Category Archives: Poetry

Books Contemporary Fiction Ground Level Conditions Poetry

A Petition to Restore Dennis Cooper’s Blog

July 24, 2016 – 1:34 pm

Sunday, July 24, 2016

A Petition on Behalf of Dennis Cooper’s Blog and E-Mail Account

Thanks to a notice posted by Brian Kim Stefans, I became aware yesterday of a major literary crisis. Dennis Cooper’s blog and e-mail accounts have been summarily deleted by Google. He was not given any prior notification or warning about this public dismemberment of his creative and cultural work, nor has he received a single sentence from Google explaining their actions.

Mark Doten has started a petition to demand the restoration of Dennis Cooper’s writing to a domain of his own control. You can join me in signing this petition at:
https://www.change.org/p/google-restore-dennis-cooper-s-blog-and-email/u/17375624?tk=BQ7EC_yqjQ5JU3WsELxKKMVO0pMDJkdX5wonCb2tAGQ&utm_source=petition_update&utm_medium=email

As Mark Doten pointed out in a post on his July 21st Facebook page, “….surely the blog contained 10,000 hours or more of Dennis’s labor.” I myself can testify to the longstanding work ethic that Dennis possesses. No one, including me, worked as hard as Dennis did back in the late 1970s and early 1980s to make poetry more visible in Los Angeles. It seemed as if every time I stopped by Beyond Baroque’s New Comp Graphics to do some typesetting for my own Momentum press, there was Dennis at the Compugraphic keyboard, pounding out page after page for some issue of his magazine, Little Caesar or a book for his press. What part of work does Google not understand? It takes substantial work to accomplish the body of work produced by Dennis Cooper. In contrast, anybody in a state slightly more alert than torpor can sit at a machine and with a couple dozen keystrokes, gleaned from an operations manual, obliterate another person’s thoughtful cultural work. It doesn’t take much effort to figure out who is more admirable.

I suspect, by the way, that the hand of a censor is at work in this instance. Many of us might think that the trial of Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” in the mid-1950s settled once and for all the rights of serious writers to have their work protected from censorship. I am afraid that the battle to keep the censoring hand from the writer’s keyboard is never completely won. The situation is rather like that of abortion rights and the issue of a woman’s control over her own body. Roe versus Wade was just an important turning point; so, too, was Ferlinghetti’s victory in a San Francisco court. I certainly hope that Dennis Cooper does not have to take this case to court. Doten’s petition, if it receives the vigorous support it deserves, might well help resolve this crisis before it reaches that point.

Fortunately, in promoting this petition, Dennis is not without friends and allies who are willing to speak up on his behalf. If you want to find out more about this crisis of imagination and censorship, please read Jennifer Krasinski’s article at the “Culture Desk” at The New Yorker:
http://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/why-did-google-erase-dennis-coopers-beloved-literary-blog

And once again, I urge you to join me and over 3,000 other people in signing Mark Doten’s petition to Google.

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Poetry

“A Transfixion of Seeing”: On the poetry of Stevie Smith

June 22, 2016 – 2:04 pm

Monday, Jun 20, 2016

“A Transfixion of Seeing”: Stevie Smith’s All the Poems (edited by Will Meyer; New Directions, 2016)

Mortality distracts my meditations these days, and on a sweltering pair of days such as Sunday, the 19th, and Monday, the 20th, one can hardly summon the strength to concentrate even on the best of poets. Fortunately, All of the Poems of Stevie Smith is close at hand, and heavy enough in its gracious gathering to give a sense of accomplishment to the day’s reading.
In the first glide through this volume, I was surprised at how many very fine poems I was unfamiliar with, and then I realized how long it’s been since I sat down at all with a stand alone volume of Stevie Smith’s poetry. She does seem to resemble Robert Frost in one particular way: people don’t read single volumes of Frost unless they are literary scholars. His famous poems are read and written about over and over, but only scholars appreciate the dialogue between those poems and the other ones that appeared in their original collections. Some of Frost’s best work gets neglected, as a result. The same seems to be true of Smith. How else to account for how little known many of the following poems are (page numbers in All the Poems follow the titles):

“In My Dreams” (page 139)
“My Soul” (138)
“The River Humber” (145)
“Little Boy Sick” (174)
“The Recluse” (253)
“Le Singe Qui Swing” (287)
“Childe Rolandine” (380-281)
“Can It Be?” (416)
“The Past” (410)
“The Choosers” (434)
“The Singing Cat” (420)
“A Soldier Dear to Us” (605-607)

When you start looking between these pages, you’ll soon find adjacent poems that raise and examine issues with an acerbic coyness worthy of Emily Dickinson. “Why are the Clergy…” on page 385 pops up right away when one finishes re-reading “Childe Rolandine.” Adjusting to that sublime cantankerousness will no doubt help you feel less jolted by “But Murderous,” which starts in one direction, but doubles back on itself with an almost humiliating reproach; to jump, then, to “King Hamlet’s Ghost” on page 412 will not push you forward, however, but make you return and re-read “But Murderous” in the voice of Gertrude or Ophelia. If you do push forward, you’ll quickly savor “At School,” and what do you know, eh? You’re at the next poem in the above list: “Can It Be?”, and perhaps you’re asking yourself how it would change the poem to be entitled “The Lily Tank”? If you imagine keeping everything the same but the title, the whole thing shifts, in thematic aim as well as tone.

In reading Smith at age (almost) 70, I realize how much my young students in Rowland Heights missed out on when I taught them back in 1982-1984 as an artist-in-residence for the California Arts Council. They were properly enamoured of Shel Silverstein, who deserves more attention, but they would have benefitted from being introduced to Stevie Smith with poems such as “The Donkey” (616) and “Cock-A-Doo” (617).

It appears from the notes at the rear of the book that Smith “prepared an alternative version without the final stanza for inclusion in a children’s anthology,” and that only confirms what I noticed as I read through this book. Smith has an eerie ability to write a poem that can challenge and embed itself in an adult mind and at the same time lure a child or a young person into its realm. Not every one of the dozen poems in my list above has that capacity, but the two poems listed at the end of the last paragraph most certainly do. If you don’t introduce a nephew or niece to “the sweet prairies of anarchy,” then you have fallen short in one small task that can give merit to a life worth undertaking.

Smith will probably end up being regarded as a “minor poet.” No matter, she would probably say, for she seems to have known better than most advocates of verse how endless is the supply of volunteers to serve the muse. She hastened to write only when necessary, and to that haste she brought great skill and dexterity. One only has to study how the anapestic beat and use of the caesura ratify the clarity of theme in the first two poems in my list. Start there, and linger. Few poets can give you more the longer you do so.

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Contemporary Fiction Poetry Teaching

“To Make It Memorable” — a fiction writing class at Idyllwild, California

June 16, 2016 – 12:55 pm

Thursday, June 16, 2016

“To Make It Memorable” – a fiction writing class in its third decade

In the weeks since the graduation ceremonies for the College of Liberal Arts at CSULB in mid-May, I have been concentrating on addressing the health care issues of my mother, who is in her mid-90s at this point. Her particular problems are not new ones, and my youngest sister, Joni, is visiting her right now in an attempt to get her access to better doctors. While my family is certainly not the only one that has to mitigate the encroachments of old age on family connections, I will confess that the deviations in life choices between my mother and myself are so extreme as to make us almost unrecognizable as parent and offspring. The differences between my sister, Joni, and myself are only slightly less radical.

These kinds of disparities are, of course, the source for much of the creative writing that is characterized as fiction. Unfortunately, I have never been able to write fiction, although I was a fairly successful teacher of fiction writing for 20 years at the summer youth arts camp at Idyllwild Arts Academy. I got the job in the summer of 1995, less than six weeks after my ten-year run as a typesetter at Radio & Records had terminated. I had enough money in the bank to last me about three and a half months, but I had no idea of where I was going to find my next job. It certainly wasn’t going to be typesetting. Computers were eroding that occupation quite rapidly, and I found myself sitting at my desk, feeling slightly bemused, in my apartment at the corner of W. 18th and Robertson Blvd. on a Monday morning at 8:45 as the phone rang. “Hi, Bill, this is Steve Fraider at Idyllwild Arts.” We exchanged 20 seconds of pleasantries, and Steve cut to the chase. “Hey, Bill, I know you teach poetry, but do you also teach fiction?”

I had never taught a fiction class, but I certainly had read a lot of fiction and had had formal training as a playwright and written several full-length plays. In the two seconds after I heard his question, I thought to myself, “What do I have to lose if I say yes?”
“Sure, Steve, I teach fiction, too.”

“Well, would you be interested in teach a two-week class here at Idyllwild?” I said, yes, and asked when it would start. His answer jolted me: “Now.”

“You want me to start today?” I asked. “My car needs some work, and I’m not sure it can make it up the mountain.”

I had finished that sentence before he pounced on my concerns: “We’ll send a van.” And indeed, a van showed up at my apartment about 2:30 that afternoon, at which point I had packed a suitcase and a couple of boxes of books. The driver was a Native American animator who was studying at CalArts, I believe. His institutional van had air conditioning, which my car lacked, so the two and a half hour trip to Idyllwild went by in considerable comfort.

At 7:00 that evening, I was in a small classroom at the far rear edge of the campus. It was built into the start of a hillside, and was hoisted on thick wooden stilts. The ten students were quietly anxious. Their teacher had walked off the job, leaving a note in his room saying that he was going back to Redlands to think over a few things. My job was to soothe the students and assuage their sense of being abandoned. A few of them had studied with the teacher the summer before, I learned later, and they had looked forward to working with him again. I began teaching the class, and by the end of the session, at 9 p.m., they students were writing and seemed reassured that the class would help them become better writers. Two weeks later, the class had a culminating reading, and it was a thorough success.

I was not a fiction writer, however, and never expected to be asked back, but a few months after I returned to Los Angeles, I received a request from Steve to write catalogue copy for the course for the following summer. It was due by December. It turned out that all Steve cared about was that I was a published writer – and indeed, my publications did include prose – and that I was a very good teacher. During the first decade of summers that I worked at Idylliwild Arts, I taught a single two-week class, but we began to notice how quickly it was filling up. Word seemed to be getting around that my class was an invigorating experience of young fiction writers, and I suggested to Steve that we offer a second class. When that class also filled up fairly quickly, I told Steve that I would be willing to teach a third session, too. That, too, reached its enrollment goals.

About three years ago, I told Steve that my 20th anniversary was coming up and that I had decided to retire from Idyllwild Arts’s summer faculty. It seemed to be a nice, round number that had the ripeness of a cycle of time behind it. I taught my last workshop at Idyllwild in the summer of 2015, and there are ways that I miss it. On the other hand, by retiring, I get to feel the pride of seeing something that I helped build up continue at full strength. A program that only had one two-week session when I started is still currently offering three sessions.

I highly recommend the program and the arts camp as a place that young people can learn the advanced basics of fiction writing. Kim Henderson and Eduardo Santiago are the teachers this summer. Here is the link to the program and the class, which still carries the title that I gave to it when I wrote my first catalogue copy: “To Make It Memorable.”
http://www.idyllwildarts.org/page.cfm?p=843
There are three two-week sessions scheduled from July 3 to August 13.

There also is a poetry writing workshop for young people taught by Brendan Constantine, a very fine Los Angeles poet who attended high school at the Idyllwild Arts campus.

It is perhaps part of the odd twists of life that I always wondered if my mother would succumb to a sudden shift in her health when I was up at Idyllwild. If she had collapsed and died, for instance, when I mid-way through a six-week residence at Idyllwild, it would have been a situation fraught with divided loyalties. Idyllwild became a home for me in a way that I never experienced as a child. It would have been a very tough home to leave under duress. That I left my tenure there as a person should leave a fulfilled part of his or her life makes my time there as memorable as anyone could hope for. In addition to Steve, I want to especially thank Emma, Andrew, and Denise for making Idyllwild a second home for me in addition to my residence in Los Angeles County, and to Cecilia Woloch for introducing me to Steve Fraider.

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Poetry

LOCH RAVEN REVIEW; Talking with Glenn Bach at Gatsby

May 16, 2016 – 12:25 pm

Monday, May 16, 2016

Alexis Rhone Fancher in LOCH RAVEN REVIEW; Talking with Glenn Bach at Gatsy’s Celebration of the Chiron Review

Two weeks ago, on Sunday, May 1, Michelle Bitting and I gave a reading at Gatsby Books and we were fortunate enough to have ten people show up for it. I say “fortunate” because there had been a reading at the same store the evening before that went for at least five hours and the store was packed with just about everybody on the local scene. The occasion was a celebration of the Chiron Review, whose editor had come out all the way from Kansas to be part of the reading. The older poets included Gerald Locklin and Charles Webb, both renown for their prime roles in establishing and promulgating the Stand Up school of poetry. Other poets I spotted in attendance included Laurel Ann Bogen, Michael C. Ford, Joan Jobe Smith, and Fred Voss. I didn’t get there until about 8:00 p.m., by which point Alexis Rhone Fancher had already read. I heard from a student the next day, however, that Alexis’s presentation was exceptionally dynamic. That report did not surprise me, for Linda and I had both heard her read with two of her friends at Beyond Baroque several weeks ago, and her poems glowed with passionate candor.

I received this past weekend a note from Alexis in which she passed on some good news about her writing as well as a link to some recently published work. The delightful announcement is that Edward Hirsch has chosen Alexis’s poem “when I turned fourteen, my mother’s sister took me to lunch and said:” for reprinting in The Best American Poetry of 2016. The link to Loch Raven Review is:

Alexis Rhone Fancher

Despite the low (but understandable) attendance at Gatsby for Michelle and me, I am very happy for the success of the event the night before. Wendy Rainey had invited me to join the reading (though I have never contributed to CHIRON), but I decided that it would be better to get some sleep and left the reading by 9:30. Before I left, however, I had a chance to chat with Glenn Bach, poet and sound composer who told me that he had just finished his 600 page project and was hoping to find a publisher. If anyone wants to start their cultural project with the work of one of the most interesting artists around, get in touch with him. He is ready to roll.

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Books Poetry

Wanting Animals on Her Side: a review of two books by Lynn McGee

May 11, 2016 – 2:18 pm

Wednesday, May 11, 2016

Wanting Animals on Her Side: a review of two books by Lynn McGee

In a book about prosody, Karl Shapiro commented that “rhythm is the total sound of a line’s movement.” Contemporary poets who prefer free verse often seem to have a difficult time getting stressed syllables to coordinate their pivot points with precisely peculiar consonants and vowels. (Hence, the prosaic quality of much of contemporary poetry.) One poet whose gift has been honed through long practice is Lynn McGee, whom I first met back in the mid-1980s, just before she moved to NYC. Although a chapbook, Heirloom Bulldog, arrived in my mailbox several months ago, I am only now getting around to writing about it in conjunction with the very recent publication of a full-length collection, Sober Cooking.

One of the most remarkable features of Heirloom Bulldog is its thematic concentration on hunger. In McGee’s configuration, the appetite never doubts its unappeasable epistemology: it quivers through our beings as a desire ominous in its self-attachment; we cannot relinquish it except at the peril of extinction. Each individual creature in this menagerie of poems is poised at an existential edge in which its choices seem to serve as its species’ proleptic fate. Whether coyote, wild boar, lizard, python, rat, lioness, crow, pigeon, or wasp, McGee depicts the peculiar hybrid of a dilemma each finds itself oscillating within. The narrator extends her empathy (“I have always wanted animals / wanted them on my side.”), but only so far. The first poem recalls her first use of a weapon to kill a rabbit, and in doing so, she acknowledges the irreversible momentum of a predator’s consciousness: (“Something had to be stopped, / and it would not be me.”) Later on in the sequence, she conflates the imagery from a televised program of baby elephants brought down by a pack of lionesses with the end of a romantic relationship that she has terminated with equal deliberation.

On at least one occasion, McGee hints that an animal is a prosthetic symbol for her own struggle to ground herself in a solid continuity:

this invasion thrills me;

a creature that seized his place

when others said,

you don’t belong.

(

The same tone of fierce persistence concludes her tribute to coyotes, in which she describes them as:

….a panting blur

hovering at the edges of dreams,

not so much wanting in,

as already there.

That McGee’s poems have been “already there” for quite some time is evident in her full-length collection, Sober Cooking. These poems focus on the discontinuity of attachment; the human animal turns out to be as hungry for submersion in the company of another person as any physical pang for nutrition. That need is strong enough to endure death vigils, and Sober Cooking is especially impressive in keeping control of feelings that could easily boil over.

Sober Cooking devotes many of its poems to meditating on a love relationship with a woman suffering from a defective heart, which must be replaced if she is to survive and live to any age resembling a normal life-span. The book, therefore, flutters within a field of poetics that converts what might have tended toward the confessional school and brings it closer to memoir. The intensity of the life or death situations of these poems serves as a reminder of how we ourselves should proceed:

I see your surprised smile

as I pull out a tiny bottle,

squeeze a glistening bead

onto your fingers

I’m giving you all kinds

of permission – and I feel

that tender rush, as you

slow us down.

In “Dinner Date” McGee recounts the importance of lingering. A lover chooses an image of “a pink cactus splayed / against stucco” to magnify. The thumb and forefinger deftly coax eros out of hiding as the “lavender tongue, / ….. the nodding spiky bloom” becomes a quietly consecrated foretelling.

Of late, I have yearned for more formal arrangements in poetry, and often find myself wanting a more emphatic drum kit providing percussion to the poem’s upswelling. My guess is that not many reviews will mention McGee’s lineation. Though free verse has long gone beyond being a given poetics, McGee gives it an edge in her best poems that accentuates our language’s percussive capacities for dialogic insight into a poem’s themes.

An attendant

with a merman’s wet, black curls

rolled me down a hallway

under a fluorescent keyboard –

dark, light, dark, light, dark –

and I was stored somewhere safe.

Then a nurse was standing

by my bed, offering

apple juice and crackers,

and I was back

in the world of teeth

and trains, the world I hate

and love.

(“The Dark Visit Before a Routine Procedure”)

The alternation of dark and light is more than mere visibility. It hints at the kind of uncertain on-off switch of choice that underpins the human predicament: “There are two kinds of people – those afraid / of heights, and those who imagine / jumping” (“Flight”). The heartbeat of “dark. light, dark. light, dark” is the echo at the core of McGee’s quiet, almost whispered meditations. The pulse of Sober Cooking is worth putting your fingers to, if only to help you feel your own heart beat for all its worth: the risk of giving yourself to someone else.

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Biography Books Poetry

Recollections of the Distant Past: Ocean Park and Culver City

May 10, 2016 – 12:16 pm

Tuesday, May 10, 2016

Recollections of the Distant Past: Ocean Park (Bill Mohr) and Culver City (Larry Goldstein)

One of the first projects of the upcoming summer will be my interviews for the Oral History Project (OHP) at UCLA. I received an invitation to contribute to the OHP slightly over a year ago, but both Jane Collings, who will conduct the interviews, and I have been too involved in other tasks to sit down with a tape recorder. We almost got started this past January, but since the process entails a half-dozen sessions lasting an hour and a half each, we decided not to engage in intermittent recall. In a fortnight, however, this oral memoir will get at last get underway, and I am both grateful this opportunity and honored to be asked.

Jane has said that she will drive from UCLA to Long Beach to conduct the interviews, which will probably happen in the morning, since traffic on the 405 will flow best for her at that time. I wish somehow I could persuade her to conduct at least one interview in Ocean Park, where I lived for 20 years (1973-1993) and did the most important work of my life. I never visit that area but that I am seized with a pervasive, ambivalent nostalgia. As much as I would have enjoyed spending the rest of my life there, it would have left so many other tasks incomplete. I had to leave, though it broke my heart to do so.

In my sojourn of the past two decades, I was often uncertain of where I would be living in the near future. Moving to Long Island from San Diego certainly caught both Linda and me off-guard, as did the precise location of the return move to the West Coast. I never anticipated that I would end up teaching at Cal State Long Beach, a campus I first visited when Michael Horowitz, the British poet who edited Children of Albion, came and gave a reading back in 1973. I had met Michael when I spent a month in London in September, 1971. Ah! It strikes me that I ought to forestall this recoil of memory and let it unfold when the tape recorder is running. Once I write this out, the oral history will end up as a recitation rather than a rediscovery when Jane pushes the “on” button. Until the upcoming sessions are done, therefore, I think it will be best if I focus on the less personal in my blog posts.

In abruptly terminating these references to being a young poet, I find myself wanting to give the reader some recompense. By chance, one of my newest friends, Larry Goldstein, has just had an article published that delves back into his origins as a writer; the link to it can be found at the end of this post. The way that cinematic careers (in all their frequent brevity) and serious book reviewing blend in Larry’s article might surprise many people outside of Los Angeles, but even those who do not know of Robert Kirsch will savor this glimpse of a young man’s life emboldened by the spontaneous hunches of his on-the-spot mentors.

http://michigantoday.umich.edu/how-tom-sawyer-changed-my-life/

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Books Poetry

“The Golden Age of Los Angeles Poetry” — Robert Kirsch on “THE STREETS INSIDE: Ten Los Angeles Poets”

April 20, 2016 – 11:36 am

TheStreetsInside

THE GOLDEN AGE OF LOS ANGELES POETY: The Streets Inside (1978)

The Streets Inside: Ten Los Angeles Poets (Santa Monica, CA: Momentum Press, 1978) was the first of three anthologies I either edited or co-edited in the past 40 years. While it was not the first book to group Los Angeles poets as a distinct ensemble in American poetry, The Streets Inside was, however, the first anthology of Los Angeles poets of any significant length. Earlier, very short projects of this sort included a collection called Poetry Los Angeles in 1958 that was scarcely bigger than an issue of a little magazine. A trio of Los Angeles poets, James Boyer May, Thomas McGrath, and Peter Yates, were the editors of that first Los Angeles anthology. According to World Cat, Poetry Los Angeles clocks in at 68 (unnumbered) pages. It is an interesting collection, however, if only because it reveals the fractures that existed in Los Angeles in the late 1950s. None of the poets in Venice West (such as Stuart Perkoff and Bruce Boyd) are included in Poetry Los Angeles.

Fourteen years later, Paul Vangelisti, Charles Bukoswki and Neeli Cherkovski partially rectified the omission of the Venice West poets from Poetry Los Angeles by including both Perkoff and John Thomas, who by that point had not only been part of the Venice West scene, but had also lived in San Francisco and then returned to Los Angeles. Although Anthology of L.A. Poets ended on the shelves of 90 libraries around the world, it didn’t attract much critical attention in Los Angeles, let alone elsewhere. In terms of local attention, I wrote one of the first reviews and published it in the second issue of Bachy magazine (July, 1973), and I recollect that a reporter named Jim Stingley wrote a series of articles for the Los Angeles Times in the spring of 1974 about “The Rise of L.A. Underground Poets” that cited that anthology. Unfortunately, Bukowski, Cherkovski, and Vangelisti’s anthology was not that much bigger than the volume published in 1958.

Over 250 pages of poetry in length, The Streets Inside implicitly made a claim about the significance of the “underground” poetry scenes in Los Angeles. In point of fact, my book featured fewer poets than Anthology of Los Angeles Poets, and therefore was a less representative sampling of the scene. In retrospect, it was an enormous error. to limit the anthology to ten poets. Perhaps I kept the number down because I was still editing Momentum magazine and I didn’t want the anthology to seem like a special issue of the magazine. The decision to have between 15 and 25 pages of work by each poet was one of the ways that I hoped to make the anthology distinct from the magazine.

It should also be noted that my desire to promote the poetry of Lee Hickman led to this large portfolio of each poet’s work. Without consciously copying Donald Allen’s New American Poetry, I placed the oldest poet first. Lee Hickman led off the book with five discrete poems from the manuscript I eventually published in 1980, Tiresias I:9:B Great Slave Lake Suite. Since Lee’s five long poems snagged 25 pages total, I could hardly have much smaller selections of poems by the other poets without distorting the sense of equivalency that was one of the central aspects of its self-identity.

Having Lee as the first of ten poets, however, helped solve the question of the rest of the order, for I wanted the poet who followed Lee to have a much quieter voice; few voices were speaking in the intricate yet subdued manner that had been achieved at that point by Jim Krusoe, whose second full-length book Small Pianos I published almost simultaneously with The Streets Inside. On a formal level, Jim’s writing also established just how unpredictable the Los Angeles scene could be in terms of a reader’s expectations. If opening The Streets Inside with Hickman’s highly oxygenated lyricism would startle many readers, then it should also be noted how truly unusual it was for an anthology forty years ago to follow up that bravura performance with poets who emphasized the prose poem. There is hardly any other anthology in the 1970s in which a significant number of the poets are represented by a substantial amount of prose poetry. In the selections of writing of Krusoe, Holly Prado, Deena Metzger, and Peter Levitt, the prose poem is an accepted variant of poetry. Of the first eight poets in the book, in fact, only Leland Hickman and Kate Ellen Braverman do not have any prose poetry.

A half-dozen anthologies of Los Angeles poets have appeared since The Streets Inside was published out of my bedroom apartment in Ocean Park, California (512 Hill St., Apt. 4). Many of them have received substantial praise from numerous reviewers and critics, but all of these subsequent anthologies are ultimately responses to the crucial “group show” of The Streets Inside. Robert Kirsch’s praise for this collection remains a clarion call to all subsequent projects involving Los Angeles poets.

“If Los Angeles were San Francisco, where these things are more readily recognized, what is happening in poetry here would long since have been hailed as a golden age. … This handsome and exciting anthology …… is a book worth pursing, even if difficult to find in your bookshop. If necessary, just send for it.” –
Robert Kirsch, Los Angeles Times, April 27, 1979

It should be noted that Kirsch was kind enough to put my mailing address in his review. The address was slightly inaccurate, but since I had lived there for a half-dozen years, the postman (an Atlanta Braves fan, as I recollect) unfailingly brought the letters requesting copies of the anthology straight to my mailbox. I therefore got some direct sense of how many people were reading Kirsch’s review and responding to it. I sold a couple dozen copies directly through mail orders and it sold very well at Papa Bach, Chatterton’s and several other independent stores.

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Books Poetry

Amy King — “The Missing Museum”

April 17, 2016 – 4:18 pm

Sunday, April 17, 2016

The Missing Museum — Amy King (Tarpaulin Sky, 2016)

“The strange rain outside awakens
the strange rain within.”
Amy King

“RAIN RAIN TIRESIAS BLIND WORD-RAIN
inside clouds black wrap me rain
Tiresias witchman shapeshifter shaman
Leland Hickman (TIRESIAS, I:1) (circa 1966)

I first met Amy King when I was teaching English as a Second Language at Nassau Community College for two years. After I finished my Ph.D. at UCSD in 2004, I was unable to find any substantial teaching jobs in California. The economy had disintegrated to the point where voters turned the governor out of office, and elected a movie star to replace him. Linda and I moved to Long Island, New York and rented a couple rooms upstairs in a huge brick house owned by Lenny Durso, an old friend from the glory days of Los Angeles independent bookstores. Lenny had been the last of the original three owners of Intellectuals & Liars Bookstore in Santa Monica to run up the white flag. The store went out of business in 1979, and Lenny returned to New York, where he eventually started what amounted to an extension program at Nassau Community College. He offered me a full-time job teaching, and assisting him, at the English Language Institute (as it titled itself). Linda and I arrived in September, 2004 the day before classes started.

Except for Lenny, no one in ELI was directly affiliated with Nassau Community College. Those who taught at ELI were non-adjunct adjunct faculty, if that term makes any sense. What it meant in effect was that I taught at NCC, but was not a member of any union, nor was I eligible to join any union. I was teaching 18 hours a week, plus working 20 hours of desk job assignments for Lenny. Every once a while, I would wander over to the building where the English Department was located. One afternoon, I noticed a flyer for a reading by two of the English Department faculty, one of whom was Amy King, and I was fortunate enough to adjust my work schedule so that I could attend. I had no idea what kind of poet she was eager, but I starved to hear some work read live. She read from her first book of poems, Antidotes for an Alibi (2005). Her publisher, Blazevox, went on to issue two more titles, I’m the Man Who Loves You (2007) and Slaves to do These Things (2009).

At the reading for her first book back in 2005, I was impressed with her astute flippancy. In using a word that has almost nothing but negative connotations, I want to emphasize a touch of appropriation. Whatever else might be said about her poetics, I noticed from my first hearing a sense of a poet “playing for the whole casino.” This is an expression I use to demarcate the difference between those in contemporary poetry who are hard at work at the nickel, dime, and quarter slot machines, and those who are playing for nothing less than to take over the casino and ultimately change the house rules. Amy King’s flippancy radiates from her askance gaze at the disjuncture of gender roles and social power, in all of their cultural and political ramifications. She demands a meritocracy that glistens with the body’s head-on grappling with exaltations; nor are the inner coils of poignant yearning to surmount, and be surmounted, in turn, by the touch of another, of any less urgency. King believes whole-heartedly in the efficacy of a poem as a resistant object of personal recourse. If nothing else avails itself, the poem’s temporary embrace has the power to suffice, and enable one to endure. This existential gesture is underlined in King’s use of Samuel Beckett’s mantra: “I can’t go on. I will go on.” Not blindly go on, however: King’s “strange rain” empowers the kind of self-assigned shape-shifting invoked in Leland Hickman’s Tiresias, and takes it several steps further.

Her latest volume, The Missing Museum, is an uneven collection, which is not necessarily surprising. King is not interested in the predictable, or in hewing to strategies that she is comfortable with. It would seem as if she would prefer to make each poem recalibrate the horizon lines of life’s contingent absurdities. “Horizon lines” plural: not simply the one in front of you, but to the side, behind, and underneath, as well as the illusion of an apex. “Pussy Riot Rush Hour” swivels on a tour of all those perspectives.

Just write. Stop worrying.
Twitch from the corporate fondle,
bake a cake for the women in prison,
go to the bank when no one’s looking
to discover what you don’t want there.
You know all of this, so why do I ask?
I’m asking because you need to hear
again and then some how you’re not
above anything, how you are not
nothing but the roar of clouds overhead,
the din of a bodega at let-out hour,
the smell of a smile unwashed
and the compression of panties beneath
too-tight tights drawn to impress
the boss into a holiday off. What we
won’t do for a little piece of ourselves,
for a shiny glimmer of heaven behind
the stacks of computer boxes and books
that tell us nothing of literature. ….

In instructing the reader as well as herself, she models the tempestuous conditions for writers embedded in the post-avant. King has unflinchingly propelled herself along the river of a huge canyon of contemporary poetics: on one side, John Ashbery and the alignments of various New York School poets, and on the other the Language poets. Coming of age as a poet well after the publication of In the American Tree, King’s poems exemplify the flippancy needed to survive the travail of daily life.

Perhaps, though, flippancy has a page limit. The pair of five-page poems in The Missing Museum need a more intricate argument to sustain their length. It’s gratifying to see her interest in poems longer than the usual academic set-point, but both the rhythms and images need more complexity in their mutual undulations. The shortcomings of the longer poems, however, do not detract from the distinctive verve of her best work, which especially shines in the final section, “Sorry the Sex Is so Bloody.” I would recommend that anyone unfamiliar with King’s poems begin, in fact, with two poems from that section: “A Woman Is an Act” and “Your Heart, The Weight of Art,” and then read “We Will Never Fully Recover” and “Drive By,” which appear in earlier sections. This quartet of poems will help the reader liberate herself from unsuspected impositions of language’s possibilities, and enable her to find a new footing in her own life. Each of us needs to be more thoughtfully flippant, and Amy King shows us how well it can be done.

In readymade life sexual dimensions hold against us,
Could not map us out of eleven dimensions.
They would just go on forever, smudging the details down,
wearing us the fuck, most pleasantly, out.
(“The Stars Are Calling, Skin Sacks”)

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Books Poetry

FEASTS by Holly Prado (1976)

March 29, 2016 – 11:18 am

Tuesday, March 29, 2016

“to turn our gold into ordinary ground / the best possible solution”

Feasts_BookCover

One of the most tantalizing books I published when I was the literary editor, production manager, and distribution agent for Momentum Press back in the 1970s and 1980s was Holly Prado’s Feasts, which I published in 1976. It’s hard to believe that Feasts is forty years old. Even after all this time, however, it still remains a difficult book to classify. A prose poem novella? Autobiographical fiction? A feminist text that serves as an early example of the use of journal writing as a source of creative self-definition?

I believe that the book is one of the classic pieces of writing in American literature. Although the book is not in print, I have taught it in several graduate seminars at CSU Long Beach; one student summed up many reactions: “Where has this book been all my life?” One answer I give to that question is, “Looking for another publisher.”

FEASTS sold well in the two years after it was published, even though it did not receive many reviews. One of them, however, was in the Los Angeles Times, and I excerpt from it to give you some sense of the book’s impact at the time:

“An experimental novel about a twice-divorced, 36-year-old writer named Clare and her lovers and friends. What’s interesting here is that Prado is truly experimenting…. She splices together a life from fragments of scenes, sentences, dreams, memories … a vivid sense of Clare’s life…. Stylistically the book is worth examining because Prado breathes energy into the flat, half-truth of fiction by writing poetry. (She ) arranges words in breath patterns rather than in sentences … Prado uses the period, the comma, the strophe and antistrophe with a musical exactitude we’ve not heard for a long time.”

I suppose it is a bit of a fantasy to expect a book that has not been in print for over 30 years to appear in an annotated edition, and yet that is what this book needs and deserves. Without at least some commentary accompanying a reprint, a new generation of readers would probably not realize how important it is to go on-line and look up the Woman’s Building, the cultural center in Los Angeles that plays a major role in Feasts. Those who read this book without any awareness of the roman a clef quality of its social context will miss much of the ambience that it has to offer.

I would like to go on record as having made efforts to get Feasts reprinted. Specifically, I have twice approached the Feminist Press in New York City, and each time have failed to receive even the courtesy of a form rejection. The first time they claimed that they never received the copy of the book I sent for their consideration, but the second time I handed a photocopy of the book to the editor along with a return envelope. No response.

Perhaps there is some new feminist press out there that would be willing to undertake this project and include a long introduction and afterword. It is with this hope that I light a cake with 40 candles to celebrate my good fortune in having been its first publisher. I refuse to believe that such a marvelously intimate, tender and lyric piece of feminist affirmation will not be for sale again at Skylight Books.

The AWP will have a major bookfair as part of its annual convention, which opens at the Convention Center in Los Angeles starting tomorrow. In general, the book publishers that are part of the AWP trade show are far more conservative than they imagine themselves to be. The sad truth is that I am not expecting any publisher at that bookfair actually leaving town in anticipation of reading FEASTS and seriously considering taking it on as a reprint project. Nevertheless, I post this notice in the hope that someone still cares about keeping avant-garde feminist writing available to the generation that might well elect the first female president or the first openly Socialist president of the United States.

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Books Poetry Teaching

Review of Eloise Klein Healy’s ARTEMIS IN ECHO PARK

March 21, 2016 – 11:14 am

I first heard Eloise Klein Healy read her poetry at Immaculate Heart College, a Catholic college in Los Angeles that unflinchingly challenged the patriarchal hierarchy of that religion during the late 1960s. By the time I got to the campus around 1973 or 1974 to hear her read with Michael C. Ford, the nuns who taught there had already declared themselves to be free of the local bishop’s heavy hand. As a poet, Healy too was seeking alternative models of writing. At Immaculate Heart, Healy read a mix of poems, several of which were memorable enough on first hearing that I recognized them immediately when they appeared in her first collection, Building Some Changes (Beyond Baroque New Book, 1976). I included her in my first anthology, The Streets Inside: Ten Los Angeles Poets (Momentum Press, 1978), alongside Holly Prado, Deena Metzger, Kate Braverman, Jim Krusoe, Lee Hickman, and Harry E. Northup. Her poems have subsequently appeared in over a dozen anthologies, including Edward Field’s mass-market paperback, A Geography of Poets. Healy went on to devote a considerable amount of time to the Woman’s Building, all the while teaching at a variety of settings, including California State University, Northridge. In 2012, the Cultural Affairs Department of the City of Los Angeles selected her to serve as the first Poet Laureate of L.A.

Healy was among the small cluster of poets in Los Angeles who managed to be featured both in the Stand Up poetry anthologies edited by Charles Webb and to be part of the roster of Spoken Word performers recorded by New Alliance Records for which Harvey Kubernik served as producer.

You can find a selection of twenty poems from her books at:

http://www.eloisekleinhealy.com/read.html

Almost a quarter-century ago, I wrote a review of her collection, ARTEMIS IN ECHO PARK, that never found an editor willing to publish it. By the time I wrote this review, she had also appeared in my second anthology, Poetry Loves Poetry. I should emphasize that my comments on her poetry probably reflect my impatience with my own inability to bring a more lyrical touch to my poems than a dissatisfaction with her Healy’s verse. I present my review, though, without rewriting it. I would add only that her work has continued to mature, in the 20 years since I wrote this brief essay, both in its “ordinary wisdom” and in its formal dexterity. Her sestina, “Louganis,” which I first heard her read at the Idyllwild Poetry Festival, is memorable enough to make the task of memorizing it not anywhere near as daunting a task as learning to dive from a high board. It’s a 10, though it’s not the first time her poems have earned that mark.

Artemis_01_02.23.16

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Artemis_03_02.23.16

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