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A Report on A Tribute to Wanda Coleman (Part Two)

January 20, 2014 – 6:21 pm

Report on A TRIBUTE TO WANDA COLEMAN (Part Two)

Monday, January 20, 2014

 

By the early 1970s, the Church in Ocean Park at 235 Hill Street in Santa Monica had been shuttered by its denominational diocese for lack of a congregation. Most likely, the midwestern Methodists who had founded and built it had moved to the San Fernando Valley or Orange County, leaving behind a neighborhood that was turning into a slightly less rambunctious northern outpost of Venice. My recollection is that the Church in Ocean Park was re-opened, in part, in order to find a pastoral assignment for a newly ordained minister, Jim Conn, who didn’t quite fit in with the old boys’ patriarchal theology. Over the years, I heard him comment at least once that some of the church elders were a touch reluctant to ordain him; I’ll leave a full account of that for Jim to write. All I know is that my childhood would have been a hell of a lot easier if I could have gone to a church he was in charge of. Whatever the reasons that stymied the renewal of the original congregation, they certainly left behind a facility with a serious piece of real estate to make use of; it was built at a time when a large parcel of land could be acquired without much strain: the church’s property includes enough space for a small parking lot, a child care center with a playground, and at least one additional house that is still in use as a community center.

 

In any case, if anyone ever talked about the church’s history or its contributions to the welfare of its local citizens in the years since its founding, I never heard of it during the 20 years I lived in Ocean Park. That might be because its coalescing congregation in the mid-1970s was more interested in making history than preserving the old order or memories thereof. As I noted in Holdouts, Jim Conn was in the forefront of making his congregation the initial moving force behind the push for rent control and other progressive issues in Santa Monica.

 

I got to know Jim and become a member of his church in the 1970s primarily because of proximity. After graduating from UCLA in 1970 and taking a trip abroad in the fall, I had moved to the neighborhood across the street from Santa Monica City College. In November, 1972, I met a young poet, Sandi Tanhauser, and a few months later she and her two children (Gary and Mina) and I moved into an apartment up the street from the church. One of the outcomes of taking numerous walks around my new neighborhood was that I quickly found myself visiting Jim in the upstairs loft office of the Church in Ocean Park from which he issued his monthly newsletters. I quickly began to regard these one-page messages as an essential part of the conversation about literature and society that I was trying to contribute to through a poetry magazine, Momentum, that I started to edit in 1974. You can find several examples of Jim Conn’s monthly mini-sermons in the final issue of Momentum magazine. Over the years, the Church in Ocean Park allied itself with other cultural forces and became an unofficial accomplice of Beyond Baroque’s projects and aspirations. It should be noted that a large number of poets have read there over the years, among them the late Francis Dean Smith, a poet who was the mother of Charles Bukowski’s daughter, Marina. Francis was a member of the church for many, many years and I remember not only being at services with her, but being the featured part of a Sunday service in the late 1980s, when Jim asked Francye and me to read our poems in place of his sermon.

 

One of the young poets I published in Momentum was Wanda Coleman, whose poem “Mad Dog, Black Lady, Frothing (Part I) and (Part II),” appeared in the second issue (Summer, 1974). She also appeared in issue number 4 and number 6. It should be noted that the poem in the second issue was not the title poem of her first book. Instead, she just used a shortened version of that poem’s title as the rubric for her first full-length collection, which had been preceded by a chapbook collection, “Art in the Court of the Blue Fag.”

 

Yesterday, between 100 and 150 people gathered at the Church to celebrate the life and poetry of Wanda Coleman. One of the big differences between Saturday evening’s event and Sunday afternoon’s was how many of Wanda’s family were present – and acknowledged – in the course of the many choruses of Wanda’s praise. Both a daughter and a son spoke at Sunday’s gathering, and several siblings and their families stood up and were warmly applauded as honored guests of the day’s assembly. When Linda and I arrived yesterday, Jim Conn was in the process of convening the event, and for a moment the church seemed vibrant with the same glow of potential utopia that it had simmered with 40 years ago. If much that we started out to accomplish back then has not come to fruition, nevertheless there has also been the triumph of renitent survival.

 

Austin Straus then led off the afternoon with a blend of the solemn and the comic, in a manner befitting Wanda’s own example, and he proceeded to introduce both family and friends who wanted to address Wanda’s passing. First, though, he introduced family members, including Wanda’s brothers George and Marvin. I believe that George’s wife, Monique, died very recently, too, so this gathering must have been very heavy (as we used to say in the 60s). I tried to keep a list of everyone who spoke, though no doubt I will miss a few names. Rod Bradley started out by showing 11 minutes of film and then reading a recent poem, “I like being large…,” based on a comment she made at a CSU Los Angeles reading (May 9, 2013). Rod’s poem refocused “large” so that it slid into “largesse,” as a prime characteristic of Wanda’s ability to embrace those marginalized by oppression and injustice. (“large in her acceptance of others’ pain as her own.”)

 

The first set of poets to follow Rod included Steve Goldman (who had attended high school with Austin and who culminated his comments with a short blues riff on his harmonica), Richard Modiano, Lynn Bronstein, and Al Young, who read a very moving poem entitled “The Deep West,” which he had composed specifically for Wanda. The first editor to publish Wanda’s poetry, Michael C. Ford, then read some of her wok followed by a short excerpt on his truncated horn of Dizzy Gillespie’s “I Waited for You.” Eric Priestley, as perhaps the poet in the room who had first met her, then spoken about that early encounter. He had been acting in a production of Jean Genet’s Les negres, directed by Jayne Cortez, when they first met, and you could tell by the timbre of Priestley’s voice that a half-century had not dimmed the recollection of their youthful fraternity. The sanctuary of the church sits on a north-south axis, and as the light through the tall stained-glass depictions of traditional Christian iconography (e.g., Christ in the Garden of Gethsemani) began to waver and dim, the poets continued to stand up and comfort themselves and all who were present in the affirmation of mourning. Lynn Manning reminded us of one of the best parts of the film that Rod had projected on the white curved wall at the end of the sanctuary. “I needed to hear that laughter again,” he said, and for an instant it echoes in our mind’s ear again. Manning had first sampled Wanda’s generosity in 1980 or 1981, shortly after he had been blinded and moved from visual art to writing. After a reading she gave which Lynn attended, she had accepted a portfolio of his poems and responded to them within two weeks, and Lynn emphasized it was that response that helped him move forward as a writer. (He is now the artistic director of the Watts Village Theater Company.) The afternoon glided on with the unexpected: a musical act (in the manner of Janet Klein) consisting of Sharon Evans (Wanda’s sister) and Rick Rogers got up and performed “Lazy Moon” and “Side by Side.” The history of the songs they shared with us made their performance all the more pertinent.

 

Harry Northup, who had known Wanda at least as long as I have, then read one of the best poems of the entire weekend, “In Memoriam.” Harry’s poem will be featured in tomorrow’s post. S.A. Griffin spoke on behalf of Pam Ward, who was not able to attend because she was nursing her ill husband, and read a poem that reiterated the street-level fortitude of the title of her Coleman’s first book. Doug Kearney then bounded onto the stage and reprised his poem from the evening before, “Headstone.” He seemed to have grounded himself even more fully in the poem since that first recitation and his layers of anaphoric rhythms consecrated the inner timpani behind the culminating address: “Dear Austin Dear Austin Dear Austin I am sorry…”

 

Perhaps the major surprise of the afternoon was the poetic resurrection of a figure I thought had vanished altogether, Michael Roth. Back in the mid-1980s, when Reagan was charming the pants off of the American middle-class, Michael Roth’s performance poetry stood out for its forthright critique, but little if any of it managed to get into print. In the past half-dozen years, I asked around about him, but nobody seemed to know what became of him. If only I had asked Austin and Austin! He stood up and spoke about that period in his life, though all too briefly and I hope he gets in touch with me since I would like to include his writing in a future project.

 

The final third of the afternoon included a poignant recollection by Yvonne de la Vega of Wanda’s intervention as a protector of youthful aspirations. Yvonne first met Wanda at Café Largo in 1989, and she remembered having given a reading after which an audience member said, “Oh, so you’re the flavor of the month.” Wanda overheard this comment and immediately encircled Yvonne with her arm and made it clear to that snide person that Yvonne was just at the beginning of giving us all a taste of her passionate poetry. Eve Brandstein performed Wanda Coleman’s poem, “My Thang” with such perfect timing that the entire audience was laughing at all the right spots. For a brief moment, our laughter and Wanda’s laughter seemed to be in a cosmic give and take. At some point in this mix, Alice Pero stepped to the stage and played a soothing piece of music by Debussy on her flute.

 

Coming down the home stretch, Austin called to the stage Bibbe Hansen, whose artist husband Sean Carrillo I got a chance to talk with afterwards. Bibbe spoke about the challenges of raising her three children in Los Angeles and how her son Beck found himself at the age of 15 in the mid-1980s in a classroom at Los Angeles City College with a poet named Austin Straus, who turned him on to the kind of poetry found in my anthology, Poetry Loves Poetry. Austin and Wanda befriended Bibbe and her family at a difficult time and Bibbe and her husband flew across country from NYC to participate in yesterday’s event as a way of acknowledging how important Wanda and Austin were to their family. Soon after Bibbe’s affectionate account of their friendship, the founder of Beyond Baroque took the stage to put everything into perspective: “Wanda was large, and anything she touched she made larger.” I must confess that my scribbled notes started to overlap at this point, and I’m not sure if it was George who spoke about an interview that Wanda did with Lee Hickman in which Wanda spoke of her poetic practice as “a higher form of politics.” It may have been Bruce Williams who spoke of this interview. In any case, it was good to hear Lee Hickman’s name mentioned at this gathering by someone other than myself. Both of us were the editors who most frequently published Wanda’s poetry in the mid-1970s. In a similar manner, it was also gratifying to hear, late in the afternoon, someone mention Harvey Robert Kubernik, without any prompting as to his important contribution to the maturation of Los Angeles-based poets.

 

The musical contributions were far from over. Earlier in the afternoon, Ruth Buell had sung for a while, and toward the end, Dennis Holt contributed a lovely rendition of a song based on a poem by Pablo Neruda. Austin said, “I could listen to that melody all afternoon.” By now, one could tell that it was dark outside. Austin called me to the stage and I spoke briefly about Momentum magazine and read a short excerpt from Holdouts, in which Wanda appears frequently enough that Austin joked in his introduction that the book should have been called, “Wanda Coleman and company.” Gloria Alvarez Edina, Luis Campos and Linda Albertano finished up the tributes. In particular, Linda Albertano was able to give a full-throated cry of exuberant wistfulness. She walked off the stage with tears being shed on behalf of all of us, and I am grateful – and will remain grateful – for her ability to absorb and release in tender sympathy our common burden of Wanda’s absence.

 

Some of the people who were there but who did not speak included Linda Fry, Susan Suntree (who sat next to Linda and me), Liz Gonzalez and her husband, Holly Prado, Phoebe MacAdams Ozuna, Jim Cushing and his companion (each of whom attended both Saturday and Sunday’s events), Roger Taus (whose son, Chris, was a student of mine at Phoenix High School), David James, Laurel Ann Bogen (who valiantly worked at the desk at the entrance during the entire event), Amelie Frank, Lynell George, Ellyn Maybe, Ellen (Reich), Brendan Constantine, the sculptor Sean Carrillo, Holaday Mason, Jim Natal, Fred Whitlock, Carlye Archibeque, Michel Bernstein, and Elizabeth Iannaci. Florence Weinberger was caught off-guard when she was asked to speak. “I thought I was just signing a guest list.” My guess is that David Ulin would have spoken, but he might have then felt that he had compromised his journalistic objectivity.You can find his astute and well-honed reflections on both gatherings at:

 

http://www.latimes.com/books/jacketcopy/la-et-jc-weekend-tributes-wanda-coleman-20140120,0,7511270.story#ixzz2r0py5N5D

 

Finally, there were many people there whose names I do not know, but some of whose faces I recognized, as well as many unintroduced strangers. For those whose names I do not know and whose faces I did not recollect as familiar, forgive me for not writing you into this account of a tiny portion of Wanda Coleman’s afterlife. As the occasion made us grateful for the life she devoted to our enlightenment; in equal measure, we were gratified to have all of you there.

 

As a footnote, I especially want to thank Amelie Frank, who gave me a copy of the recently published book of Austin and Wanda’s love poems just after I signed the guest register. “We’re almost out of copies,” she said and I felt very fortunate to be there at that precise moment.

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Books Ground Level Conditions Performance Poetry

A report on “A Tribute to Wanda Coleman” (PART ONE)

January 19, 2014 – 9:09 pm

DOWNTOWN TRIBUTE TO WANDA COLEMAN – Saturday, January 18

Linda and I headed out to the Los Angeles Central Public Library around 3:45 p.m. yesterday and took the 710 to the 5, a route that all too often slows to five mph at the transitional lane. Not yesterday, though: we had a smooth ride all the way to the library’s parking lot. I don’t recollect ever previously attending an event at the Mark Taper Auditorium at the Central Library, and it’s a pleasure to report that it’s an extraordinarily comfortable venue with just the right number of seats to impress an intimate significance upon any occasion held there. In particular, for such a modestly size venue, the curvature of the audience’s seats keeps its members aligned with the speakers on stage with a subtle bend in the focused trajectory of performance’s gift exchange.

The evening opened with a recording of Wanda Coleman’s reading of “L.A. Love Cry” which contains an exquisitely ironic benediction of the nine commandments of Los Angeles, the first of which is “Don’t grow old.” Since the average age of the audience was well over 40, we found ourselves laughing in acquiescent chagrin at our accelerating frailty. Louise Steinman then introduced Kate Gale, the highly esteemed editor of Red Hen Press, who recounted a story of her son’s experience of reading out loud some of Wanda Coleman’s work in radio and in front of a live audience. “It’s so much more difficult when there are people here,” her son said. It must be emphasized that all of the readers on Saturday made the difficult look easy throughout this tribute.

The rhythm of the presentations turned out to have a felicitous arrangement, though at first I feared that the evening might prove too long, in part because I was concerned that Douglas Kearney’s and Terrance Hayes’s fairly long presentations would prove to be the rule. I would estimate that Kearney, for instance, was on stage for about ten minutes, a good part of which was taken up by a poem entitled “Headnote,” which propelled itself along the anaphoric oscillations of “I am sorry for…” The piece ended with “Dear Austin…. Dear Austin… Dear Austin, I am sorry…” intoned in a manner that said the words were pebbles falling down an eternal cliff. Kearney earned his extended set on stage, but I did feel some initial trepidation that the evening’s passion would get diluted through a long program.

Having Terrance Hayes read next was a perfect choice. He enfolded all of us in an appreciation of Wanda Coleman’s versatility as a poet, while reminding us of the odds that she confronted in being accepted at the canonical banquet table by quoting from Bathwater Wine: “There is no degree for what is learned in the dark.” Hayes mentioned that he was the guest editor of an issue of Ploughshares; one of Wanda’s poems in that issue ended with the line: “like Jesus walking on water.” Terrance looked up, repeated the line, and let its manifold complexity linger for all of us to savor together. He concluded with a long, scathing poem called “Haunting the Confederacy,” which reminded us all too vividly of the racist fabrications that infect our national ideology.

The third poet to speak was the first one to publish a substantial review of Wanda Coleman’s first full-length book, Mad Dog Black Lady. Stephen Kessler spoke with quiet exactitude of his support of Wanda’s work and cited Bachy magazine as the “local” publication that enabled him to get the word out about this important new poet back in the late 1970s. I would add to Stephen’s comments that his work as an editor of the Alcatraz edition anthologies also was a crucial affirmation of Wanda’s poetry. I believe Stephen was the first editor to include Wanda Coleman in a significant anthology of poetry.

One of the highlights of the evening was Cecilia Woloch’s incandescent recitation of “Angel Baby Blues,” which she has included so often as part of her informal anthology of poems presented to students in classrooms that she was able to intone its many registers of grief and wonder with ebullient dexterity, despite feeling an almost overwhelming degree of poignant loss. Before she took on the daunting climb of “Angel Baby Blues,” however, Woloch read a message from Carol Muske-Dukes, a poet I’ve never thought of as being particularly supportive of Wanda Coleman’s writing, but whose words of appreciation were certainly worth putting on record. It’s always possible that Muske-Dukes spoke up for Coleman’s work at the kinds of grant-giving committees whose considerations are not part of the public record, and if so, her praise should be taken at face value.

(If you want to hear Wanda Coleman performing one of her classic pieces of writing, “Angel Baby Blues,” go to:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3C7U6prKQR0

Other poems by Wanda Coleman that were chosen to pay tribute to her were “In the Other Fantasy where We Live Forever” (Michael Datcher); “The Lady in the Red Veiled Hat” (Laurel Ann Bogen), “Pigging Out” (Charles Harper Webb); “Bedtime Story” (Ron Koertge); “I Live for My Car” (Suzanne Lummis); “20th Century Nod-Out” (Brendan Constantine); and “Dream Walk #7” (Robin Coste Lewis). Lewis’s quiet delivery proved to be one of the evening’s most poignant moments and I am eager to hear more work by her. My notes might wrong for Sesshu Foster’s choice, though his memory of being in upstate NY and wishing he could transport WC right there to help him out during his reading made it clear what a reassuring ally Wanda acted as in our own performances. Sesshu’s choice may have been “Q&A (for Gil Cuadros).

Of all the people who were missing from the list of presenters last night, the most disconcerting absence was Harvey Robert Kubernik. The question needs to be raised: was his name even mentioned once during the meetings that took place to organize this event. Harvey’s support of Wanda’s writing was as crucial to her maturation as an artist as John Martin’s in the decade between the mid-70s and the mid-80s, and that his name was not once mentioned from the stage tells me that many of the people who read this evening still have much to learn about the breadth of Wanda’s career and accomplishments, as well as those who collaborated with her as a cultural worker.

Finally, if the first commandment of Los Angeles is “Don’t grow old,” then I have certainly committed a mortal sin. The poets who spoke at this memorial frequently mentioned when they first met Wanda. “I first saw her read in 1978 or 1979,” Cecilia Woloch reported. “She was wearing thigh-high boots and a cape.” “I’m honored to say that I was a friend of Wanda’s for a long, long time,” Charles Webb said at the start of his comments. Webb arrived in Los Angeles in the late 1970s, by which point both Leland Hickman and I had repeatedly published Wanda Coleman’s poetry in our magazines (Bachy and Momentum, respectively). In the entire auditorium, I was the poet who had known and supported Wanda Coleman’s poetry the longest. I first published Wanda’s poetry in 1974 and she was one of the featured poets in Holdouts, which was published in 2011. That Red Hen Press and the Poetry Society of America deliberately chose to exclude me from this public homage to Wanda’s poetry left me with a renewed sense of my peculiar marginality in Los Angeles. It puzzles me why several of the current power brokers of poetry in this city do not deem me worthy of saying a few words of goodbye to a poet I believed in starting 40 years ago, long before many of the readers in last night’s program were even writing poetry. On Sunday, though, I got a chance to make my memories part of this weekend’s memorial. Stay tuned for Part Two.

 

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Ground Level Conditions

Fracking: A Report from a so-called “public hearing”

January 7, 2014 – 2:43 pm

Tuesday, January 7, 2014 – A so-called “public hearing”

Although I like to regard myself as one who stays abreast of important issues immediately affecting California’s ecology, I had only the vaguest notion that the current governor, who was derided by the Republican party three decades ago with the moniker “Governor Moonbeam,” has become a kind of corporate version of Hal in “Henry IV, Part 1.” Prince Brown may well have hung around with Gary Snyder when he was young, but he is showing that he no longer needs the companionship of an environmentally-minded Falstaff. Instead, he would rather demonstrate that he is as pragmatic as any well-paid CEO in oil industry.

The travesty that contemporary political interaction has become was well on display at the so-called “public hearing” at the CSULB campus on Monday afternoon. Despite being held at the southernmost edge of Los Angeles, in as remote and inaccessible a public venue as possible, over a hundred people showed up to speak in defiance of this scheduling obstruction. But distance from the epicenter of the Los Angeles County’s power center was the least part of the problem. The far more serious hindrance to social accountability was a complete absence of elected officials at the “hearing” to “hear” what the public had to say. A court reporter transcribed the comments and a video camera was set up in the back of the Beach Auditorium to record the presentations by speakers. No one, however, from the government who has a direct hand in the drafting of this legislation was actually present in the room to absorb directly the quiet passion in the protestors’ voices. In terms of public input, the statements will be neutralized in flat pixels on a computer screen. If they are glanced at all by the people who are supposed to be “listening” to the public hearing, it will no doubt be in the manner of what young people call “snacking” as they “surf” the web.

One speaker described the situation as “Orwellian,” in that the people who showed up to protest the imposition of fracking on California were speaking in a black box to themselves. None of us who spoke yesterday had any reassurances that in fact our comments would be read at the same measured pace at which they were spoken. If even one person in a position of authority from Department of Conservation (originally typed as “conversation” – an ironic typo!) had shown up and had to sit on the stage and listen and take notes, then at least we who spoke up against fracking could feel that the state of California was willing to subject itself to the charade of pretending to listen politely to our points about the scarcity of water in California and the potential for seismic destabilization, and then ignoring us. We weren’t even given the dignity of a charade. It was a thoroughly depressing event, and I left with the same sense of futility as after massive, global demonstrations failed to stop the Bush-Cheney-Blair invasion of Iraq. Fracking is passed off as safe, but a devastating environmental impact is most certainly in the offing.

As I type today’s blog entry, I feel a kind of PRE-Traumatic Stress Syndrome. It must be horrific to live in a society in which car bombs are constantly going off. Fracking seems to me to be a kind of remote-controlled car bomb. When the technology fails — and this is an ineluctable self-implosion — the consequences will not stop at the precise interstices of the collapse. As with the BP oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, the explosion will permeate an entire region. Unfortunately, the people who profit the most from practices such as fracking will suffer the least ramifications. What a shame that one of the suggestions yesterday will never be made a law: everyone who benefits the most from fracking should be forced to live, day after day, in a home that is within 150 yards of a fracking site; then we would see how long it takes for a “not-in-my-backyard” movement to gain some respect. I would propose a series of rippling concentric neighborhoods, with the Board of Directors and CEOs living closest and those lowest-paid and doing the most dangerous work being allowed a buffer zone.

 

 

 

 

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Ground Level Conditions

Fracking Protest in Long Beach

January 5, 2014 – 8:45 pm

MONDAY — Fracking Protest — TODAY!!  — January 6

According to the Long Beach Press-Telegram, a protest of the ongoing push by California’s government to enable this state’s oil industry to engage in the drilling and oil extracting process known as fracking will take place at the California State University, Long Beach campus today, Monday, January 6 at 2 p.m. The protest is scheduled to last an hour.

Given that Los Angeles just had the lowest level of rainfall in any year since weather records were kept in 1877, it’s hard to believe that an industrial practice that would devour huge amounts of fresh water is being allowed to gain a foothold in this state with so little public discussion. To call hearings held before most people have even finished returning from work and eating dinner a “public” hearing verges on the absurd. I realize almost no one reading this blog will find out about this protest in time to attend, but I feel as if I have to go on record as at least supporting this effort.

The decision to hold tomorrow’s meeting at a time when school is not in session is also not an accident. I suppose one could argue that if the meeting was to take place during the semester, then there would not be much in the way of parking for the public, but given the hours the meeting is being held at, it’s very questionable whether there would be much need for public parking. I rather suspect that the last thing the oil industry wants is to have a large segment of justifiably concerned young people protesting the environmental destruction of this state.

As for the argument that fracking will restore California prosperity, I do not hear anyone in the oil industry advocating that California adopt the same kind of oil extraction tax that is used to sustain higher education in Texas and Wyoming. California, in fact, is the only state that is a major oil producer without an oil extraction tax. The fact that the industry doesn’t want to pony up even as it engages in yet even more risky environmental practices sums up the notoriously selfish agenda of the corporations involved with oil production.

 

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Ground Level Conditions Music Performance Poetry

Justice for Victor Jara

December 14, 2013 – 12:18 pm

Saturday, December 14, 2013

Broken Hands Play Guitars – Rebel Diaz

I received an e-mail from the SOA Watch organization the other day in which it was announced that a man currently residing in the United States is alleged to have been involved in the torture and murder of Victor Jara, a Chilean theater director and folksinger, in September, 1973. The United States government appears to be reluctant to honor the extradition request of the Chilean judicial system, but the issue of U.S. complicity in the coup d’etat that led to Jara’s murder is not going to disappear anytime soon. Forty years after the overthrow of a democratically elected socialist government, the memory of Jara’s fate is benefiting from a multi-generational momentum. Most recently, Bruce Springsteen performed in a concert in Santiago, Chile that included a rendition of Jara’s “Manifiesto” as one of a pair of songs for his concert’s encore. In another domain of popular culture,  Rebel Diaz invokes Victor Jara as a heroic paradigm in its song, “Broken Hands Play Guitars”:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rbG5Hwg-qs8

For the Springsteen video, go to:

http://www.rollingstone.com/music/videos/bruce-springsteen-honors-chilean-folk-hero-victor-jara-in-santiago-20130913

There is almost no audience cross-over between those who attend performances by Springsteen and Rebel Diaz, so this variegated advocacy, both direct and implicit, for some formal reckoning to establish the chains of responsibility for Jara’s murder is indeed heartening.

You can also Rebel Diaz’s music on Volume 2 of “Sing It Down,” a compilation of recordings by Francisco Hererra, Jolie Christine Rickman, emma’s revolution, Jon Fromer, Joe Jencks, Elise Witt, Holly Near, David Rovics, Los Vicious de Papa, Quinto Imperio, Vientos del Pueblo, and Steve Jacobs. Colleen Kattau contributes her recording of “Manifiesto,” the song by Jara that Springsteen covered. Proceeds from the sale of “Sing It Down” go towards supporting the School of the Americas Watch.

 

 

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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 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 Ground Level Conditions Military Life

The Acupunctured Counterpoint to Social Insecurity

September 28, 2013 – 8:25 am

Saturday, September 28, 2013

The Acupunctured Counterpoint to Social Insecurity

On Monday, September 16, I turned in my mother’s applications for VA Health Benefits at the hospital next to CSULB. One of the small details I learned about my mother’s life is that she had the desire to attend college, even after she had gotten married during World War II. Her discharge papers from the U.S. Navy in October, 1945, include a box to indicate plans for further training: “attend u. of California” (lower case “u”). My father, on the other hand, was never interested in attending college. Even if he had also gotten out of the Navy at the end of the war, it’s difficult to imagine him encouraging my mother to attend college on the G.I bill while he headed off to work as a clerk in a retail store (which was his first extended job after a 20 year career as an “aviation mate”).

My own application for social security benefits back on August 1st seems to have run into a classic case of bureaucratic indifference. It’s bad enough that a couple weeks ago I had to wait 45 minutes on the phone, listening to a recorded voice loop with all the officious sincerity of a “Do not park in the loading zone” command of a metropolitan airport, in order to get sent a copy of my electronic application that was supposed to have been automatically mailed out. That’s a minor irritation, compared to waiting for some statement from social security about the status of my application. Finally, I spent half a morning in a local office two weeks ago to find out that additional information is needed and that nothing can be done on my application until I submit that information. “And why did I not receive a phone call or an e-mail or a letter requesting this information at some point in the past six weeks?” “Oh, we’re sorry.” There was no explanation of why I was not contacted or acknowledgement that I could very well have just kept waiting and waiting and waiting, wondering when my application would receive the slightest processing.)

I should emphasize that nothing on my Social Security application portended that any kind of specific document would be required from the University of California about my time as a graduate student, during which I was part of UC’s retirement program. Now I am given a deadline to get this information, and have been informed by the workers at UC that it will take a couple weeks to process my request. Unfortunately, the Social Security retirement date begins in 10 days. All of this could have been resolved if only the workers at Social Security had done their job and sent out a simple letter or e-mail a month ago. I guess working and contributing to Social Security for almost half a century is not enough to earn the basic respect that should be accorded any worker’s co-operation with a painfully unequal system of rewards and punishments.

Meanwhile, it turned out that by yesterday (Friday, September 27), nothing had happened with my mother’s application whatsoever. I had twice called the number I had been given by the intake worker to inquire about the application, but my message was never returned. Finally, early yesterday afternoon, I parked in a school lot and walked over. It turned out the intake worker was out for 10 days with a serious cold and had just gotten back on the job, but if I were willing to wait, the application would be processed. I settled into a chair with the Complete Poems of Robert Frost, whose work is just ahead in one of my classes. By the end of the afternoon, my mother was officially in the Health Care system of the VA as a WWII vet, with a “group five” designation. Now begins the process of getting her vetted as being eligible for a “group four” rating, which would provide an allotment for assisted care.

Fortunately, the morning had its exquisite counterpoint. Susan Wiggins and George Hart (one of my very favorite colleagues at CSULB) spent the past summer at work on converting a commercial space on Atlantic Boulevard in Long Beach into a community-based acupuncture clinic that offers a sliding scale of payment. Neither Linda nor I had ever tried acupuncture before, but both of us have reached the age when we feel we have very little to lose by trying alternatives. The unexpected part of the acupuncture treatment was that it gave me a period of rejuvenating surrender: I leaned back in a recliner and permitted the entity I am conscious of as the performer of a public identity to experience the absence of that need to perform. A vulnerability set in that allowed me to meditate in an integrated manner distinct from any sitting seance with Nothingness. Instead of having my knees folded in selfless-enchantment, the acupuncture encrypted my stiff body into an elongated horizon that cradled me in a gentle levitation. What secret messages were sent from nervousness to mindful nerves remain too whispered to have been heard by other than the recesses of my body; more than an hour after the first needle was inserted with exquisite precision by Susan, though, my mind found itself clarified with remunerative aftertastes of unusually peaceful continuity. My posture (both physical and psychological) has never been vibrant and its accumulated disintegration has put more pressure on my spine than it is designed to absorb; hence, I was gratified beyond expectation about twenty minutes into the treatment when a tender but firm warmth began slowly effusing from my spinal fusion. It was like an infinitely tiny solar eruption of a pent-up knob, as if a hemisphere of remorse had had a tectonic plate settle back in its proper groove. Leaving the clinic, I walked with a new sense of purpose, which I turned out to need later on in the day.

Perhaps the most meaningful part of my visit to this clinic is the realization that not all the aspirations of my youth have foundered in the vortex of conservative obeisance in the 1980s. The willingness of gifted individuals to commit themselves to a life of generous service that empowers others by strengthening their frailties is exemplified in this community health project, which is a member of POCA (People’s Organization of Community Acupuncture). If you are living in or near Long Beach, you can find Susan’s clinic at:

http://www.longbeachcommunityacupuncture.com/

If you live elsewhere and want to give your body and mind an equally restorative moment, then start your search at:

https://www.pocacoop.com/clinics/search/0,0/18000/

 

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Ground Level Conditions Photography

Camilo Vergara, The Lamp, MLK, and WCW

September 26, 2013 – 9:43 am

MLK Bill -5

At the end of the first week of August, Linda Fry and I drove up to downtown Los Angeles to help Lisa Thackaberry mount a show of Camilo Vergara’s photographs at the Lamp Community (527 Crocker Street). The Lamp is a service organization for the homeless, especially those who are teetering on becoming permanently embedded in bedlessness. In recent years, Vergara has been taking photographs of murals that include or feature Martin Luther King, Jr., almost all of which have been spontaneous creations done without official bureaucratic approval. As the fiftieth anniversary of King’s “I Have a Dream” speech approached, Vergara decided to organize simultaneous shows of his photographs of these murals at various places that would have been the major concern of King’s dream: those left on the margins whose sense of powerlessness has proven overwhelming. Linda and I had not know of The Lamp before making this trip, so we are grateful to Camilo and Lisa for offering this opportunity to become more aware of the specific quality (and quantity) of homelessness in Los Angeles.

I especially enjoyed the improvised quality of the show. The reproductions of the photographs were attached to one side of the brick hallway by maximum strength masking tape. The tricky part was trying to keep all the images aligned with each other as we spaced them out in a visually logical sequence. We also had to keep track of time, since street parking near The Lamp is set up so that a car cannot be parked for more than an hour. If it were only a question of feeding a meter, then that would have been no challenge, but there are no meters. The car itself must be moved to another side of the street or much further down the street to avoid a ticket. Thus, anyone who wanted to go to The Lamp to help as a volunteer would be facing the constant problem of interrupting one’s work in order to address the parking obstacle. Thus do the homeless further become isolated from those who might be concerned about their plight.

Vergara also had a show at the Rose Gallery at Bergamot Station in Santa Monica that opened just after his exhibition at The Lamp. This show, which ran from mid-August to mid-September, featured the nocturnal work of this master artist. This past spring Vergara was living in Los Angeles and waking up very early in the morning (as in 3:30 a.m.). He would drive out to sections of Los Angeles that are rarely photographed, even in the daytime, and catch the eerie glow of street lighting popping the blister of exterior wall lamps. There was a corner tire shop, for instance, in which the main object of business, elevated up near the painted store sign, seemed to glow in muted recrudescence with the nearby back of a stop sign, itself exuding an hexagonal sheen of turbid grey.

I was immediately reminded of W.C. Williams’s “Pastoral,” in which he speaks of the improvised housing of the “very poor,” in which the construction material for fences and outhouses has been assembled from discarded boxes and dismantled barrels. These objects, as Williams notes, are at least given the dignity of some minimal covering; they are “smeared a blusih green / that properly weathered / pleases me best of all colors.” It is this kind of coloration that Vergara has captured so well in these photographs. Williams mocks himself at end of his brief poem, “No one / will believe this / of vast import to the nation.” Vergara has no need for such ironic modesty. These photographs of Los Angeles at night should be widely exhibited throughout this city to remind us of the work that is done, by both artists and non-artists, to keep the flow of daily life in touch with more than superficial meaning.

In retrospect, the one thing I would now want to see would be photographs of the MLK murals at night. In particular, there is one of MLK on a brick wall which is cut off from a very close look by a padlocked chain fence. That it suggests the time that MLK spent in jail in order to move the freedom train along is part of its artistic rendering by Vergara. Nighttime in jail, though, is even harder time, and it’s the thought of that solitude, recreated by my imagined version of Vergara’s photograph, that I find even more haunting. Indeed, it is an image of import to the nation.

(contents of this blog, copyright Bill Mohr, 2013; photograph, copyright, Linda Fry, 2013)

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