L.A. poets absent from Wide Awake:

Frank T. Rios; Martha Ronk; Marisela Norte;

Yvonne de la Vega; Roger Taus; Daniel Tiffany;

Fred Voss; Joan Jobe Smith; Brian Kim Stefans;

Will Alexander; Anthony Seidman; Aleida Rodriguez;

Martha Ronk; Juan Delgado; Ramon Garcia;

Douglas Messerli; Jack Grapes; Mindy Nettifee;

Julia Stein; Nancy Shiffrin; Anthony McCann;

Harold Abramowitz; Matthew Timmons;

David Shook; Barbara Maloutas;

Todd Baron; Blair H. Allen;

John Doe; Exene Cervenka;

Dave Alvin; Amy Gerstler;

Tim Reynolds.

 

 

L.A. poets who left town between 1980 and 2010 and are not in Wide Awake:

Brooks Roddan; Richard Garcia;

Doren Robbins; Standard Schaeffer;

Dennis Cooper; David Trinidad;

Michelle T. Clinton; Kate Braverman;

Michael Lally; Ian Krieger.

 

Poets in “Poetry Loves Poetry” (1985) or Grand Passion (1995)

who switched to other genres / other occupations

Jim Krusoe; David James; Max Benavidez; Peter Cashorali

 

L.A. POETS WHO DIED BETWEEN 1970 and 2015

John Thomas; Philomene Long;

Ann Stanford; Joan LaBombard;

FranceYe (Frances Dean Smith); Charles Bukowski;

Leland Hickman; Bob Flanagan;

Stuart Perkoff; William Pillin;

Bruce Boyd; Grover Jacoby, Jr.;

Lawrence Spingarn; Charles Gullans;

Robert Peters; Peter Schneidre;

Dick Barnes; Robert Crosson;

Scott Wannberg; Charles Bivins;

Mel Weisburd; Manazar Gamboa;

Bert Myers; Marine Robert Warden;

Susannah Foster; Ed Smith;

Curtis Zahn; John Brander;

Carol Lem; Maria Fattorini;

Robert Greenfield; Tony Scibella.

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Books Poetry

Steve Kowit Postscript: Walt Whitman’s butterfly

April 18, 2015 – 8:59 am

April 18, 2015

“That mischievous flight of felicitous whimsy”

Before I headed off to the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books at the University of Southern California, I spent a few minutes working on my bookshelves at home. I have enough new books  that I simply must prune (de-accession?) the shelves! Sorting and re-shelving, I found that treasured gifts from other poets awaited me, especially a broadside from Steve Kowit entitled “A Whitman Portrait.” It’s a 55 line poem with a delicious sense of humor. Kowit loved to let other hoist themselves on their own petard, which in this case is their presumptuousness that the butterfly poised on Whitman’s finger in a photographic portrait taken of him in Camden in 1883 was “nothing but papier mache. Kowit’s poem is the pleasure of community formation at its best. Sure it’s an “us against them” poem, but those who have mocked the alleged artificiality of this portrait (with the implied contempt for Whitman’s sentimentality) deserve this rebuke, which also rebounds to us for the ultimate fate of this species. According to Kowit, ” high-resolution spectr0- / analysis proved what any fool could have guessed: / she was just what she seemed: mortal & breathing. / A carbon-molecular creature like us. Papilio / aristodemus, now all but extinct.”

Kowit’s critique of contemporary poetry is always already blunt and merciless. He was a poet whose eyes partook of “”that mischievous flight of felicitous whimsy,” but it must also be said that he saw no reason to spare the feelings of the Great Pretenders.

If it’s true there exist fake butterflies

cut out of paper & wire, my guess is

they belong to a later generation of poets.

I’ll leave you to figure out the ones who dedicate their lines to fake butterflies, but I don’t think such a project deserves more than a few minutes. Better to give yourself the pleasure of the company of Steve Kowit’s poems, which are more than willing to alight on your fingertips.

My retrospective thanks again to Steve, for sending me a signed copy of this broadside, dated 12-22-89. I think that may have been the year when Christmas looked fairly bleak. I was living with my first wife, Cathay, in our apartment on Hill Street in Ocean Park and my job as a typesetter did not pay very much. I remember that we probably had about $50 in our bank account on December 22, just enough to buy some basic groceries to get us through the month. We had not bought any Christmas gifts for each other, even tiny ones. I remember standing at the bottom of the staircase and starting to sort through a pile of old mail and assorted loose paper. I saw an envelope from a co-worker at Radio & Records for whom I had done some free-lance work, and I was one hundred percent certain that I had already opened it, but I took another look regardless and there was a simple sheet of paper in it with a notation of hours of work done and a check for well over $200. I couldn’t believe it. I suppose that moment was a holiday butterfly. Recollections of many holidays are a blur, but in that instance I still remember how the original expectations for the year’s final week made the outcome all the sweeter. I keep thinking at the present moment that there is some meaning I am missing about how one remembers eating well and having a small tree and a few gifts. Is it just nostalgia betraying me, another “bittersweet kaleidoscope”?

 

 

 

 

 

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Books

Marine Robert Warden (poet and doctor)

April 17, 2015 – 10:42 pm

Friday, April 17, 2015

Marine Robert Warden (1927-2013)

I was working on my bookshelves this evening and noticed a cluster of books of poems by Marine Robert Warden, a doctor who lived in Riverside and began writing poetry after he stopped his active practice as a radiologist in the early 1970s. A quick search of the internet informed me that Bob died back in 2013, and I felt the pang of delayed knowledge. A fine poet and an exceptionally kind man had died, and somehow I missed his passing. Such an unnoticed passing by the poetry community in Los Angeles would not have happened had Bob died in 1987, at age 60. He had been actively present, if not acutely prominent in Los Angeles poetry, for a decade by then. Given his distance from Papa Bach Bookstore and Beyond Baroque, in fact, Warden was in surprisingly close contact with other poets, including Leland Hickman, Peter Levitt and Kate Braverman, all of whom had been crucial contributors to The Streets Inside: Ten Los Angeles Poets (1978).

His first collection of poetry, Beyond the Straits, which I published in 1980, contains the core of his work that will remain part of the canon of Los Angeles poetry between 1945 and 2000. “The Great Ground Swell” is a minor classic, and any anthology that would claim to be a comprehensive presentation of Los Angeles poetry during the second half of the 20th century should have at the very least this poem by Warden.

I can’t remember the last time I saw him. It would probably have been some time in the mid-1980s. I had included him in my second anthology, “Poetry Loves Poetry,” but I cannot recollect whether or not he was able to attend the publication reading in the summer of 1985. He stopped driving at night due to his glaucoma, and so he made fewer trips to L.A. to hear poets.

One of the last times I heard from him was back in 2007, just after Linda and I returned from Lynbrook, New York, where we lived while I worked as an adjunct at Rutgers, St. John’s and Nassau Community College. He included some brief reviews of his more recent collections as well as excerpts from letters he had written to Leland Hickman (dated 4/24/79) and Peter Levitt (dated 3/17/84). At the bottom of his typed transcript of the letter to Levitt, he wrote, “Have never been able to really live up to this.” Actually, he did live up to it: each time he read a poem that helped him make his own next effort, he lived up to it, and inspired me from a distance to do the same. I will always treasure how he was one of the first enthusiastic champions of our work outside the immediate periphery of Los Angeles.

At the time of his death, he was survived by his wife of 62 years, Lois Anne Warden, three sons, 13 grandchildren, and four great-grandchildren. I remember that he had a grandchild who drowned in a public swimming pool at the age of six, even though a lifeguard was present. I sent him a poem shortly afterwards, though it hardly rose to the occasion of addressing that tragic accident adequately. Perhaps I will be able, some day, to write a poem worthy of being dedicated to the memory of a man whose modesty was well placed, but nevertheless fell short of acknowledging his value in our community.

 

 

Friday, April 17, 2015

Marine Robert Warden (1927-2013)

I was working on my bookshelves this evening and noticed a cluster of books of poems by Marine Robert Warden, a doctor who lived in Riverside and began writing poetry after he stopped his active practice as a radiologist in the early 1970s. A quick search of the internet informed me that Bob died back in 2013, and I felt the pang of delayed knowledge. A fine poet and an exceptionally kind man had died, and somehow I missed his passing. Such an unnoticed passing by the poetry community in Los Angeles would not have happened had Bob died in 1987, at age 60. He had been actively present, if not acutely prominent in Los Angeles poetry, for a decade by then. Given his distance from Papa Bach Bookstore and Beyond Baroque, in fact, Warden was in surprisingly close contact with other poets, including Leland Hickman, Peter Levitt and Kate Braverman, all of whom had been crucial contributors to The Streets Inside: Ten Los Angeles Poets (1978).

His first collection of poetry, Beyond the Straits, which I published in 1980, contains the core of his work that will remain part of the canon of Los Angeles poetry between 1945 and 2000. “The Great Ground Swell” is a minor classic, and any anthology that would claim to be a comprehensive presentation of Los Angeles poetry during the second half of the 20th century should have at the very least this poem by Warden.

I can’t remember the last time I saw him. It would probably have been some time in the mid-1980s. I had included him in my second anthology, “Poetry Loves Poetry,” but I cannot recollect whether or not he was able to attend the publication reading in the summer of 1985. He stopped driving at night due to his glaucoma, and so he made fewer trips to L.A. to hear poets.

One of the last times I heard from him was back in 2007, just after Linda and I returned from Lynbrook, New York, where we lived while I worked as an adjunct at Rutgers, St. John’s and Nassau Community College. He included some brief reviews of his more recent collections as well as excerpts from letters he had written to Leland Hickman (dated 4/24/79) and Peter Levitt (dated 3/17/84). At the bottom of his typed transcript of the letter to Levitt, he wrote, “Have never been able to really live up to this.” Actually, he did live up to it: each time he read a poem that helped him make his own next effort, he lived up to it, and inspired me from a distance to do the same. I will always treasure how he was one of the first enthusiastic champions of our work outside the immediate periphery of Los Angeles.

At the time of his death, he was survived by his wife of 62 years, Lois Anne Warden, three sons, 13 grandchildren, and four great-grandchildren. I remember that he had a grandchild who drowned in a public swimming pool at the age of six, even though a lifeguard was present. I sent him a poem shortly afterwards, though it hardly rose to the occasion of addressing that tragic accident adequately. Perhaps I will be able, some day, to write a poem worthy of being dedicated to the memory of a man whose modesty was well placed, but nevertheless fell short of acknowledging his value in our community.

 

 
 

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