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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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Music Performance Poetry

Bob Flanagan’s Birthday Bash

December 27, 2013 – 12:56 pm

Friday, December 27, 2013 — Bob Flanagan’s Birthday Bash

Last night an audience of about 40 people gathered at Beyond Baroque to celebrate the birthday of Bob Flanagan, poet, performance artist, and musician (1952-1996). Sheree Rose organized the event and introduced each presenter. George Drury Smith, the founder of Beyond Baroque, lead off by commenting that, in the 1980s, he had stopped attending events that honored people who had died. The AIDS crisis took too many of his friends for him to endure the extended mourning of public rituals, but Smith said that last night’s assembly helped him reevaluate his reluctance to participate in these kinds of tributes. In praising Flanagan for his consistent contributions as a workshop leader and a poetic presence in Beyond Baroque’s early days, Smith also reminded the audience of another important figure in the organization’s survival, Alexandra Garrett, who died 20 years ago this coming New Year’s Eve. Smith’s opening remarks were followed by readings of Bob’s poems by Harry Northup, Jim Cushing, Michael C. Ford, Jim Krusoe, myself, and S.A. Griffin, after which Jack Skelley performed a song (“It’s Fun to Be Dead”) that Bob and he had written while they were bandmates in a group called “Planet of Toys.” Sheree capped the evening off by reading a letter from a young gay man in England who also suffers from cystic fibrosis and has found in Bob’s life and art a way to give meaning to his indefatigable suffering. Sheree also screened a slide show of Bob’s performance as well as a portion of a video of one of his last readings. It was a bit odd to have so many male presenters, even though at least a third of the audience was female.

The evening once again raised for me the question of Bob’s inexplicable absence from any of the anthologies that have organized themselves around the notion of “Stand Up” poetry. Several of the poems read at last night’s event generated sustained laughter from the audience. I was surprised, in fact, at how funny the poems still were. “Fear of Poetry,” for instance, which I read from the POETRY LOVES POETRY anthology, required me to improvise at least three unanticipated pauses in the performance so as the let the laughter play out. Flanagan’s poems represent some of the most successful examples of “Stand Up” poetry in the movement’s earliest days. Perhaps the singular blend of eros and thanatos that permeates Bob’s writing made his poetry unwelcome in the milieu of middle-class aspirations that underlie “stand up” ‘s editorial preferences.

Beyond Baroque’s back yard featured one of the best parts of the evening, an exhibition of “Bobaloon,” a twenty-foot tall inflatable figure of Bob with a fiercely erect cock, pierced with the full regalia of priapic masochism. I believe it was Richard Howard who noted in an essay on the poetry of Edward Field that “Stand Up, Friend, with Me (the title of one of Field’s books, which lent itself out to the movement’s name) is a joke on the arousal of the phallus. Bob’s stand-up figure in the back yard served to remind us that any anthology that would title itself “Seriously Funny” seriously needs its editors to start reading up on those who got it all started.

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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 Performance Poetry

L.A. Poets: 1950 – 2013

December 9, 2013 – 10:16 am

Monday, December 9, 2013

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

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Books Performance Poetry

Askew’s first L.A. reading

December 7, 2013 – 10:39 pm

Saturday, December 7, 2013

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

 

 

 

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Performance Poetry

Askew magazine reading at Beyond Baroque

December 6, 2013 – 8:16 pm

Marsha de la O, Phil Taggart, and Friday Lubina

invite you to:

Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Center
681 Venice Blvd., Venice 90291

Saturday, December 7 at 4pm

 

to hear some of the following poets read

from issue no. 15

of ASKEW magazine:

Amy Uyematsu, Carol Davis, Suzanne Lummis,

Ellen Reich, Holaday Mason, Bill Mohr, Sarah Maclay,

Ron Alexander,  Laurel Ann Bogen, Larry Colker,

Charles Harper Webb, Herb Reich, Marjorie Becker,

Dane Baylis, Gerald Locklin, Paula C. Lowe,

Jean Colonomos, Judith Pacht, Patty Seyburn,

F. Albert Salinas, Steven Hendrix, Dorothy Barresi.

Beyond Baroque: (310) 822-3006

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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 Performance Poetry

Wanda Coleman (1946-2013)

November 23, 2013 – 10:33 pm

November 23, 2013

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

we’re literary L.A., baby.”

(Native in a Strange Land, 1996, 114)

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

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Books Painting and Sculpture Performance Poetry

Miramar

November 17, 2013 – 9:41 am

Sunday, November 17, 2013

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here’s the pertinent information:

MIRAMAR

342 Oliver Road

Santa Barbara, CA 93109

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

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

 

 

 

 

 

 

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