DATE: April 12, 2015

PLACE: Church in Ocean Park, 235 Hill Street, Ocean Park, CA 90405

EVENT: Beyond Baroque’s Annual Fund-Raising Dinner

OCCASION: The bestowing of the 2015 George Drury Smith Award

RECIPIENT: Suzanne Lummis

PRESENTER: Bill Mohr

AWARD PRESENTATION SPEECH

      The Doubly Improbable:

 Suzanne Lummis and the Wide Awake Poetics of L.A. Poetry

Years ago, back in the mid-1970s, I was at a book fair in San Francisco and I began talking with another poet-editor-publisher, J. Rutherford Willems, who ran Isthmus Press, about what it meant to operate a small press and he said, “Well, I am a cultural worker.” I was not certain at the time that one could volunteer for that job, but it has proved to be an accurate rubric to describe the bodhisattvas of contemporary literature, those who care about more than their own careers. It’s no small miracle when a poet comes along whose ambitions for the communities of poets she or he lives in the midst of exceed the aspirations that that poet has for her or his own writing. It’s even more miraculous when that poet goes on to produce poems that merit a place of canonical memory. In exemplifying that selflessness that has still enabled her to mature as a writer with a distinct, singular voice, Suzanne Lummis has pulled off the doubly improbable.

Specifically, in the final two decades of the past century, her work as the founding director of the Los Angeles Poetry Festival was crucial in nurturing the development of a variety of scenes in the Los Angeles area. This spring, in the second decade of this century, she has edited an anthology, Wide Awake, that demonstrates how many new poets have come up through the ranks in the past 30 years. This is not her first anthology; Grand Passion (1995) served as her initial survey of the impact that her festival had in integrating a younger generation of poets with the core of the L.A. poetry scene of the 1970s.

Such a grasp of several generations of poets would seem possible only if one had a grand design for one’s life, and such appears to be the case. Born in 1951, Suzanne Lummis wasted little time in deciding on her vocation. According to her bio note in Grand Passion, she was nine years old when “she alarmed her friends and family by announcing she intended to become a poet.” Subsequently, Lummis added, “all worst fears were realized,” fears it should be added that were compounded by also adding playwrighting and acting to those ambitions. Though she won much praise as a playwright, and her acting as a member of the theatrical troupe, Nearly Fatal Women, alongside Laurel Ann Bogen and Linda Albertano, retains an impeccable timing, her enduring legacy will be her own poetry within the context of her splendid work in the community. Not the least of her contributions has been the consistency with which her poems have amplified the poetics of Stand Up poetry, a school that has its roots in Los Angeles County, all the way from Long Beach at its southern border to Hollywood and the San Fernando Valley.

Not everyone here tonight may realize exactly how much our poetry is starting to get critical attention. Most recently, Laurence Goldstein, who has taught at the University of Michigan for over 40 years, has written an entire book devoted to poems about Los Angeles, and we who live and work here are acknowledged throughout as superb writers. It is no accident that Laurence Goldstein leads off his introductory remarks by quoting an entire poem by Suzanne Lummis and giving her comic vision of L.A. a deeply appreciative close reading. It is one thing for her friends and peers in Los Angeles to praise her work. To find her singled out in a book such as Goldstein’s Poetry Los Angeles or to find her featured in a recent edition of the New Yorker indicates that we have chosen well this year. Indeed, Professor Goldstein’s praise of Suzanne’s latest anthology sums up exactly why we are here tonight. Both in her own poems and in the poems she nominates with her own discerning eye and ear for enduring poetry, Suzanne “constantly surprise(s) and enchant(s) the contemporary reader and bring(s) glory to the City of Angels.”

It is, therefore, for Suzanne Lummis’s accomplishments as a risk-taking poet and performer of poetry, an extraordinary teacher of poetry, and a canonically-impacting editor and cultural worker that we have gathered to honor her tonight. With applause worthy of these contributions, please summon to this stage the recipient of this year’s George Drury Smith Award, Suzanne Lummis.

— Bill Mohr

Occasionally a poet comes along whose ambitions for the communities of poets she or he lives in the midst of seem to exceed the aspirations that one might have for one’s own writing. Suzanne Lummis has exemplified that selflessness. Her work as the founding of the Los Angeles Poetry Festival  was crucial in nurturing the development of a variety of scenes in the Los Angeles area in the decade after my anthology, Poetry Loves Poetry, was published. This spring she has edited an anthology, Wide Awake, that demonstrates how many new poets have come up through the ranks in the past 30 years. This is not her first anthology; Grand Passion (1995) served as her initial survey of the impact that her festival had in integrating a younger generation of poets with the core of the L.A. poetry scene of the 1970s (Ron Koertge, Charles Bukowski, Amy Gerstler, Jack Grapes, Eloise Klein Healy, John Thomas, Holly Prado, Harry Northup, Wanda Coleman, Kate Brabverman, Michael C. Ford, Aleida Rodriguez, Jim Krusoe, and Gerald Locklin).

Born in 1951, she wasted little time in deciding on her vocation. According to her bio note in Grand Passion, she was nine years old when “she alarmed her friends and family by announcing she intended to become a poet.” Subsequently, Lummis added, “all worst fears were realized.” By this point, in fact, she has compounded those fears by also adding playwrighting and acting to those ambitions. Though she won much praise as a playwright, and her acting as a member of the theatrical troupe, Nearly Fatal Women, retains an impeccable timing, her enduring writing will be her poetry and it is for her accomplishments as a poet, a teacher of poetry, and an organizer of the multi-faceted poetics of those living in Los Angeles that she will be awarded the George Drury Smith Award at the Church in Ocean Park in Santa Monica this coming Sunday, April 12, starting at 5 p.m. This event sold out last year, so if you wish to attend, go to the Beyond Baroque website and grab a ticket on eventbrite.

If you can’t make it to Sunday’s event, then consider dropping by Beyond Baroque and listening to her read at 8 p.m. on Saturday, April 11.

For those who are coming to this blog for the first time, I am appending my commentary on her poem that appeared in the New Yorker magazine last fall.

Bill Mohr’s blog – posted November 9, 2014

The first time I had any contact with Suzanne Lummis was a short letter passed on to me by Lenny Durso, the last of the three original owners of Intellectuals & Liars Bookstore to be holding out against the onslaught of Crown Books. Suzanne was looking for venues to give a poetry reading; unfortunately, I & L was on its last legs and so she never read there. At that time, she was collaborating with a songwriter, as well as working on plays and doing some acting. Her versatility and talent intrigued me and I was pleased to include her in my second anthology of Los Angeles poets, “Poetry Loves Poetry” (1985). Suzanne has gone on to become one of the major literary activists in Los Angeles during the past thirty years. She has edited or co-edited a series of anthologies, including the first thin volume of “Stand Up” poetry as well as a subsequent collection, “Grand Passion.” In addition, she is co-editing a new anthology of Los Angeles poets to be published with the Beyond Baroque imprint in 2015.

As a poet, she has not gotten anywhere near the attention that she deserves. Her first full-length collection, “In Danger,” was more than strong enough to expect that other presses would have solicited the next manuscript. Instead, her work has languished in that peculiar zone of incomprehensible marginality that frequently seems to be the birthright of many poets working in Los Angeles. Nevertheless, her writing has continued to gain widespread respect; in fact, as a successor to the wonderful poet, Eloise Klein Healy, Suzanne Lummis would have been my choice for the second poet laureate of Los Angeles.

Finally, though, 15 years after “In Danger” was published, her second substantial collection has been published. “Open 24 Hours” won a contest sponsored by Blue Lynx Books and the book is now available at Beyond Baroque Bookstore as well as the on-line outlets. Suzanne has just had another break-through occasion, too, in having a poem appear in “The New Yorker.” On one level, of course, such a standardized level of accomplishment is not something that changes my opinion of her writing, which I would respect no matter if she collected 184 rejection letters in a lifetime of submitting to that magazine. On the other hand, she should be justifiably proud of getting printed there. If Rae Armantrout feels comfortable about having a poem in “The New Yorker,” then why shouldn’t the rest of us lounge by its poolside, too? Rae’s poem, “Before,” which appeared in a mid-December, 2013 issue, is worth looking up.

Suzanne’s poem, “How I Didn’t Get Myself to a Nunnery,” which appears in the November 3rd issue, is probably the best “response” poem to one of my favorite poems of all time, “Dimanches,” by Jules LaForgue. The poem comes close to being an ekphrastic rendition of a teenage wasteland, and I suppose part of its appeal to me was how the landscape caught all the dreariness of Imperial Beach, the border city I had the misfortune to spend my adolescence in. LaForgue’s poem opens with an epigraph from “Hamlet” that points to the invocation of Ophelia’s fate that his poem makes use of. “Let her not walk in the sun,” Hamlet advises Polonius. As for walking in the rain, LaForgue picks up an impressionist paintbrush for his nine couplet poem, which begins and concludes with the same line, “Le ciel pleut sans but, sans que rien l’émeuve.” In between, yet one more frail young woman joins what Lummis calls “the season of self-drowned maids”:

Une qui n’a ni manchon, ni fourrures
Fait, tout en gris, une pauvre figure.

Et la voilà qui s’échappe des rangs,
Et court ! Ô mon Dieu, qu’est-ce qu’il lui prend

Et elle va se jeter dans le fleuve.
Pas un batelier, pas un chien Terr’ Neuve.

In contrast with the melancholy despair of LaForgue anonymous suicide, Lummis’s protagonist is a survivor. Her poem opens:

That girl they found ensconced in mud and loam,
she wasn’t me. Small wonder, though, they jumped.

A number of things happen here that have the touch of a chess master handling the opening gambit and its and counter-moves, not the least of which is how the diction and colloquial syntax pull the reader close for a moment of sneaky intimacy. The voice is more reflective than one might find on a dramatic stage, and yet what’s at stake is equally compelling. The use of blank verse in a nine-line stanza (but without any Spenserian rhyme scheme) is impressive. I particularly admire the spondee of the third foot of the second line and would argue that this accentual nuance (SMALL WONder) is exactly what underscores the irony trembling throughout the poem. That spondee, in turn, can only be fully appreciated if one notes that the placement of the caesura in the poem’s first line is not necessarily in the “obvious” place (after “found”). The fact that there is not a comma after “found” is a clue that the caesura’s placement is more open to interpretation than the naive reader might think.

That girl they found ensconced in mud and loam,

she wasn’t me. Small wonder, though, they jumped.

If the caesura is placed after “ensconced,” one magnifies the sense of a fateful anticipation being fixed in certainty, as opposed to the counterpunch of the opening of the second line: “she wasn’t me.” In other words, the sense of displacement in the narrative gets underscored by the spot, in the first line, where the hemidemisemiquaver of an internal pause gazes inward at itself.

I have my doubts that anybody who wrote to Suzanne to congratulate her on the poem commented on her metrical tactics, but if Suzanne has brought her knowledge and skill to the task, then it deserves some measure of specific commentary. As is often the case, I wish I had more time to extend my analysis. This is merely a start on her poem’s subtle effects. I urge all of you to turn to it with ears wide open.

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/11/03/didnt-get-nunnery

— Bill Mohr

Topanga Canyon was the northernmost outpost of Venice West back in the 1950s, a refuge created in particular by Wallace Berman. Over the years, I met a few people who lived there, but never became familiar with the community. The closest I came to spending time there was when I hiked in Topanga State Park, though I recollect those walks with great fondness. As a tribute to that period in my life, which I shared with Cathay Gleeson, I will be donating a copy of “Holdouts” as a prize to a poetry contest being held by the “Topanga Messenger,” a newspaper that serves the Topanga residents.

TOPANGA MESSENGER POETRY CONTEST

 The  Rules—Submissions are due on or before June 1, and winners will be announced in the July 2 issue. Please send two unpublished poems (no epics, please) to editor@topangamessenger.com. All copyrights revert to the owner upon publication.

First, Second and Third prizes, are as follows:

First Prize: $25 and Rick Lupert’s latest book, “The Gettysburg Undress:  Poems from Gettysburg, PA, Washington, DC, Richmond, VA, Baltimore, MD., and Environs.”

Second Prize: “Holdouts: The Los Angeles Poetry Renaissance 1948-1992,” by Bill Mohr (University of Iowa Press, 2011), his account of Los Angeles’s poetic communities.

Third Prize: “Madness, Rack and Honey,” by Mary Rueffle, a finalist for the 2012 National Book Award.

Jurors: Rick Lupert (poetrysuperhighway.com), Jean Colonomos and Topanga Library Manager Oleg Kagan.

The Prompt: A Poem of Place—Topanga Canyon is unique in Los Angeles, a refuge for artists in the ‘60s that has yet to shed its bohemian enclave reputation. (Nor should it.) When you visit, you know you are there. You may find comfort in that; or you may feel an itch to retreat to something more familiar. Perhaps you feel the same about your home or a particular place. Write a poem of place. It can be a place you love and are supremely comfortable in, or the complete opposite. Speak to the unique identity of that place, even if that identity is exclusive to your perception of it. You can paint a complete picture, or hone in on a minute detail. Be brave, be funny. Show us your Topanga. Take us to that place.

Entry Fee: None.

A special double issue (#3 and 4) of MILK magazine has just been published. The contributors include:

Alexander Adams
Margaret Atwood
Amiri Baraka
Marvin Bell
Rick Benjamin
Robert Bly
George Bowering
Charles Bukowski
Billy Childish
Andrei Codrescu
Billy Collins
Sandra Cisernos
Norman Dubie
Stephen Dunn
Martin Espada
Edward Field
S.A. Griffin
Donald Hall
Jack Hirschman
Erica Jong
Ron Cortege
Ted Kooser
Joanne Kyger
Michael Lally
Ursula Le Guin
Philip Levine
Gerald Locklin
Michael McClure
David Meltzer
William Mohr
Andrew Motion
Carol Muske-Dukes
Joyce Carol Oates
David Ossman
Alicia Ostriker
Rochelle Owens
Robert Pinsky
Doren Robbins
Kay Ryan
Anne Stevenson
Robert Sward
James Tate
Natasha Trethewey
Gary Soto
Fred Wah
Diane Wakoski
Charles Webb
Ruth Weiss
C.D. Wright

The line-up might remind some people of a table of contents for a volume of BEST AMERICAN POEMS OF THE YEAR, except that I suspect that the poems in this issue of MILK will be better than most of the volumes of BAPY. The problem with BAPY is that all too often the poems that get chosen could not be considered the best poems published in that year by anyone other than the editors. When I open BAPY at random, I frequently encounter a poem that I would have rejected back in the days when I edited Momentum magazine. Such poems would never have seen print, if I had had any say in it. But I no longer determine such matters, and so “name brand” editing leads to mediocre poems by  “name” poets racking up yet another canonically affirming “credit.”

I look forward to getting a copy of MILK and reading the choices made by Abel Debritto and Joshua Johnson. It’s obviously a selection of poets who are in old age, or getting close to it. Two of the poets (Philip Levine and Charles Bukowski) who were born in the 1920s are now dead, but others such as Robert Bly and Edward Field, are still active. A substantial plurality was born in the 1930s or early 1940s, and only a handful qualify as first-wave baby boomers (born between 1947 and 1955). The average age must be somewhere around 70 years old. What is most remarkable is how a half-dozen of the poets in this issue, including Doren Robbins, Gerald Locklin and myself) occupy a very odd and marginal niche within this list of canonically familiar names. Along with Charles Webb, Ron Koertge, Carol Muske-Dukes and the late Charles Bukowski, we represent an unusual number of contributors from Los Angeles to a volume of this kind. Perhaps, indeed, Los Angeles as a referent is losing its place in the batting order of the quadruple whammy invoked by the late Wanda Coleman in her famous mantra (“a black woman poet from Los Angeles). That Laurence Goldstein’s POETRY LOS ANGELES is getting some serious critical attention from Stephen Burt in a recent issue of MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW is one indication that my analysis in HOLDOUTS was not a case of special pleading, but merely the first in the oncoming wave of respectful commentary.

You can order a paperback copy of this special issue of MILK for $12.00. Write for ordering details to Bill Roberts at milk@bospress.net.

I first met Mark Weiss in San Diego, where he was running a small press project called Junction. His vast knowledge of poetry, amplified by his ability to translate the work of poets from a wide variety of Spanish-speaking countries, has only continued to accumulate yet more layers of insight into our common journey. I received a note from him today announcing that he has a new book out, and if the entire book is as vibrant as the poetry in the first section, then the 50,000 people who still read poetry in this nation need to make room on their bookshelves for another “must-have” volume. I felt truly fortunate this morning to open up my e-mail and to find the link to the first 20 pages of poetry in “As luck would have it.” “Gravity / is a cruel instructor,” Mark reminds us, but the incorruptible kindness of Mark Weiss’s subtle lyricism redeems those tough landings. I look at my book case these days and ask myself how many of these books I would want to take with me to a room in an old age home, there to keep me resolute company. Mark’s books belong to that select group.

Here’s the link to the first section:

http://www.shearsman.com/ws-public/uploads/223_mark-weiss-as-luck-would-have-it-sample.pdf

Mark reminded me in his e-mail that all of us can orrder from the usual suspects, on both sides of the Atlantic, or from Shearsman.com

Mark Weiss – As Luck Would Have It

Paperback, 116pp, 9x6ins, £9.95 / $18

“This is a barefoot poetry, almost in the very oldest Asian sense of that phrase, a poetry of voice & body that recognizes that even body-language has accents, which surely it does. The eye is keen, the humor self-deprecating. Mark Weiss has reached that point on life’s mesa where forgiveness (to oneself as well as others) may well be the most important of gestures. A book to make you glad to be in the world.”

—Ron Silliman