Category Archives: Books

Books

California Poets and the Academy of American Poets

January 1, 2014 – 10:07 am

Wednesday, January 1, 2014

The Academy of American Poets maintains a website that dispatches a state-by-state breakdown of poets. In addition to California’s current poet laureate, Juan Felipe Herrera, five other poets receive marquee billing as featured poets: Allen Ginsberg, Adrienne Rich, Robert Duncan, Lyn Hejinian, and Gary Snyder. Thirty-four other poets are also listed into two evenly-divided, parallel columns. This page can be found at:

http://www.poets.org/state.php/varState/CA

I have not been able to determine what guidelines were at work in the choice of poets delegated to California.  In terms of the progenitors of legacy, two of the poets (Robinson Jeffers and Edwin Markham) have been dead for over a half-century. Another pair (Kenneth Rexroth and Richard Brautigan) died around 30 years ago, while the two poets most associated with Black Sparrow Press (Charles Bukowski and Wanda Coleman) are now both also deceased. Ginsberg, Rich, Gunn, and Duncan have all passed away, too. In total, one-fourth of the poets on AAP’s list of California poets are no longer alive, which is not a problem at all as long as the list of the living poets demonstrates the links between the past and the present.

Unfortunately, the absences are prolific: who at AAP decided to exclude Michael McClure, Amy Gerstler, and Rae Armantrout from this list? Or Ron Silliman, Michael Lally, and Paul Vangelisti? Or Jack Grapes, Suzanne Lummis, and Eloise Klein Healy? Or Gail Wronsky, Sarah Maclay, and Holly Prado? Or Neeli Cherkovski, Jack Hirschman, and Harry Northup? The erasure of all five of these trios is beyond comprehension. The list of vigorous trios could go on and on…. Lewis MacAdams, Leland Hickman, Dennis Phillips; Michael Hannon, Brooks Roddan, Amy Uyematsu; Douglas Messerli, Michael Davidson, Diane Ward;  Scott Wannberg, S.A. Griffin; Marisela Norte. Far too many poets on this list, on the other hand, have only a superficial connection with the state. Heather McHugh’s most salient connection to California is that she was born in San Diego, and while she taught briefly at UC Irvine and Berkeley at various points, what exactly is it that would justify her association with California? This has nothing to do with the quality of McHugh’s poetry; I would be just as happy to attend a reading by her as McClure, Gerstler, or Armantrout. Perhaps, though, one of the reasons I find the AAP’s delegation of McHugh to California so puzzling is that I’ve never heard her read, whereas I’ve heard the other trio just cited read on multiple occasions. In other words, those poets are “local” enough to have given a multitude of readings, and I’ve been fortunate enough to hear them several times.

AAP’s website on California amounts to an anthology that reflects more ignorance than knowledge. It’s not so much little knowledge that’s the danger at work here, but a belittling knowledge. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the trios of poets I listed as missing from the list have largely been associated with the small press movement. In general, their books of poems have not been published by university presses, but by individuals unaffiliated with institutional largesse and privilege. Ultimately, the exclusion of the poets I have listed serves to reinforce a hierarchy of American poetry that pretends that cultural capital is not always already at work in canon formation.

AAP’s list is not without usefulness, however. It would be possible to descry a sense of the relationship between poet and region by considering the careers and writing of a dozen or so living poets in AAP’s list (Kim Addonizio, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Harryette Mullen, Robert Hass, Brenda Hillman, James McMichael, Philip Levine, James McMichael, Carol Muske-Dukes, Jane Hirshfield, Gary Soto and David St. John). If a critic undertook such a project and got it published, the key question would involve its usefulness to the next generation of poets. How much would a young poet who wanted to move to California learn from such a book? By extension, in fact, how well would an anthology of AAP’s California poets actually prepare a woman or a man for the ground level conditions of being a young poet in California in 2014?

Of course, it’s not just California that suffers from East Coastal Shelf Syndrome, where the rest of the country falls off the radar screen one hundred miles west of Philadelphia. One only has to go to Minnesota’s site and look at the list of poets and wonder how Jim Moore’s name never came up during discussions at AAP on who should be included in that state’s roster. The dismaying part of all of this is the degree to which a complacent version of “normality” is at work in the AAP’s website. The Academy of American Poets holds fast to the domain of its name: it is primarily interested in poets whose social investment has been institutionally granted a sense of cultural entitlement. One can only wonder how long it will take AAP to develop the literate discipline required of anyone aspiring to do curatorial work.

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Books Poetry

“Gaze” — Christopher Howell

December 10, 2013 – 10:04 am

Tuesday, December 10, 2013

Christopher Howell’s Gaze  (Milkweed Editions, 2012)

I once heard Richard Kostelanetz propose, at an event at the Bowery Poetry Club in NYC, a guideline for determining the stature or significance of a poet: someone who has several memorable poems in addition to the title poems of his or her books. Christopher Howell’s Gaze certainly meets the standard of having poems that match or exceed the quality of the title poem. In particular, “The Mystery of Names” is one of the best poems I’ve read in a long, long time. It’s almost eerie how the first half of the story-line of that poem catches and blends together a series of experiences that will be very familiar to most readers: a new year’s eve party, sleeping over at a friend’s house. Reading “The Mystery of Names” is almost like a dream-like, deja vu experience, out of which an epiphany flows which takes one’s breath away, and then restores it.

Although Howell’s poem has nothing in common with the structural form of the blues, “The Mystery of Names” similarly encapsulates so much knowledge of the fundamental conditions of human consciousness that it accomplishes that rare feat of arousing and satisfying one’s craving for wisdom; in other words, it attains a resemblance of universality. It does this without any pretension whatsoever or posing in the manner of Rilke. Instead, the quiet candor of its subtle transitions enables a reader to trust the poem completely. The visionary restraint of this poem is nothing short of astonishing. Not many young poets, even as they ripen towards their mid-30s, can realize how many years one has to work to perfect the skills that Howell displays in “The Mystery of Names.”  For once, I’m grateful to be old enough to begin to apprehend the full measure of a poem on this scale.

There are, of course, other very substantial poems in “Gaze,” such as “The Long Arm of the Lake,” with its audaciously blunt conclusion, but “Mystery of Names” is a mouth-dropper. The first time I read it, I had to put the book down and just walk away and let it flow in and out and around me, and then back into me again. I only needed to read it once for that to happen; it just kept floating alongside me for the next couple days. It was that stunning.

Over the years, I have not seen an abundance of anthologies with Howell’s poems, an omission that needs to be rectified. He has published ten books, so one would expect more visibility for a poet who has won two NEA fellowships and had several Pushcart Prize credits. One major obstacle to wider recognition is that his predominant publishers are considerably west of Pittsburgh. I’m happy that Milkweed Editions has made his poetry part of their booklist. One of the poets long championed by Milkweed, Jim Moore, has long been one of my favorite American poets. At this point, I can’t think of too many readings that would be much better than hearing Jim Moore and Chris Howell back to back. Come to think of it, one could build a very interesting poetry festival around those two poets.

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Books Performance Poetry

L.A. Poets: 1950 – 2013

December 9, 2013 – 10:16 am

Monday, December 9, 2013

Laurel Ann held her annual holiday party for her workshop students and a few of her oldest friends yesterday. Dylan Thomas’s recording of “A Child’s Christmas in Wales” regaled us as a ritual opening of the occasion that never wears out the jostling oscillations of its lyric impetus. This year, I heard how the words “distant” or “distance” appear several times in the story, which made the final chord of “close and holy darkness” all the more resonant.

Towards early mid-afternoon, when many of her guests had departed with their “secret santa” gift exchange (Amelie Frank being the happiest of that cluster, and Thom almost equally delighted), Laurel Ann asked if I had heard the news about Suzanne’s book of poetry. “You mean her book that Red Hen’s putting out a couple years from now?” “No,” said Laurel. “Suzanne won the Blue Lynx poetry prize and her book will be out in September.” I was delighted to hear this news, as I knew from a phone conversation with Suzanne how much a full-length book was needed as a way of clarifying her distinctive blend of “stand up” and “noir” poetics. I first heard of Suzanne shortly after she arrived in Los Angeles. She wrote to Intellectuals & Liars Bookstore in Santa Monica and asked for a reading, but the store was closing up. I don’t remember at this point where I first heard her read, but her poems impressed me immediately and she easily earned a spot in “Poetry Loves Poetry” (1985).

I hope that “Open 24 Hours” secures some significant and much deserved critical attention for Suzanne’s poems. One problem will be that reviewers will be unlikely to have a copy of her first full-length book, “In Danger,” to use as a point of comparison. Any book that costs over $30 to buy a used copy of on Amazon is obviously out of print, so unless a reviewer is living near one of the 85 libraries in the United States that have a copy of it, she or he is going to be at a wretched disadvantage in calculating the importance of Suzanne’s new volume.

The lack of willingness on the part of many libraries (including CSU Long Beach’s) to sustain any semblance of interest in contemporary poetry remains one of the great scandals of American culture. The reality is that many living writers have better personal libraries of contemporary poetry than most public libraries. One can only hope that Suzanne’s book get enough attention to merit a second and third printing and thereby ends up on enough private bookshelves to make future reviews of her poetry more knowledgeable about its trajectory. The sad truth is that I just checked “World Cat” and it does not appear that Lynx House has any more luck in getting its titles by poets into libraries than Heyday Books. Lou Lipsitz, whose early book “Cold Water” remains one of my favorites from 40 odd years ago, had a recent title come out from Lynx House, “If This World Falls Apart”; only 88 libraries pop up on the World Cat listing.

Laurel graciously allowed Linda and me to make use of her apartment as a way-station during the late afternoon. Mel Weisburd had invited me to attend his presentation at Beyond Baroque yesterday, which had its starting time inexplicably moved from 7 p.m. to 8 p.m. (Even more odd was how Michael C. Ford’s event with Phoebe MacAdams and Renny Golden found itself upstairs at the same time.) Despite the late start, Mel’s slide show attracted an audience of about 30 people, not all of whom were close to his age. Of the younger people who heard off-hand comments about Bert Meyers’s tendency to borrow people’s books without permission, I wish to thank Robert Herrick for introducing himself to me in the Beyond Baroque bookstore, just after I purchased a copy of Stefi Weisburg’s “The Wind-Up Gods.” He mentioned having gone to Susan Wiggins’s acupuncture clinic as a result of reading about it in my blog. This is the first time that I’ve actually had a sense that someone I didn’t know was actually making use of this late-blooming foray into an electronic diaspora. I was delighted to hear Stefi read Bert Meyers’s poem, “L.A.,” which remains a classic of urban remonstration. Most of Mel’s talk covered ground that was very familiar to me, though I had never seen many of the photographs he showed. It was a pleasure to hear Gene Frumkin’s work talked about with affection and respect and I only wish there had been time to talk more about Alvaro Cardona-Hine.

Yesterday was the 33rd anniversary of John Lennon’s death. For some reason, I never thought about the overlap of the date (December 8) with the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, which was regarded as a holy day of obligation in my childhood religion, Roman Catholicism. It’s a mark of how difficult it is to free oneself from early temporal cycles in that I almost always think of that religious holiday when 12/8 rolls around. It’s Lennon’s death, though, that remains a wound far more profound that the assassinations of the Kennedy brothers.

Linda and I drove home as soon as it was over, and we were both grateful that traffic was flowing well, since even so, it was past 11 p.m. by the time we turned on the heat to warm up the house before we quickly fell asleep. We had encountered over 60 years worth of poetic history, including the up-to-the-minute developments, and we were grateful for our accommodations, transient as they might be.

 

 

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Books Performance Poetry

Askew’s first L.A. reading

December 7, 2013 – 10:39 pm

Saturday, December 7, 2013

According to Phil Taggart and Marsha de la O, tonight’s reading at Beyond Baroque was the first time the magazine had organized an event in Los Angeles. They invited both contributors to the latest issue (#15) as well as past contributors to take part in today’s gathering. Laurel Ann Bogen was one of the first readers, as she had to get back home to prepare for tomorrow morning’s annual holiday party that will feature one of the year’s sweetest rituals at her residence: the playing of Dylan Thomas’s recording of “A Child’s Christmas in Wales.” Larry Colker brought along a lectern-sized xylophone that he elicited gently swooning echoes from as he recited his poem. Herb Reich read a piece that meditated on the futility of trying to comprehend musical terms by using dictionary entries; the attempt to catch the meaning of “hemidemisemiquaver” reminded me of Zeno’s Paradox, except that Herb can closer to resolving it than most philosophers. There were a number of poets I’d hadn’t heard read before: Dane Baylis, Marjorie Becker, and a young, intriguing poet named F. Albert Salinas. Many of the most familiar voices sounded better than ever: Carol Davis and Judith Pacht read fairly early on, while Amy Uyematsu and Dorothy Barresi read at the very end. Both Amy’s and Dorothy’s poems were quite good. I have heard Dorothy read fairly frequently and I always have a strong reaction one way or the other. Tonight’s poem was unusually poignant. Amy Uyematsu’s poem had been published in an earlier issue of Askew (#9, I believe) and her performance made me want to dig up that issue and read it again. My colleague-in-spirit, Gerald Locklin, read a very funny poem about his visit to the doctor’s office. It helped keep things on the buoyant side, given that the evening started with a reading of a poem by the late Kurt Brown by Marsha de la O, who also read a poem by Wanda Coleman later on in the evening. I recited Mark Van Doren’s “When the World Ends” as my contribution to the gathering. Two of my colleagues at CSU Long Beach had originally told ASKEW they would be there, but proved to be no shows. Whatever they might have read would certainly have made a fine evening even better, but Holaday Mason and Sarah Maclay (who brought along a huge contingent of students to help fill out the audience) more than made up for their absence with palpitating renditions of deeply felt lyric poems.

 

 

 

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Books

Roll Call

December 2, 2013 – 10:21 am

Monday, December 2, 2013

My second anthology of Los Angeles poets, “POETRY LOVES POETRY,” came out in 1985. I am hoping to have a reunion reading at Beyond Baroque in 2015 by the contributors to that book to mark the 30th anniversary of its publication. As part of that celebration, I hope that Sheree Levine will be willing to mount an exhibition of all the photographs of the poets that appeared in the collection’s rear section. At the time, I got some criticism from Joe Safdie for not including poetics statement in the book and instead giving that space to a portfolio of full-page portraits of each poet. In retrospect, I wish that I had done both, but at the time I was hard-pressed just to make the book happen. I still profoundly regret the absence of Scott Wannberg’s poems from PLP. That was an inexcusable lapse on my part.

The death of Wanda Coleman made me pause for a moment and realize how many poets in Los Angeles have died since PLP was published. The roll call follows; exactly half of the list (nine of 18) were poets who appeared in PLP.

Dick Barnes

Bill Bitting

Charles Bivens

Charles Bukowski

Wanda Coleman

Robert Crosson

Maria Fattorini

Bob Flanagan

Manazar Gamboa

Robert Greenfield

Joseph Hansen

Lee Hickman

Carol Lem

Steve Richmond

Peter Schneidre

Ann Stanford

John Thomas

Scott Wannberg

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Books Ground Level Conditions Performance Poetry

Wanda Coleman’s final public reading

December 1, 2013 – 7:15 pm

December 1, 2013

During the past week I received several e-mails and messages from poets about Wanda Coleman, but the one that surprised me the most was from Jax Pham, who commented that she had seen Wanda read at The Last Bookstore in downtown Los Angeles in the recent celebration of the new edition of the Norton Anthology of Postmodern Poetry. I had thought about attending that reading myself, but I was still fairly ill from a flu I caught on the return trip from New York City. Jax wrote me that Wanda’s performance at the reading was “fabulous,” which makes me regret missing it all the more. That Wanda was strong enough to take part in a public reading and give an all-out effort a month before she died is part of the reason we feel so caught off-guard by her passing.

Another poet who recently wrote me is Mae Ramirez, who is now living up in Berkeley after getting a M.F.A. at Cal State Long Beach. Mae recollected how much watching videos of Wanda perform her poetry enabled her to apprehend the pivot points of recitation. Wanda was a master of summoning the underlying rhythms of a poem and thereby making the dialogue between the images an iridescent spiral of hard-won knowledge. I am grateful that both Jax and Mae will have a poet such as Wanda to point to as they teach their students in the decades to come.

For those who are reading this blog for the first time, here is the important date to remember: Sunday, January 19, 2014; 2 p.m.; a memorial gathering for Wanda Coleman at the Church in Ocean Park; 235 Hill Street, Santa Monica. 90405.

Here are two links to other commentary on Wanda’s passing:

http://splab.org/2013/11/wanda-coleman-dead-at-67/

http://kategale.wordpress.com/2013/11/23/wanda-coleman-is-dead/

 

 

 

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Books Ground Level Conditions Poetry

Wanda Coleman; Academic Canon Formation

November 26, 2013 – 9:00 am

Tuesday, November 26, 2013

I am still in a state of begrudging acceptance that Wanda Coleman is dead. I can close my eyes and still see her at Beyond Baroque’s first site on West Washington Boulevard reading Garcia Lorca’s poem, “Green. I want you so much, green.” The Los Angeles poets had gathered to read their favorite poems by other poets and no one tipped their hands about their choices. Wanda’s choice was the most delightful one in an evening of splendid recitals.

Laurel Ann Bogen called last night and informed me that a memorial service for Wanda is planned for Sunday, January 19, 2014, at 2 p.m. at the Church in Ocean Park on Hill Street in Santa Monica.

*

Today, I am going to post what I had originally planned to insert as my entry on the day that I found out about Wanda’s death.

In my book, Holdouts, I cite Brother Antonius’s comment that that the East Coast is the canon of judgment and the West Coast represents the canon of creativity. That not much has changed since Brother Antonius (William Everson) proposed that binary was made clear to me when I was visiting Lynn McGee in Brooklyn a little over a month ago; one morning she went through her book shelves and pulled a couple dozen volumes for me to read while she went and visited a very dear friend who was in the hospital.

D. Nurske’s A Night in Brooklyn and Dean Kostos’s Rivering were the two books I’d recommend the most enthusiastically out of all the books I looked at. I have yet to get my own copies, so I can’t quote from them, but they were far better than most of the work cited and praised in Lisa Russ Spaars The Hide-and-Seek Muse, which was one of the books I spent a fair amount of time perusing. Part of the problem with Spaars’s evaluation of contemporary American poetry is that she has accepted the restrictions of her job as a reasonable compromise because it rewards her with social status within the critical realm.

“My only charge was to write about current compelling poetry for readers who are intelligent and interested in poetry but who might not necessarily be poets. The only other stipulation made by the Chronicle was that I consider for presentation poets with some sort of university or other higher education affiliation and/or who publish with a college or university press” (Spaar 11). It is the “only other stipulation” that is the central problem. In submitting to that requirement, she has announced that any poet who lives outside the domain of her employer is (by implication) someone whose writing is not compelling enough to deserve the attention of intelligent readers.

Spaar’s attitude has a term in the locker rooms of competitive athletes: trash talk. Teams will often use this kind of commentary as motivation to make the extra effort even when they are exhausted from a long season of practice and performance. Her willingness to dismiss a significant number of poets from the conversation about American poetry is not new. I met all too many academics in the 1970s who were not interested in the poets I was publishing because neither they nor I had any university affiliation.

The consequences of Spaar’s attitude lead directly to a purging of the accessible canon from the professional conversation of those who shape the anthologies used in college classrooms. As a result, students have little chance at an early stage of their development to read work that originates outside the confines of academic discourse. The dismaying part of Spaar’s and the Chronicle’s smug discrimination is not just that the poems of Scott Wannberg and Marisela Norte are not accounted for, but that their social value as cultural workers is left by the wayside.

Spaar does not even have the grace to admit in her introduction to the book that her willingness to accede to the Chronicle’s cultural immigration policy poses a predicament. I would be more in a mood to grant her some critical amnesty if she had at the least said something to the effect that her employer’s restriction would have played out like this in the early 1990s, when the late Wanda Coleman won the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize: “I’m sorry, Ms. Coleman, I cannot speak up for your writing. You are not published by a university press. Not only that, you do not have a B.A., let alone a M.F.A. Surely you understand your place in our society.”

I suppose the rules that Spaar ends up affirming as intellectually justifiable guidelines make sense when one realizes that her end goal is to be able to determine who deserves top billing in the corporate world of poetry writing. It takes slightly over two hundred pages to get to the key sentence, but Spaar’s not been doing all this reading and writing just to turn intelligent readers into committed fans of contemporary poetry. Rather, every academic critic must anoint a poet laureate; otherwise, one risks not being taken seriously. Spaar’s nomination? “Charles Wright is arguably the most significant, original poet writing in America” (Spaar 202). She’ll need more than a Chronicle article to prove that “arguably,” but it would almost be beside the point within her realm. The “blurb” has been written and has the credentials of academic citation.

All of this is not to say that I dislike the poets Spaar’s column has chosen to write about, such as Debra Allbery, Jill Bialosky, Alison Seay, Joanna Klink, Brian Teare, Ravi Shankar, Mary Szybist, Larissa Szportuk, Mary Ann Samyn, Srikaat Reddy, L.S. Klatt, Paul Legault, and Amy Neman. Of this list, I know and admire Brian Teare’s and Kate Daniels’s work and intend to take a close look at several others on this list whose work I am not yet as familiar with as I should be.

For the record, here are some of the other books I spent some time reading at Lynn’s apartment:

Jan Beatty – The Switching / Yard – University of Pittsburgh

Amy Lemmon – Saint Nobody (Red Hen)

Gerry La Femina – Notes for the Novice Ventriloquist

Joseph Millar – Blue Rust (Carnegie Mellon)

Nance Van Winckel – Pacific Walkers

Ann Lauinger – Persuasions of Fall

Elizabeth Haukaas – Leap (Texas Tech, 2009)

Kate Light – The Laws of Falling Bodies

 

Every one of these books had stronger moments than the prosaic efforts of Eamon Grennan, whose collection, Out of Sight, was very disappointing. His poems have little sense of efficient narrative and dramatic construction; his use of detail needs much more compression if his poems are ever to attract the enduring attention of readers. When Lynn returned from visiting her friend, I showed her a poem in Grennan’s book that required all of two minutes of attention to improve. Rarely has a supposedly mature poet needed so badly the firm hand of a devoted editor.

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Books Performance Poetry

Wanda Coleman (1946-2013)

November 23, 2013 – 10:33 pm

November 23, 2013

I was driving to my sister-in-law’s home in Thousand Oaks this morning to celebrate my mother-in-law’s birthday when Linda’s cell phone rang. It was Laurel Ann Bogen and I could tell from the tone of Linda’s voice that Laurel was giving her very bad news. “I’ll tell Bill as soon as we get to my sister’s house,” Linda said, and I knew for certain that the news must involve one of my poet friends. By now, anyone who is reading this blog will probably know that Wanda Coleman died yesterday (Friday, November 22, 2013), at the age of 67. Within two hours of hearing the news from Laurel, who had received a call from Austin Straus earlier this morning, a short obituary was in the on-line edition of the Los Angeles Times; later that afternoon, I read a tribute to her by Michael Lally in his blog. I didn’t get home until after 7 p.m., so I am only now getting a chance to record some of my memories of Wanda, who was one of the first poets I was to publish on a regular basis back in my early days as an editor and publisher.

I don’t actually remember the first time I met her, but by the time I published her for the first time in Momentum magazine, she had also read in the reading series I was in charge of at the Century City Playhouse on Pico Boulevard. The first issue of my magazine, Momentum, had come out in the spring, 1974, and among the manuscripts to come in for consideration for the summer issue was a poem entitled “Mad Dog Black Lady, Frothing” by Wanda Coleman. I’m not certain if this was her first published poem. According to the Poetry Foundation’s website entry on her, she had had a short story published in 1970, but her contributor’s note to the second issue of Momentum mentioned nothing about previous publications. Two years later, the only magazines she listed for her credits were Bachy, Mt. Alverno Review, and issues two and four of Momentum. In other words, Lee Hickman, Michael C. Ford and I seem to have been the only editors in the United States willing to speak up for a thirty-year-old African-American poet in Los Angeles. Fortunately, our support proved enough to help convince John Martin, the publisher of Black Sparrow Press, to publish a chapbook of her poems in 1977. Two years later, Martin published a full-length collection, the title poem of which had first appeared in Momentum magazine in 1974, and she slowly began to attract an audience outside of Los Angeles.

Wanda went on to win several prizes and awards, including a National Endowment for the Arts grant, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. She never got the critical acclaim she deserved, however. I once asked Aldon Nielsen why Wanda Coleman did not get more attention and he responded, “Wanda is a difficult case.” Our conversation was cut short by the need for each of us to get to the next panel, but I hope some day to have a chance to hear Aldon elaborate on that response. I suspect that some of the problem remains rooted in the complex tangle of race-sex-class-genre-regionality that I quoted Wanda as saying about her predicament as a writer in Holdouts:

My poverty level steadily climbs. I pay blood for everything. Open my pages and read my bleed: the essence of racism is survival; the primary mechanism, economics. The power to have is the power to do. I, black worker “womon” poet angelena, disadvantaged first by skin, second by class, third by sex, fourth by craft…., fifth by regionality.

(“Clocking Dollars,” African Sleeping Sickness, 1990. 218)

 

Any one of these disadvantages could well overwhelm a poet who had less determination than Wanda. If she found comrades in Los Angeles, it was in large part because determination was about all we had in our favor. She stood out, though, not only for her indefatigable commitment, but for her confidence that the scene she was part of was destined for eventual greatness.

“Up at Lee’s new apartment on Griffith, back in the early 80s, we watch the first documentary video tape of our maturing literary scene – another failed attempt to get any documentation on the new Southern California bards on Public Broadcasting. Before leaving I tell Lee that one day those video tapes, and the poets on them, will be very important. That we’re the generation. Like Hemingway and Gertrude, like Virginia Woolf and Bloomsbury, like Henry (Miller) and Anais (Nin), Kerouac and Ginsberg. We’re a group a movement a happening. I’m not bragging, I’m describing what I believe, the place where I’ve invested my future. Lee buries his hands deep in his pockets and goes into thoughtful silence as he walks me to my car. The night is clear, the stars twinkle, I can see the observatory from where we stand.

“I’ve never thought of us quite that way, Wanda.”

I’m surprised and not sure I believe him. I’d always assumed Lee had more ego. My laughter fills the street. “Thank about it Lee,

we’re literary L.A., baby.”

(Native in a Strange Land, 1996, 114)

If “literary L.A.” began to attract the attention of critics such as Julian Murphet, it was largely because Wanda Coleman’s writing was never less than utterly honest and candid. At the same time, her bluntness did not mute the underlying lyricism of her vision. I never tired of hearing Wanda read her poems. Did I say “read”? Her words lifted off the page with a splendid, passionate intonation that no one else I’ve ever heard can possibly match. Like all the great musicians, nothing undulates quite like the “live” performance. I am so fortunate, Wanda, that I got to hear you read so many times. How is it that I think you hear me write those words? I’ll type them out again: I am so fortunate, Wanda, that I got to hear you read so many times. In suddenly realizing I’m on the verge of needing the requital of a third line, I wonder if perhaps this is what is meant by American blues.

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Books Ground Level Conditions Military Life

The Anniversaries of Empire

November 22, 2013 – 7:50 pm

November 22, 2013

While I was in the front yard raking up leaves from the huge maple tree late this afternoon, I heard my 80 year old neighbor, Kathy, call out, “Look at the rainbow.” I glanced over my shoulder, and was much surprised to see a full arch opposite the glowing pink of the sunset. It lasted at least two whole minutes (4:47-4:48). I suppose if I were someone who believed in signs and portents, I might attribute some significance to the appearance of this rainbow. It does seem an unusual coincidence to have this rainbow appear on the 50th anniversary of JFK’s assassination, but it’s no more than a quirky conjunction. Even to categorize it in that manner, in fact, is to give it more credit than most people alive in the United States in 2013 would be able to apprehend. Of the people in Long Beach who saw this rainbow, less than twenty percent of them probably have a specific memory of where they were when they learned of Kennedy’s murder. It’s a rapidly dwindling generation of nostalgic grief.

The best books I’ve read about this event are Don Delilo’s Libra and Robert Stone’s Hall of Mirrors. Stone’s novel was published six months before the assassination, and there’s nothing in it that specifically hints at even the possibility of an attempt on a president’s life. Yet Stone’s story summons up New Orleans in the early 1960s with such palpable vividness that one can almost see Jack Ruby standing on a street corner as a nameless extra filling out a scene. Anyone who read the book from the mid-1960s on has the advantage of recognizing this retrospective cameo and the book’s vatic quality is amplified by an eerie recoiling sense of proleptic déjà vu.

The most discouraging coincidence of today’s anniversary is that the United States finds itself more enmeshed in empire mode than ever. A “security agreement” has been negotiated between Afghanistan and the United States that guarantees the continued expenditure of our nation’s wealth on a war that has no justification other than the maintenance of U.S. interests in the mineral and rare earth resources of that country. The likely Democratic candidate in 2016, Hilary Clinton, is no more likely to speak up against the occupation of Afghanistan than she was to object to Bush’s invasion of Iraq. The minimal number of people against the war in Vietnam fifty years ago had far more reason to be optimistic about the success of their movement than anyone currently dismayed by the fantasies of this nation’s military-industrial complex.

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Books Painting and Sculpture Performance Poetry

Miramar

November 17, 2013 – 9:41 am

Sunday, November 17, 2013

Last night Linda and I went to a poetry reading at the Craft and Folk Art Museum. Although we technically live in Los Angeles County, we’re so far south that Orange County is less than a score of traffic lights on Seventh Street away from us. To make the trek worth it, we left early enough to catch a few galleries on Washington Boulevard in Culver City. We especially enjoyed the paintings at the Maxwell Alexander Gallery, which has only been open for a year. If this gallery can keep the doors open, it may start giving the George Stern Gallery some serious competition. One of the paintings was not a depiction of a California or Southwest landscape, but a superb encounter by Ray Roberts with a coastal scene in Maine in which the mist and ocean-slathered rocks hunched together in the brevity of several trumpet blasts of light.

Oddly enough, Maine put in an appearance at the Craft and Folk Art Museum, too, in the form of environmentally derived sculptures by Nathalie Miebach. An old friend of ours, Larkin Higgins, was already there when we arrived and she enthusiastically recommended the soundtracks that were available at the far wall of the exhibit. Miebach’s work is a fabric-based transcription of the weather conditions in the Gulf of Maine, which then becomes the basis for a collaboration with musicians and composers. Unfortunately, we didn’t have sufficient time to spend at her show and we’ll have to make a return trip sometime in December.

The reading was well attended and MC Brendan Constantine kept the evening in good spirits with his inimitable effervescent wit. Brendan mentioned that Rick Lupert and he had first seen Mindy Nettifee reading her poetry in her mid-teens: “She had no right to be writing that well.” I’m happy to report that she’s writing better than ever and a breakthrough book is long overdue. The other readers included Brynn Saito and Bruce Snider. All three had broadsides printed of a poem or poems written in response to the exhibition on the third floor. I had a little trouble hearing Saito’s poems, though that may be due to the deterioration of my own capacity to hear, so I was happy to see her “W.W.” (“Woman Warrior”) poems printed on both sides of her card. Bruce Snider told me that the poem on his broadside, “Creation Myth,” was a new one. I look forward to sharing it with my students this coming week. He set up a sequence of “t” chords from start to finish in the poem that fastened the images to each other with startling clarity.

Several other readings took place last night in the Los Angeles area. It was a tough call about which one to attend. Beyond Baroque featured Alan Soldofsky, Carol Davis and Dean Rader; and across town, Ron Koertge and Charles Webb were reading at a bookstore. Linda and I made the right choice, though, because I got a chance to talk with Marisela Norte, who is now working at the Craft and Folk Art Museum. At first, I didn’t recognize her, which reminded me how much I depend on context to help me remember. She had worked at the Museum of Contemporary Art for so long that I couldn’t imagine her being at the counter of any other arts institution. I was abashed when she said, “Bill Mohr, don’t you recognize me?” I certainly hope to bring her to CSU Long Beach very soon to give a reading.

We’ve had two poets so far this semester: Myriam Gurba and Christopher Buckley. Myriam’s poems exemplify some of the missing links in lesbian identity formation in a film such as “Blue is the Warmest Color.” I appreciated the DIY small press spirit of Gurba’s production. One photocopied chapbook had a notation that was absolutely in the spirit of those who worked forty and fifty years ago in alternative publishing: the page read simply: “copyright and all that shit.”

Chris Buckley has launched a new magazine, MIRAMAR, which deserves your subscription money as soon as you can find enough left over after rent and food. The first issue has more good poems than any single issue of a magazine has a right to assemble in its table of contents. Gary Soto has one of his best poems in many years; Jon Veinburg, Naomi Nye, Suzanne Lummis, Richard Jackson, Laurel Ann Bogen, Greg Pape, Amy Uyematsu, Dixie Salazar, Christopher Howell, and many others contribute to an extraordinary first issue, dedicated to “old school truth and beauty.” All the contributors subtly make a case for Buckley’s choice of the lower case.

Here’s the pertinent information:

MIRAMAR

342 Oliver Road

Santa Barbara, CA 93109

Single copies: $10. 2 year subscriptions: $15.

NOTE: “Submissions are read February through August and will be given prompt attention.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

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