Category Archives: Ground Level Conditions

Ground Level Conditions Health Care

“Mega-mergers” versus Obamacare paranoia (The Health Care Crisis, Part Two)

January 21, 2016 – 9:44 am

January 21, 2016

The obsession of the right-wing with Obamacare and how the Federal government might “socialize” medicine is a long-standing resentment. One of the most popular programs administered on a national level is Medicare, but it was strongly opposed in its original formation by the Republican party and its more extreme sympathizers.

The fear of centralized control of such an intimate matter as one’s individual health has some reasonable basis. Anyone who works at a large institution knows the enormous discrepancy between the ideological claims of those who administer the institution’s programs and the actual delivery of those services. “Student success” is the mantra in higher education, but I have seen first hand how students needing classes and registered for those classes are left empty-handed. And I myself, at a critical moment in my health care between July and November, 2010, nearly died because of the bureaucratic ineptitude and indifference of my HMO medical plan; indeed, I have seen this personal experience replicated several times in the past decade and a half in my first-hand network of friends and family. The difference between the level of care announced in HMO press releases and the dilatory delivery of that care when it is needed is enough to make one highly suspicious of claims that urgent medical attention, under the thumb of HMO financial expediency, will be superior to the care that a single-payer system will deliver.

The part that I don’t understand about people’s fear of Obamacare or a single-payer system administered by the federal government is their concern about the centralization of medical power. Hey, folks – it’s already happening. All you have to do is look at the articles in newspapers about the mergers of various HMOs to understand that massive mergers of health insurers have already created a vortex of centralization that has the profit-motive as its primary engine: your health is merely an inconvenient obstacle to the maximization of that overriding urgency.

The issue of “mega-mergers” was recently the subject of a very fine article by Chad Terhune, an award-winning journalist, in the Los Angeles Times.

http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-agenda-health-mergers-20160111-story.html

This article is dated January 11, 2016, and it is merely the latest installment by a reporter with an impressive backlog of articles on the health industry crisis. It appears, however, that this will be his last article as a reporter for the Los Angeles Times. I heard recently that David Ulin is no longer with the LA Times, and I note with dismay on the bio page for Chad Terhune that “he left the Times in January 2016.” If so, the departure of two writers of the caliber of Ulin and Terhune is not a good sign for the future of that newspaper. I am deeply concerned about how the Times plans to cover the current debate on health care. To whom will this crucial assignment be given? I have substantial doubts that someone of Terhune’s exceptional caliber will replace him.

In the meantime, the question I have for conservatives who fulminate about Obamacare’s centralized control of medical plans is why the same vigorous disdain is not brought to bear on these mega-mergers. It seems, quite frankly, hypocritical to lambast Obama’s program on one hand, and then to shrug one’s shoulders with a “business-as-usual” slouch as companies interweave with one another in a winner-take-as-much-as-possible competition.

For Terhune’s biography, see:

http://www.latimes.com/la-bio-chad-terhune-staff.html?page=2&#

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Ground Level Conditions Health Care

Bernie Sanders and the Single-Payer Presidency (The Health Care Crisis, Part One)

January 19, 2016 – 10:19 am

January 19, 2016

Bernie Sanders and the Single-Payer Presidency

Part One: Memories of the Job Crisis and its Impact on the Health Crisis to Come

In recent decades, the Republican party has succeeded in large part because it has manipulated the voters who support its candidates by making promises about social issues that it has only been able to deliver on an installment plan. Symbolic victory is more prevalent than any actual effacement of the gains made by women and people of color since 1950. Conservatives often feel disregarded by the party Elites except when it comes to voting in elections.

Not to be outdone in that kind of campaigning and underperformance, the Democratic party has often talked a good game, but delivered far less than its supporters have a right to expect. In the most recent debate (Sunday, January 17, 2016) involving the two leading candidates for the Democratic nomination for President, Hillary Clinton listed jobs as her first priority. Where have we heard this before? From her husband, Bill Clinton, who ran in 1992 as someone who told us that indeed jobs would be lost to technology, but that there would be job training. And he was right. Jobs were lost, but there was no job training available to those workers in any meaningful number of programs.

Hillary Clinton would like to forget that by 1995, three years after her husband took office, jobs were being lost at an extraordinary rate, and while one can argue that things briefly got better from 1997-1999, that was only after the havoc of much unnecessary turmoil in employment. The shedding of jobs – especially union jobs – helped out his corporate sponsors immensely and devastated the day-to-day lives of workers. Bill Clinton did not care about anything other than empowering Wall Street firms. Workers were last on his list of priorities.

Hillary Clinton’s reiteration of jobs as her first priority deserves more than just the skepticism rightfully generated by the memory of her spouse’s betrayal of working people in the 1990s. One only has to look at the woeful incompetence of the Democratic party in handling the job crisis of 2007-2010 to estimate the likelihood of Hillary Clinton being a “jobs President.” Let us go back eight years and take a look at how well President Obama handled the crisis. Here is the policy statement that explains the plan:

http://otrans.3cdn.net/45593e8ecbd339d074_l3m6bt1te.pdf

“A key goal enunciated by the President-Elect concerning the American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan is that it should save or create at least 3 million jobs by the end of 2010. …. We expect the plan to more than meet the goal of creating or saving 3 million
jobs by 2010Q4. There are two important points to note, however: First, the likely scale of employment loss is extremely large. The U.S. economy has already lost
nearly 2.6 million jobs since the business cycle peak in December 2007. In the absence of stimulus, the economy could lose another 3 to 4 million more. Thus, we are working to counter a potential total job loss of at least 5 million. As Figure 1 shows, even with the large prototypical package, the unemployment rate in 2010Q4 is predicted to be approximately 7.0%, which is well below the approximately 8.8% that would result in the absence of a plan.”
(policy document dated: January 10, 2009)

That was the plan that President Obama and his team of advisors from Wall Street came up with to meet the crisis of massive unemployment. The actual outcome is that the plan did not begin to ameliorate the damage done to the economic lives of working people. By the end of 2010, the unemployment rate was 9.3 percent, not 7 percent. (http://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS14000000 )

The shortfall, as stunning as it is, hardly represents the real evil at work here. How could anyone think that the goal of resolving this crisis should be 7 seven percent unemployment? That aspiration is in and of itself a hideous, reprehensible failure of social imagination on the part of Obama and his co-conspirators from Wall Street. Of course, that Democrats would put forward a plan that they had to know in their muscle-bound brains would be completely inadequate would not be surprising to anyone who remembered Bill Clinton’s inability to deliver on job training in the 1990s. As with Bill Clinton, Obama and his cohort merely went through the motions of alleviating the catastrophic distress of working people. Nor did things get better in 2011. In September, 2011, the unemployment rate was 9 percent. The prolongation of the crisis and its cantilevering on the backs of working people reveals exactly how little those in the professional ranks of politics and social and economic policy understand ground-level existence.

And does anyone care to remember that this figure of nine percent unemployment in 2010-2011 is totally manipulated? Anyone who had despaired of finding work by the summer of 2011 was not counted. You were not unemployed, these statistics insisted. And the nightmare was only worse under the surface. How many hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people found that their unemployment benefits were insufficient and found themselves depending on relatives and friends who could barely sustain themselves? The damage done to working people during that period is at a level that those who hold positions of authority cannot imagine. They do not have enough intelligence to make that kind of empathic leap.

Bernie Sanders at least has the common sense not to make jobs his first priority. It is too late to redeem that tragic implosion. While he listed “jobs” in third place in his list of priorities, he knows that the coming crisis involves health care and that the only way to address the onslaught of health care needs of the baby boomer generation is the single-payer system. “Medicare for All,” he calls it, and in making this his anthem he brings to a complete stop a system in which generations exploit each other.

It should be noted that the baby boomer generation has subsided Medicare for the population born between 1910 and 1935. This rather large cluster of people paid very little into the Medicare system and reaped continuous coverage. By the end of this decade, it will be the turn of those born between 1946 and 1955 to receive the same benefits that their hard work provided to their elders. But will that promise be kept? Why should it be kept, especially when there are fewer people paying into it, all the while suspecting that it will not be there for them when it is their turn? I can hardly blame Gen X and the succeeding generations from being cynical. There is a tsunami of unfunded health benefits about to come due, and they are being asked to let themselves be drowned by a health care system dominated by corporate culture.

So Sanders wisely sees that the only way – the only fair way – to make sure that the promise made to the baby boom generation is kept is to provide the same level of access and care to everyone, and to provide this health care as a right. The pursuit of health is the foundation of whatever happiness we are fortunate enough to share with others. It is an inalienable right, and those who are 35 or 45 years old have as much right to it as those who are 70 or 75 years old. Health care is one of the essential critical fulfillments of social cohesion and requital. To diminish its status is to guarantee a debilitated social economy. If Sanders’s plan seems radical and daunting in its unfamiliarity to Americans, then they need to remember how badly both Democrats and Republicans handled the job crisis. They will do no better with their current plans (including Obamacare) to resolve the coming health crisis. Millions of economic lives would have been saved if Obama had acted with the boldness required in 2009. Millions of lives – literal lives, this time – are at stake, if we do not act with similar boldness in altering the health care system in the next four years.

A minority of our fellow citizens, however, would prefer to benefit from the unequal distribution of “health wealth.” This fraction of business as usual administrators has a vested interest in a system in which HMOs become “too big to fail.” Anyone can see what such a system has in mind: public money subsidizing private profits. Wall Street’s health is the only check-up they need to have an annual report on.

UPCOMING:

Part Two: The Checkmate Confrontation of Corporate Health and the Single-Payer System

Part Three: The “Life” Panels

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Biography Ground Level Conditions Performance Poetry Teaching

Jack Grapes remembers Bob Flanagan, too

January 5, 2016 – 10:49 am

January 5, 2016 — The day after the 20th anniversary of the death of Bob Flanagan

In 1983, the Reader, Los Angeles’s Free Weekly (as it formally called itself) ran a long review of books by Jim Krusoe, Bob Flanagan, and myself. One common feature that linked us received very little notice in an otherwise very fine article; all three had had our first major collections of poetry published by Bombshelter Press, which was edited by Jack Grapes and Michael Andrews. Grapes and Andrews had met, if recollection serves me correctly, because one of my first poet friends, Dennis Ellman, mentioned at a Beyond Baroque workshop that he was going to be giving a reading at a place in Hermosa Beach called the Alley Cat. Jack Grapes decided to attend the reading, met Michael Andrews there, and the two launched a series of anthologies featuring the poets who read at the Alley Cat under the imprint of Bombshelter Press. In addition to publishing books, Grapes and Andrews also edited and published a magazine called ONTHEBUS that featured the work of poets who might be considered the progeny of The Outsider magazine in New Orleans back in the early 1960s.

Grapes grew up in New Orleans, where he had the good fortune to be a young poet when The Outsider was one of the few magazines with enough editorial vision to make the category suggested by its title a widely inclusive term instead of an elitist form of marginality. There were not many handsome literary magazines back then that regarded poets such as Langston Hughes, Charles Bukowski, Allen Ginsberg, Russell Edson, and Marvin Bell as part of their roster. Grapes himself was one of the youngest – if not the youngest – poet to have a featured portfolio of his writing in The Outsider. In the late 1960s, Grapes moved to Los Angeles in pursuit of an acting career, but it turned out that the city and the region also served as a refuge for an enormously diverse assemblage of poets who did not easily fit into any of the schools or movements that got the most critical attention during the last three decades of the 20th century.

Grapes himself went on to become the literary equivalent of a multi-instrumentalist in music. He not only acted, he became a very accomplished playwright; his play, Circle of Will, pulled together more strands of contemporary theater than almost anything I’ve ever seen, with the possible exception of Marat/Sade. He also worked as a poet-in-the-schools for many years, an experience he refers to in a letter he wrote me yesterday after reading my post about Bob Flanagan. I have secured Jack’s permission to reprint a portion of his letter as a way of giving readers another glimpse at aspects of Bob’s life that made him one of the most remarkable artists to have lived in Los Angeles.

Dear Bill:

This is a very readable account of a poet who deserves more critical attention. That his performance art and singer/songwriting and other artistic endeavors seemed to widen the focus on his art to people’s inability to appreciate the specifics of just one part of it — his poems — is a sad commentary on how we do the same to other artists. And that, of course, is a larger question, indeed, in how we WANT artists to follow in some kind of expected path (Brando, for instance), and when they don’t, we assume they’ve fizzled or wasted their talents. I saw Bob’s show at the Santa Monica museum, and I attended his “lecture” retrospective on it a year or so later, which included slides and video, as well as his commentary, and it’s one of the most amazing artistic experiences I have ever witnessed in my life. This is not hyperbole. In some ways, while the art installation, which lasted a month I believe (titled “Visiting Hours”), was extraordinary, Bob’s presentation a year later with slides, video, etc., was even more astonishing, because it included documentation of other’s experience as well, something I couldn’t have seen since I “visited” him in the “hospital/museum” only once, and didn’t get to see the effect the show had on others. If ever an artist’s poetry, singing/songwriting, and art were all conduits to one significant event, this was it. The question is, has anyone conflated the two and made a video documenting BOTH the month-long installation at the museum AND his “lecture/presentation” a year later, which was every bit as extraordinary as the installation.

Bob and I were great friends since we met at the Venice Poetry Workshop around 1972. He and I taught in Poetry in the Schools for several years (as did you), and he and I often taught together. I got to witness Bob in the classroom with kids, all ages. He was simply electrifying. His imagination and ability to ignite the same among his students was unequaled. The cherry on the cake of everything he ever did was an assignment he gave once in which students had to bring in an artistic representation (a painting, a sculpture, etc.) of their imagination. To give physical form to the abstraction of imagination — not something produced by one’s imagination, but a representation in abstract form OF one’s imagination — and then to see 35 kids all bringing in examples of that — to this day I shake my head in wonder at the amazement of it all. Bob was an artist, and while the body of his work may have been small compared to the larger output of others (such as Sharon Olds), Bob was an original. We shouldn’t take that word to lightly. Original. A Singularity.
— Jack Grapes

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Ground Level Conditions Poetry

New Year’s Eve: The Big One

December 31, 2015 – 11:03 am

December 31, 2015: From Long Beach to Monterey Bay to Mexico and France and Back

I will not likely spend as much time on the road in 2016 as I did in the year that is just ending. On the final day of 2015, it’s difficult to avoid reflection on such a momentous year on a personal level. Back in the decade and a half that I largely spent working as a typesetter, I would have years with one or two events equivalent to those I took part in 2015. In 1985, for instance, Poetry Loves Poetry appeared; in 1993, my spoken word recording from New Alliance Records, Vehemence, was released, and was played on Liza Richardson’s “Man in the Moon” show on KCRW. But I never had a year back then when I spent so much time on the road in the company of so many other poets. It started back in the spring when Pruebas Ocultas was published in Mexico by Bonobos Editores. In late August, I went to Mexico City to read from the book along with my translators, and from there I went to Guadalajara for a panel with Pura Lopez-Colome, and then to San Luis Potosi for a huge poetry festival with poets from Ecuador, Spain, Canada and Israel. I was the only poet from the United States asked to be part of it. In between the publication of Pruebas Ocultas and the poetry tour in Mexico, the gathering of poets I organized for CSU Summer Arts at Monterey Bay took place in July. For two weeks a score of poets from around the state had a chance to work with Juan Felipe Herrera, Cecilia Woloch, Ellen Bass, Douglas Kearney, and Marilyn Nelson. Marilyn gave an extraordinary reading at the beginning of the second week, which Cecilia and I were honored to serve as her co-readers. Juan’s and Douglas’s workshops were especially inspiring.

Two weeks on the road in Mexico and another two weeks in Monterey Bay replaced my usual summer residence in Idyllwild Arts, where I had taught a class in fiction writing for twenty years. The decision to end that portion of my teaching career after a nice round number was not easy. I miss my colleagues at Idyllwild, but the fact that it was time to move on seemed confirmed by my travels to Mexico and Monterey Bay, none of which was more than very tentatively in place when I decided to bow out of Idyllwild after 2014. I couldn’t put my suitcase and passport away, however, once school started, for in late November I went to Dijon, France, to give a plenary talk at a conference on “Modernities.” I want to thank Helene Aji, especially, for her invitation and for the welcome and accommodations provided by Fiona McMahon and Paul-Henri Giraud.

There were incredibly somber moments in the midst of all these travels, however. Linda and I left for France on the day of the notorious terrorist attacks in Paris, and our visit there took place within an inescapable realm of shocked grief. Not long after our return, the terrorist attack in San Bernardino reverberated with similar, astonished dismay. Surely a tipping point has been reached, but this is only to say that those who would harm others who are total strangers see no reason to cease their onslaught, and any hope that my generation might see an end to this madness has now perished. It would appear to be the same case with the insidious disregard for the lives of African-American citizens in this nation. The cold-blooded execution of several African-American youths in the past several years has only seemed to whet the appetite for those who believe that police officers deserve absolute immunity. The death of Tamir Rice is especially egregious and I would urge anyone who can sign a petition to secure more emphatic justice in his memory to do so. If you hesitate to do so, afraid of being placed on a list of suspected dissidents, you are not wrong to feel fearful. But read Marilyn Nelson’s “A Wreath for Emmett Till,” and ask yourself if you would have stayed silent then. If not, speak up now for Tamir Rice.

Finally, I was grateful to be able to put the finishing touches on Cross-Strokes: Poetry between Los Angeles and San Francisco, which Seismicity Editions at Otis College of Art and Design published at the very end of the year. Although Neeli Cherkovski is listed as the co-editor, I was the editor who did the bulk of the work on the book, and it would not have become a finished project without my concerted efforts over the past year and a half. Back in the early summer of 2014, the book was nothing more than a set of completely disorganized computer files that represented the nominations that both Neeli and I had made for poets to be included. In the summer of 2014, I organized the files and began the process of firming up the final table of contents. In the past six months, I spent an incredible amount of time correcting the texts and working with an admirably assiduous book designer, Rebecca Chamlee, to make the book worthy of Seismicity’s booklist. I am proud of this anthology, which serves as a complement to two earlier volumes of Los Angeles poets I edited and published under the imprint of Momentum Press.
This coming summer will be much more quiet, or so I hope. It is the first time that I will have a summer without any teaching or typesetting work taking up my time in well over 30 years. In fact, I can’t recall a summer so open to the chance of simply working on my writing since the summer of 1977. Ever the naughty pessimist, however, I can’t help but mention the extraordinary amount of minor seismic activity that has quivered throughout California the past twelve months. I wouldn’t given anyone better than even money odds about the likelihood of a major (6.2 or greater magnitude) earthquake happening in 2016. Get ready, folks. The drought that is being temporarily allayed is the least of our problems and worries.

I hope, though, we can all ride out the Big One and find ourselves still in each other’s joyful company a year from now. Happy new year to all my dear friends and readers.

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Biography Ground Level Conditions Poetry

Paul Vangelisti – 70th Birthday Party

September 19, 2015 – 4:27 pm
Nausikaa's Isle: a tribute to Paul Vangelisti
Nausikaa’s Isle: a tribute to Paul Vangelisti

Yesterday evening Linda and I attended a lovely backyard party at the same place where Paul Vangelisti celebrated his 60th birthday ten years ago. In 2005, Linda and I were living in Lynbrook, on Long Island, while I was working simultaneously at Rutger’s University in New Jersey, St. John’s University in Queens, and Nassau Community College in Garden City, New York. I spent a lot of time on trains and buses. Paul was still editing the “New Review of Literature,” to which I contributed several reviews and a chapter of my literary history of Los Angeles. Ten years later, he has yet another substantial magazine to his credit, “OR,” which put out 12 issues over six years. Many of the people who were steady contributors to both magazines were recruited by Dennis Phillips to pick out pieces of their writing that would pay homage in some way to his influence on their lives and writing. This collection of writing, “Nausikaa’s Isle,” has just been published by Postmedia Books.

Last night’s party, therefore, which probably had around 40 people by the time that “Happy Birthday” was sung, was more than an occasion to celebrate Paul’s birth; it was also a publication party for a gathering of poems, art work, and short prose pieces that bowed in Paul’s direction and said an emphatic thank you. Among the contributors who were at the party were Martha Ronk, Peter Gadol, Guy Bennett, Douglas Messerli, Barbara Maloutas, and myself. The majority of contributors, however, either live at some distance, or live only in our memories. As Phillips points out in his concise yet affectionate forward, the book opens with “Extracts” by four writers Adriano Spatola, Robert Crosson, and Amiri Baraka) who knew and worked with Vangelisti as collaborative equals when they were alive; the book then turns to those who are still on the journey as living companions.

So far I’ve only had a chance to read the work of Martha Ronk and Peter Gadol. The former invokes one of the classic literary voices of Los Angeles with intriguing excerpts from her ongoing project, “The Big Sleep.” Gadol’s “An Old Italian Saying” is one of the best pieces of short prose I’ve read in many years. A minor masterpiece. Next up in order of my plan of reading later this evening are two surprise entries by writers I’m lucky enough to call former students: a joint effort (as is all their work) by Natalija Gregorinic and Ognjen Raden, and Amy Allara.

Among those absent from the party were contributors such as Diane Ward and Lewis MacAdams, but perhaps they were ill. Paul mentioned that Rebecca Chamlee, the superb book designer who teaches at Otis, had called earlier in the day and said that she was down with the flu; Paul added that two others had subsequently left messages to say that they, too, were afflicted with some virus.
Helping to compensate for their absence were young poets such as Rachel Kaminer, and the ever steady and supportive Jacqueline Young, whose ability to keep the Graduate Writing program at Otis on an even keel for close to 20 years is a remarkable feat of dedication.

Those who live elsewhere, however, missed a splendid gathering of writers and artists, which included the photographer Don Suggs and still-life painter Gershom. Perhaps all of the absent contributors to “Nausikaa’s Isle” (including Standard Schaefer, Milli Graffi, Gilad Elbow, Norma Cole, Art Beck, Ray DiPalma, Gillian Conoley, Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum, Giulia Niccolai, George Albon, Nanni Cagnone, Luciano Mezzetta, Ersi Sotiropoulos, Polly Geller, Susi Pietri, Lucia Re, Dominic Stansberry, Sara Suzor, Avery Burns, Neeli Cherkovski, John R. Snyder, and Andrea Bursar) might still be able to gather ten years from now and celebrate Paul’s 80th birthday, though we may well have to travel to Italy to do so. The perfect excuse to make a trip there! I’m ready to buy my ticket.

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Ground Level Conditions

Caliban Chronicles #17

September 4, 2015 – 5:42 pm

Larry Smith, the editor of Caliban magazine (both in its legendary print version and in its current on-line abode that is reaching an entirely distinct generation of readers) also issues an on-line broadside commentary publication called The Caliban Chronicles. The September issue (Vol. 5, No. 1) addresses the always already racial crisis in the United States that has not abated in the least simply because an African-American is serving as the current President (aka, Commander-in-Chief of the nuclear weapons stockpile that shores up this government’s claim to empire and its spoils). Mr. Smith’s brief essay deserves our close attention, and I turn the microphone over to him, at the following link:

http://calibanonline.com/newsletter/CC17.pdf

From an e-mail sent to Larry shortly after I read Larry’s observations on the current election cycle: “Your article in the Caliban Chronicle sums it up very well. The only extended footnote I would add is about your comment concerning Reconstruction ending too soon. A couple of month ago I was thinking of the Civil War and how the decisions made by the “winning side” have continued to have a deleterious effect on this nation’s problems. In particular, it occurred to me that it was an enormous error to let the Southern States maintain their political boundaries and political rights. The rebel states should have been completely reorganized to force the white population to reconfigure their social imaginary.”
Anyone wishing to pass on their comments to me about this post or any other post in this blog can reach me at William.BillMohr@gmail.com. I realize that blogs gained a certain immediate prominence in social media about ten years ago because they allowed a dialogue to take place between the authors of the blog and their readership. I do not have the time, unfortunately, to monitor that dialogue for this blog. If that lessens the value of this blog for its readers, then so be it. That’s not what keeps me awake at nights.
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Ground Level Conditions Poetry

Eject Monterey; Insert Blanc

July 28, 2015 – 3:48 pm

Tuesday, July 28, 2015: The Return from CSU Monterey Bay; Insert Blanc’s KICKSTARTER campaign

I arrived home in mid-morning from two weeks at CSU Monterey Bay. The students were outstanding; their extraordinary group reading last Friday afternoon was fortunately recorded by Rod Bradley, as well as the staff at the theater who work with the CSU Summer Arts program, and I believe that the latter recording will eventually be posted on their web site. I posted a thank you to all the guest artists on my Facebook page, but I don’t think I can say it often enough. Ellen Bass, Marilyn Nelson, Juan Felipe Herrera, Douglas Kearney and Cecilia Woloch provided the 20 students who attended this class with a once-in-a-lifetime crash course in writing poetry. I only caught fragments of various presentations and readings, but my samplings confirmed what the students who committed themselves to this gathering repeatedly said with fervor: how did I get so lucky as to trust my hunches and go to a gathering that had no reputation other than what the poets individually brought.

Putting the class together and bringing it to fruition was a 15 month project, and I have to confess that it’s unlikely I’ll do it again, at least at the Monterey Bay site. I’m eligible to be the course coordinator again in 2017, but I’ll be turning 70 that year, and I have too many projects that still remain only half-finished; I need to give whatever time I have left to those projects. There is a possibility that I might put together a class with Cecilia Woloch that would take place in Paris, but only something on an international scale would tempt me to make the kind of effort that a summer arts course requires. It was more than worth doing, but I am truly exhausted. Nor am I the only one who found herself or himself pushed to the limits. While doing laundry late Friday night for the first time in two weeks, I began talking with one of the other course coordinators, who was getting her clothes out of the dryer. “I hit a wall yesterday,” she said. “I don’t think I could have gone one more day.” She was half my age, so I hardly feel abashed at admitting how tired I feel.

Both Cecilia Woloch and I had the good fortune to read short sets of poems on an evening of poetry with Marilyn Nelson, who knocked the crowd out with her masterpiece, “A Wreath for Emmett Till.” Cecilia and I were sitting in the wings of the stage as Marilyn read, and we could feel a palpable surge of renewed grief and sorrow for the tragedy of that young man’s murder. The fact that a slogan such as “Black Lives Matter” is still necessary to keep in emphatic circulation unlined Marilyn Nelson’s reading. The next night, Juan Felipe Herrera followed up with an equally stirring reading, and he read an imperative poem that addressed the recent slaughter in South Carolina. Ellen Bass and Douglas Kearney also gave readings to the students.

On a personal level, I felt fortunate to be able to share with the students the arrival of my book, Pruebas Ocultas, from Mexico. I went to my mailbox at the Department of English at CSULB and found a small package of copies of my book the day before I left for Monterey. It was a pleasure to read from the book to the students in the classroom, and to make that moment my first occasion of sharing my work in translation. Once again, I wish to thank Robin Myers and Jose Rico for believing in my poems and bringing me to Mexico in May, 2014, so that Bonobos Editores could learn of my writing.

During my all-out involvement in “The Poet’s Metamorphosis,” I didn’t have time to post on my blog, and one notice came to my attention during the past two weeks that I regret not having the time to post earlier. Insert Blanc Press is holding a Kickstarter campaign, and I would encourage everyone who cares about poetry outside of the academic provinces to contribute to their fund. Matthew Timmons sent me a link. Please join me in affirming a project that is every bit as important as Lee Hickman’s Temblor magazine in keeping the volcano of imagination active. Let the magma flow in turbulent skeins. Let the distant glow come closer, and then brighten, fade, and brighten again.

Insert Blanc’s kickstarter short link: http://kck.st/1LEKwtz

 

 

 

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Ground Level Conditions Philosophy Poetry

The Perfume of the Soul

June 28, 2015 – 1:11 pm

June 28, 2015

The Perfume of the Soul

I have been working on a talk I am scheduled to give in Dijon, France in November and reading with great pleasure and interest Michael Davidson’s On the Outskirts of Form: Practicing Cultural Poetics. In discussing George Oppen’s poetry, he mentions that “a number of recent books in critical theory have chronicled modernism’s ocularcentrism …. At the same time, social theorists have provided a critique of modernity’s ocularcentrism, pointing out how metaphors of seeing and sight dominate the work of philosophers and theorists from Marx’s theory of ideology as a camera obscura, Heidegger’s “Age of the World Picture,” and Bergson’s duree to Foucault’s emphasis on the panoptical gaze, to Sartre’s “regard” and Laura Mulvey’s theory of the gaze” (116-117). To limit ocularcentrism to moderism and modernity, however, is to underplay its role in Western philosophy and culture. Sight was the key sense cited by Plato in The Republic, for instance, so this privileging should hardly be limited to a contemporary rendition of “modernity.” Rather, sight’s dominance is the mark of modernity, whether we are thinking of remote modernity or the prosthetic forms that pass themselves off as the post-modern.1

It is my understanding that this emphasis upon sight has a pragmatic basis, for I read somewhere that well over two-thirds of the information our brain receives and works with is directly accessed through sight. That proportion of appetitive perception will probably not alter much in the centuries ahead, but we might be better off if we take the time to cultivate the other senses, too, in the same way that pianist must learn to play with the “weak” hand as well as the hand that ‘s inclined to take the lead. In fact, would both Plato and Heidegger have been better off emphasizing another sense, that of smell. The latter’s quarrel with the former might well have led him to a different understanding of Being if smell had been the sense to which he entrusted the fate of his soul.2

A recent prose poem of a blog entry that points to the possibilities of an epiphany based on smell can be found at: http://www.juliaharis.com/ Her entry, “Textures of the Unknown,” is a profound meditation on how the aquifers of the olfactory nourish the perfume of the soul. After reading her entry, I trusted more than ever Heraclitus’s proposition that “if all things turned to smoke, the nose would know all things.”3

 

1 In particular, the discussion in Book VI of The Republic at one point becomes a eulogy for the interwoven nature of the sun, its light, the eye and the soul.

2 Two recent articles in the Los Angeles Review of Books examine the on-going destabilization of Heidegger’s impact on twentieth century philosophy due to his affiliation with the Nazi Party in Germany.

http://lareviewofbooks.org/essay/what-to-make-of-heidegger-in-2015  What to Make of Heidegger in 2015? by Santiago Zabala (June 24th, 2015)

http://lareviewofbooks.org/review/king-dead-heideggers-black-notebooks   “The King Is Dead: Heidegger’s Black Notebooks” by Gregory Fried.

3 Michael Kincaid. There Are Gods Here Too: Readings of Heraclitus. Dickinson, North Dakota: Buffalo Commons Press, 2008, 53.

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Ground Level Conditions Poetry

Some Lamb, Some Shepherd

June 22, 2015 – 9:47 am

Monday, June 22, 2015

W.C. Fields once observed that no actor willingly goes on stage with children or animals; the likelihood of being upstaged is all but certain. This morning’s announcement of the death of Walter Scheib, whose body was found on a hiking trail in New Mexico, led me to read his blog on his website. The most recent entry is about six weeks ago, when he visited the Benioff Children’s hospital in San Francisco to spend some time baking with a young patient named Elizabeth. The new context shifts the picture of them working together to make peach-blackberry cobbler. The late poet Stan Rice wrote a book in tribute to his young daughter, who died of leukemia, entitled Some Lamb, in which Death speaks of his most recent feast. Some Shepherd, too.

http://www.walterscheib.com/

 

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Ground Level Conditions

The Massacre in South Carolina

June 18, 2015 – 10:51 am

It was a very long ride to San Diego and back to read at the Upstart Crow to a crowd of about 20 people, a couple of whom seemed to appreciate the rare chance to hear a poet from Los Angeles. Linda wanted to come along and so we couldn’t leave until after she got back from a medical appointment. Traffic by mid-afternoon made the trip down a five and a half hour haul. Nighttime freeway repair work reduced the northbound return trip to two lanes for 10 plus miles just south of San Clemente. It was past 11 p.m. by the time we got back home. I still miss Cordelia.

The news on the radio last night of a massacre in an African-American church in South Carolina by a young white man was extraordinarily disturbing. This morning I have read reports that a Facebook picture of the accused, who is now in custody, shows him wearing a jacket with patches depicting the flags of a pair of African countries when white supremacy was the rule of law in those outlaw nations. That the Confederate flag still flies above the state capitol building of South Carolina hardly seems to be a coincidence.

The time has come for someone to speak up about a larger context in which much of the recent violence against African-Americans, by both uniformed police officers as well as civilian vigilantes, is happening. To be blunt, one has to wonder how often the young man accused of this massacre heard his family, his neighbors, and friends speak of President Obama during the past six years in a manner that would suggest their preference for his assassination. It is well known that during the first two years of his first term of office, President Obama received a very high volume of intimidating threats. My guess is that the quantity of these threats delivered directly to the White House has decreased since his re-election, but that the volume of intensity felt by those who made those threats has only been amplified; and since they cannot get to their primary target, these individuals have decided to begin going after those who are vulnerable, including those at a prayer service on a Wednesday evening. To view the accused young man as an isolated individual is to miscalculate the impact of ordinary, daily conversations between those who share a festering hatred of empowered social heterogeneity. Ideological advertising is most effective when it recoils through the casual comments of those who feel dispossessed of their status as superior people.

The slaughter in South Carolina certainly brings to mind other utterly dismaying episodes of American psychosis: a young man going into a movie theater in Colorado and murdering complete strangers is an horrific event, as is the murder of a classroom of very young children and their teacher in Connecticut. The church where the massacre yesterday took place, however, is not an ahistorical space. Its original congregation goes back to the final decades of slavery in the United States. The murdered individuals included this church’s pastor, who was also an elected politician. This attack, therefore, must be categorized as part of an ongoing attempt by a significant racist faction in the United States to squelch the aspirations of African-Americans to live as equal citizens in this country. Those who are responsible for punishing the perpetrator of yesterday’s mass murder must realize that justice will not be done until all those who indirectly contributed to the murderer’s motive come forth and admit their complicity. The question is: what would constitute redemptive repentance?

POST-SCRIPT: You can find the website of the church at which this attack occurred at:

http://www.emanuelamechurch.org/

Reverend Honorable Clementa C. Pinckney (July 30, 1973-June 17, 2015)

State Senator, South Carolina, and Senior Pastor, Mother Emanuel A.M.E. (Charleston, South Carolina

You can also hear the poetic voice of one of Tywanza Sanders, who has been identified as one of the people executed in this heinous hate crime, at:

https://soundcloud.com/freshwanza

“What’s Wrong with Just Being Black?”

 

 

 

 

 

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