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Books Contemporary Fiction Poetry

Book Review: THE SLEEP GARDEN by Jim Krusoe

January 31, 2016 – 12:04 pm

Sunday, January 31, 2016

BOOK REVIEW: The Sleep Garden — Jim Krusoe (Tin House, 2016)

It’s a rainy, blustery afternoon in Los Angeles County, but if you feel like stirring out of the house, ease on over to Diesel Books in Santa Monica, where Jim Krusoe will be reading from The Sleep Garden, his best novel yet, at 3 p.m. His first several published volumes of writing were poetry (History of the World; Small Pianos; Jungle Girl), and The Sleep Garden circles back to the scoured diction of that early work and brings his vision of life and afterlife to fruition. Given that an early meditation on the spondee of “rectum” adumbrates the irony of the characters’ exit, stage left, through the kitchen to their ultimate dissolution, it is a surprisingly and often humorous journey.

Krusoe’s control of tone in this existential fable is pitch-perfect. It begins with a mild echo of Beatrix Potter and Emily Dickinson all rolled into a delicate omelet of forestalled tragicomedy. The characters in The Sleep Garden have no doubt arrived at their current residence, The Burrow, with the same trepidation experienced by Dickinson’s anonymous narrator in “Because I Could Not Stop for Death,” but the horses’ heads have been forgotten as they settled in, and life in this cloistered suburban complex has proved to be much the same as it was above ground. In fact, the characters seem to have picked up exactly where they might have left off in their previous condition, which is to say Viktor is just as obsessed with making money for the sake of playing that game, and Heather is still called upon and put upon by males who need a vocal prosthesis to accompany their masturbatory fantasies.

On one level, Krusoe has written an updated version of Sartre’s Huis Clos, except that the characters seems to be much more accommodating of each other. Well, most of them are accommodating. In a metatext that serves as the underside to the comic dalliances of the main cast, there is a set of “technicians” who keep the stage show afloat. They are the stage crew who are waiting for their own Godot to show up, and serve as a kind of slow-witted Brechtian chorus. No doubt there are operations manuals that the author had access to, but we as readers were spared that labor. That irony can work on the level of authorial excision is not the least tangy part of Krusoe’s jesting in the face of “Zero,” the sum of the game played mostly (if not entirely) in the minds of the novel’s characters.

It helps, of course, to have done enough reading so that one catches the allusions. The Captain’s “memory breaks like low waves against a distant shore in search of an answer. Break break break … nothing.” Given the eventual revelation of the funerary nature of the Burrow, it helps the immediate accumulation of hints for one to hear the opening syllables in that passage of Tennyson’s “Crossing the Bar.” One doesn’t have to know this to remain entranced with the narrative, but the subtle coloring is otherwise lost.

Other references will be caught by most people without too much of an effort. Raymond, for instance, has a photograph from a sports magazine tacked up on his wall. The model in the picture is a woman in a swimsuit, and it’s not hard to attribute this clipped image to Sports Illustrated and its famous annual display of swimming attire. However, what no reader can possibly anticipate is the model’s metamorphosis into a post-modern Diogenes. As with so many other instances throughout The Sleep Garden, the aftertaste of the laugh is just as delicious as the first bite.

The audience for this novel will primarily be those who have not watched much television during the past forty years, but I mention this bifurcation because a fictional short-lived television show has a major role in the novel’s droll commentary on contemporary life, and the relationship of the characters in the novel to the characters in “Mellow Valley” constitutes one of the major mordant temblors of The Sleep Garden. Let not your ignorance of popular culture trivia dismay you, and do not fret if a show such as “Friends” does not evoke any specific image more than “Welcome Back, Kotter.” The predominance of the culture industry gets its comeuppance in this novel, but not in a vindictive manner. In this case, the spoiled child of popular culture spanks itself. It could be said, in fact, Horkheimer and Adorno might enjoy The Sleep Garden, though they might grouse afterwards that it let the culture industry off too easily.

Those two aside, most other readers will look forward to reading this novel a second and a third time. Ballerina Mouse is one of the most heartbreaking aging ingénues to ever undertake an existential rehearsal. Even very minor characters, such as the Vietnam veteran, Sgt. Moody, leave the reader with a haunting layer of the untold as being more brutal than anything that could be told.

The Sleep Garden awaits us all, Krusoe hints, no matter what endeavors we commit ourselves to. Some commitments are easier than others, however. Rather than worrying about your own personal failures in whatever you might have tried to do in your life, I would recommend the best therapy session that you will ever attend. By the end of reading this novel, you will be able to accept much that seemed too difficult to bear just a short time ago.

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Poetry

Kevin Opstedal: The Poet Laureate of PCH

January 28, 2016 – 10:49 am

Thursday, January 28, 2016
(PLEASE NOTE: The inability of WordPress to enable bloggers to easily quote indented lines of poetry so that they appear as the poet being quoted intended them to be placed on the page remains an ongoing problem. I cite the lines of Opstedal’s poems with regret at my inability, in this blog’s format, to render these lines properly spaced.)

Kevin Opstedal: The Poet Laureate of PCH

Back in 2012, the poetry blog “Harriet” posted an entry in which two poets made a plea on behalf of Kevin Opstedal as one of the most important poet-editors on the West Coast. The poets in whose development Opstedal made a difference include Noel Black, Patrick James Dunagan, Cedar Sigo, Will Yackulic, Eddie Berrigan, Micah Ballard, and Lewis MacAdams. Among the little magazine projects he edited were GAS: High Octane Poetry, Blue Book, Yolanda Pipelines Magazine and Little Horses’s Magazine.

I don’t know how that fund-raiser turned out. It wasn’t, in fact, clear to me whether the fund-raiser was on behalf of Opstedal’s publishing projects or whether it was launched to help him out of a personal crisis. In either case, he certainly deserves more recognition than he has received up to now. The likelihood of any significant accolades from the East Coast poetry establishment ever showing up in his Santa Cruz mailbox is very slim. In part, this is due to his predilection for publishing his poetry in chapbooks with that format’s traditional small runs, somewhere between 100 and 200 copies. It is also the case that these collections of poems didn’t begin to be published until Opstedal was past the usual debut age (he turns 60 next year). I personally admire this degree of contumacious circulation of one’s writing. Unfortunately, one of the best ways for this kind of literary visibility to work in the writer’s favor has fallen on hard times. Independent literary bookstores such as the ones Opstedal haunted as a youth (Papa Bach in West Los Angeles and Either/Or in Hermosa Beach) have become less important in the cultural scheme. It’s not that non-chain stores don’t exist; it’s that they don’t have sections for chapbooks or want to bother stocking something sold for less than two dollars.

I have never met him, and perhaps I never will, but his poetry has a West Coast resonance that is hard to miss. It’s not the references to places on the West Coast that generate this palpable alignment; rather, it’s a tone that Opstedal achieves by opening his lyrical ear to the pleasure receptors of sense memory. His rendering of images seems to have an instinctual grasp of when the groundswell of the poem should begin. First lines cut back with the precision of an inner glow:

Shadows falling across the threshold of sunset
to sucker punch the ocean fog
(“Liquid Sky”)

Opstedal is that rare poet in a period in which the workshop has replaced the library as the preferred studio space. He is a plein air poet, and his palette is both subtle and luscious, burgeoning with the recoil of aerated pigments. His poems are outward bound, west of PCH. One enters the color spectrum of his poems as if partaking of an ancient, slowly spinning communion.

Gravity on the streets & in your eyes
is only temporary
as these crashing waves of traffic turn
to leaves

silver green yellow orange

clattering over the pavement

D E C E M B E R

It was as though the entire coastline was enclosed in
a powdergray agate
(“Beneath the Radar”)

Opstedal is especially deft in moving between sound and color, blurring the cadence count of synaesthesia.

This is where the pavement meets the sea
all solid WHOMP
& the light is folded over the edge of the sky
like a blurry panel truck somewhere between here & there,
mid-stream, casting rogue shadows upon the pavement

gray-black palm fronds & washed out silhouettes

I will leave it to readers to seek out this poem (“Island Whamy”) and to discover for themselves the singular visionary use to which Opstedal puts the word “disentwined” and how a subsequent line-break juxtaposes the perfectly unanticipated one word parallel. It’s a jewel of a lyric, but Opstedal is not a one-hit wonder. A few pages later on, in Rare Surf, Vol. 2: New & Used Poems, one finds yet another substantially gorgeous poem, “Built for the Road Ahead.”

If Whitman were alive today and had a surfboard, he would probably be catching waves alongside Opstedal, whose poems glide with an inner balance that belies the turbulence hurling his imagination forward, and back, again and again.

Here is a partial bibliography:
Sand in the Vaseline. Mike & Dale’s Press, 1997.
California Redemption Value. Blue Press, San Francisco. 1998.
Variable High Cloudiness. The Dozens Press, P.O. Box 448, Santa Ynez, CA 93460-9110. Edition of 100 copies. 2002.
9th & Ocean. Auguste Press, 659 Filmore, #4. San Francisco, CA 94117. 2002.
Radio Beach. Pelican Press, San Mateo. 2003.
The Deep End. Plywood Press, 2032 Bluff Street, Boulder, CO 80304. An edition of 150 copies. 2004.
Straight Up & Down. Blue Press, 515 Walnut Avenue, Santa Cruz, CA 95060. Fall, 2004. 200 copies.
Minus Tide. Smog Eyes, 913 Vista de Mar, Playa Del Rey, California 90293. 2005.
Rare Surf, Vol. 2: New & Used Poems. I Smog Eyes, 913 Vista de Mar, Playa Del Rey, California 90293 2006.
User’s Manual to the Pacific Coast Highway. Seven Fingers, 2031 Bluff Street, Boulder, CO 80304. 2007.
Maybe Ocean Street. Seven Fingers (Airstream Eidtions). Boulder, Colorado. 2009. 100 copies.
Like Rain. Angry Dog Press, 1999.
Beach Blanket Massacre. Smog Eyes, 2003.
Heavy Water: poems (with Pamela Dewey). Surf Donkey. Topanga, CA. 2003.
In the bio note in The Deep End, two other collections of poetry are mentioned: Radio Beach (Pelican Press, 2003) and El Tsunami (Auguste Press, 2004).

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Music Performance Poetry

Bernie Sanders and the NSA – A Double-Take on Paul Simon’s “America”

January 27, 2016 – 5:56 am

Wednesday, January 27, 2016

The use of Paul Simon’s “America” by Bernie Sanders’s campaign has generated considerable commentary, which is why I’m aware of it. I’m hardly an accessible target audience; it’s been a while since I’ve seen an advertisement on television or even heard one on a radio. In point of fact, very little advertising for presidential campaign runs in California except during primary season. Why waste precious dollars in a state that is in its current political make-up a foregone conclusion? If Sanders continues to use this ad at all, however, he should be prepared to be asked about the obvious excision from the song and the policy choices he would have to make if he were elected president.

The song, you’ll remember, is a free verse poem (note that there are no rhymes in it), about two young people doing their own version of Kerouac’s On the Road. The reality is less glamorous than the fantasy: “It took me four days to hitchhike from Saginaw,” and the fade-out image of cars streaming by the bus on the New Jersey Turnpike suggests that the urban reality of New York City just ahead of them at the Port Authority will be less than comforting. In fact, let us consider what that turnpike image shifts into. The next song on the “Bookends” album is “Save the Life of My Child,” which mocks a New York police officer’s comment on young people: “The kids got no respect for the law today, and blah blah blah.” The two songs, a la Sergeant Pepper’s, flow musically one into the other with not a hemidemisemiquaver of a pause, as if to say, “Hey, Kathy and your young poet friend, this is what awaits you.”

What no one seems to have remarked on, though, is the elimination in the advertisement of the dialogue in the first part of the song. “Laughing on the bus playing games with the faces / She said the man in the gabardine suit was a spy. / I said, “Be careful. His bow tie is really a camera.” It’s a playful send-up of the paranoia at that time among the counter-culture of the government’s intrusion into daily life, and how people were even then being monitored and tracked. Simon’s slightly tongue-in-cheek, deadpan humor defuses the genuine fear that many young people felt at the time. The question of police state monitoring cannot be so easily laughed off now. So what is Bernie Sanders planning to do with the National Security Agency? The NSA is looking for America, too, but not in the way that Simon’s song portends.

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Poetry

Literary Events and Readings in Los Angeles – 1/28-1/31 (2016)

January 26, 2016 – 10:26 am

If one has a full-time job and is also getting work done as a writer, the amount of time left over to attend public literary events is rather limited. Writing is hard work, and a novelist or poet can hardly be blamed for choosing the easier task of attentive reading and heading out to join other writers and readers in affirming the social value of a life devoted to imaginative language (the last phrase being an obvious nod to the final question posed in Cary Nelson’s Repression and Recovery). Temptation is manifold at the end of the first month of this year in Los Angeles: several such events are scheduled for this week. In alphabetical order, here is the list of writers who will read in Los Angeles County between Thursday, January 28th and Sunday, January 31st:
Will Alexander, Heather Altfeld, Juan Felipe Herrera, Devin Johnston, Troy Jollimore, Jim Krusoe, Harry Northup, and Anthony Seidman. (It should be noted that Holly Prado, Jimm Cushing and Phoebe MacAdams will also be reading at Northup’s reading, which celebrates his latest book.)

Thursday, January 28
JUAN FELIPE HERRERA – U.S. Poet Laureate – CSU Los Angeles
California State University, Los Angeles presents the United States Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera on Thursday, January 28, 2016 at 5:30 p.m.
This event will take place at the Golden Eagle Ballroom at the California State University, Los Angeles. Doors will open at 5:30pm for a buffet reception and the program will begin at 6:30pm. This event is free and open to the public.

Also, on Thursday, January 28 — DEVIN JOHNSTON – at the Hammer Museum
UCLA’s reading series at the Hammer Museum present Devin Johnston reading from his latest collection of poems. Curated by Stephen Yenser and devoted to the memory of Doris Curran, this series is more accessible than one might expect, given its high culture location. Parking is very cheap after 6 p.m., and given that admission is free to the museum, one can turn this into a very inexpensive evening out in which visual art and poetry are available for a couple of dollars total. Devin Johnston will be reading on Thursday evening, January 28.

FRIDAY, January 29th – Beyond Baroque
Will Alexander and Anthony Seidman. Poet/translator Anthony Seidman is the author of a half dozen books including his latest translation of Salvatore Novo’s works in collaboration with David Shook.
Will Alexander one of the most extraordinary poets now working in the United States. He has several books published by New Directions and is one of the poets who has reinvigorated the status of New Directions as an outlet for a new generation of poets.

SATURDAY, January 30th – Beyond Baroque
HARRY NORTHUP – Poet Laureate of East Hollywood – 8 p.m.
On Saturday, Beyond Baroque presents a publication party for the latest book from Cahuenga Press, which is now a quartet of poets: Phoebe MacAdams, Jimm Cushing, Holly Prado and Harry Northup. Cahuenga started out with a half-dozen poets over twenty years ago, and the ability of its original core membership to keep churning out books is a small miracle. The latest book is EAST HOLLYWOOD: Memorial to Reason by Harry Northup, who is also known as an actor in some of the most iconic films of the post-Vietnam era of Hollywood.

BEYOND BAROQUE, 681 Venice Blvd., Venice, CA 90291. (310) 822-3006.
Saturday, January 30, 2016 – 8 p.m.
Also on Saturday, January 30th, at 4:00 PM – Beyond Baroque
TROY JOLLIMORE and HEATHER ALTFELD
Troy Jollimore has a Ph.D. from Princeton and has taught in the Department of Philosophy at CSU Chico for the past 15 years. He has had poems published in almost four dozen magazines, including RATTLE, Ploughshares, Tin House, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and Miramar. His two most recent books are Syllabus of Errors and At Lake Scugog, both published in the Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets. His awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship. He is also the author of several volumes on philosophy, including Loyalty (Routledge).
Heather Altfeld’s first book, “The Disappearing Theater,” was published in 2015. She has had poems published in a score of magazines and teaches at CSU Chico.

JIM KRUSOE – Diesel Books — Sunday, January 31st – 3 p.m.
On Sunday, January 31st, Diesel Books in Santa Monica presents Jim Kruose in a mid-afternoon (3 p.m.) reading. Krusoe will be reading from his newly published novel, The Sleep Garden (Tin House), which is his best book yet. Krusoe is the author of several novels, including Parsifal, Toward You, and Girl Factory. He was the founding editor of the Santa Monica Review. His collections of poetry include History of the World (Bombshelter Press), Small Pianos (Momentum Press), and Jungle Girl (Little Caesar Press).

If you will be up north between Thursday and Sunday, you might want to catch one or two of the leading events up there. On Thursday, January 28, Sarah Menefee and Al Young are reading at Fort Mason in the Friends of the San Francisco Public Library Laureates series. That reading begins at 6:30 p.m.

http://www.friendssfpl.org/events/event-calendar.html/event/2016/01/28/1454034600/thursdays-at-readers-poetry-series/111654
On Friday, January 29, in the Basement Series (1590 Bryant Street, San Francisco, CA 94103), National Book Award nominee & Guggenheim Fellowship recipient, Cristina Garcia, and Carolina De Robertis, author of The Gods of Tango. are reading together.

On Sunday, January 31st, in San Francisco, there will be a major memorial reading for Justin Chin, at the San Francisco Public Library. That event, which will feature over a dozen poets and writer, will take place at the San Francisco Public Library, and will start promptly at 2 p.m. Chin also was honored by a large group of poets and writers in Los Angeles at Skylight Books this past Sunday, January 24th. Chin was the author of several collections of poetry, including Bite Hard (1997), Harmless Medicine (2001), and Gutted (2006), which won the Publishing Triangle’s Thom Gunn Award for Poetry.

For futher information on Justin Chin:
http://ww2.kqed.org/arts/2015/12/23/justin-chin-san-francisco-poet-off-life-support-after-stroke/

and

http://www.sfgate.com/books/article/San-Francisco-poet-Justin-Chin-dies-at-46-6719862.php

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Poetry

Francisco X. Alarcón and C.D. Wright: a double departure

January 15, 2016 – 8:52 pm

Francisco Xavier Alarcón (1954 – 2016)

I heard about the sudden death of C.D. Wright earlier today, and had barely begun to absorb that jolt when I learned from Neeli Cherkovski that Francisco X. Alarcón had also died. I never met C.D. Wright, but I saw Francisco read at CSU Long Beach just eight weeks ago. He gave no indication that his health was in immediate serious danger. He read with passion, humor, and great joy. The audience was small, no doubt because the reading was announced at the very last moment. I asked Francisco why the reading had not been promoted more, and he explained that he was down in the area to visit his family for Thanksgiving and I inferred that he had decided at the last minute to give a reading at his alma mater before he back north. Indeed, his large family seemed to make up about a third of the audience. Among the family members was his mother, who had seen all seven of her children grow up to be professionals, including the fields of law and architecture. Anyone who knows the working-class status of Wilmington, especially back at mid-20th century, will understand what an accomplishment it is to raise children so successfully while working in the fish factories.

Alarcón was born in 1954 in Wilmington, but spent much of his childhood in Mexico. He worked his way through college and graduated from the college I teach at, California State University, Long Beach in the late 1970s. He then moved north and did graduate work at Stanford and established himself as a poet in San Francisco by the mid-1980s. He taught at UC Davis for many years and was a prolific poet. I especially admired his ability to write poems for children.

He won the 2002 Fred Cody Lifetime Achievement Award from the Bay Area. His books include Snake Poems: An Aztec Invocation (1992), Sonnets to Madness and Other Misfortune (2001), From the Other Side of Night / Del otro lado de la noche: New and Selected Poems (2002), and Ce Uno One: Poems for the New Sun / Poemas para el Nuevo Sol (2010).

Here is one of the poems that Neeli and I published in “Cross-Strokes” (in both Spanish and English).

Del otro lado de la noche

qué decir
ante
el silencio

las páginas
que se quedan
sin escribir

los libros
en donde
todavia

ni somos
ni estamos
ni existimos

esta vida
condenada
al olvido

aquí
nadie sabe
ni sabrá

del mar
que llevamos
adentro

From the Other Side of Night

what to say
about silence

the pages
left
unwritten

the books
in which
we are yet

to be
appear
exist

this life
condemned
to oblivion

here
nobody knows
nor will know

of the sea
we carry
within us

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Biography Music Poetry

David Bowie and “Music for Airports”

January 11, 2016 – 10:25 am

Monday morning, January 11, 2016

Present tense entry:

I wake up (6:30 a.m.) and check my e-mail. Near the top is a subject line from the Huffington Post: “The Legacy of David Bowie.” A very slight unease seeps up, but I don’t fret as such. Two lines further down, the LA Times puts it bluntly: David Bowie has died. The hastily written Times article, unfortunately, is more of a list of his albums and collaborators than anything else. The bottom of the article lists several links, though, so I go to the NY Times article on Sunday, July 11, 1971. Section D, page 23, and I hit unexpected cultural treasure. No, it’s not the nostalgic prophecy of Bowie’s emergence from the music underground.

Instead, adjacent to the article, which takes up two and a half column inches total and is spread out over one full column and three half-columns, are two advertisements taking up the entire rest of the page, both ads featuring one of the following:
A) a used car dealership announcing its first clearance sale of 1970 models
B) a grocery stores chain with specials on fish and coffee
C) a record store and audio equipment outlet
D) a furniture store announcing 25% percent off sale on Lazy-Boy recliners

If you guessed “C,” then you astutely asked yourself who would most likely be supplying the money for the NY Times to write a check to the author of the article on Bowie and Marc Bolan that allows the Times to call itself something other than an advertising circular. (In case you didn’t know, a publication must feature a certain percentage of its page space as “news” or “public information” in order to qualify as a newspaper. The current LA Weekly is a fine example of a publication that strives to meet that minimum and print nothing else beyond that that might require someone be paid for it; in order words, maximize the ratio of advertisements to news articles in order to increase the profit of each sheet of paper.)

“The World’s Largest Record and Audio Dealer” is the claim for the Sam Goody ‘ad’ (the word is put in quote marks), which you must bring with you in order to take advantage of the following special:
6 Days Only
from July 12 through July 17
Every LP and Pre-Recorded Tape
EVERY LP and PRE-RECORDED TAPE (bullet) in OUR HUGE
INVENTORY of THESE SEVEN TOP LABELS
• COLUMBIA * BUDDAH * KAMA-SUTRA
• ANGEL * HOTWAX* CURTOM* SUSSEX
ALL AT THE EXTRA SPECIAL SALE PRICE OF 25% OFF OUR LOW EVERDAY STORE SALE PRICES
•NEW RELEASES, SPECIAL AND LIMITED EDITIONS ON THE SEVEN LISTED LABELS ARE INCLUDED.

(It should be noted that one band does receive some publicity in the advertisement: BLOOD, SWEAT, & TEARS runs in a vertical banner along the left hand side of the larger ad, accompanied by a smaller ad for audio equipment. Beneath the above promotional offer there is also the following announcement: “Now available on Angel Records” “The Musical Enchantment of the Year” – Peter Rabbit and Tales of Beatrix Potter.)

The prominence of labels in this advertisement rather than individual musical artists suggests that its target audience (the record-buying public, i.e., customers who might make use of an American Express, Master Card or Uni-Card credit line) is familiar with those labels enough to know that the music they want to get a bargain on is included in this sale. That labels are advertised in the sale rather than individual artists suggests something about the cultural work being done by the record companies that deserves more attention, in much the same way that book publishers need to be the through-line of surveys of literature.

* * *
In memory of David Bowie, I am not playing any of his songs as I finish this post and prepare to load it onto my blog. Instead, I have his collaborator Brian Eno’s Music for Airports playing. If one were to write about Bowie as an artist at any length and with any substantial appreciation, it would behoove those who do so to spend time addressing the projects of those he collaborated with instead of isolating Bowie in the obstreperous cocoon of pop music adulation.

“I am a DJ / I am what I play.”
Here’s what I’d play today after Eno, and then after this baker’s dozen of a set list, Eno again.

“Rebel, Rebel”
“Cracked Actor”
“Under Pressure”
“Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps)”
“Panic in Detroit”
“Rock ‘n’ Roll Suicide”
“Candidate”
“Starman”
“Breaking Glass”
“The Jean Genie”
“Ashes to Ashes”
“Hang on to Yourself”
“Heroes”

Post-script added 12 or so hours later:
Music as gestural poetry, and lyrics that gestured with music. All on a very intelligent, visceral level. He was a masterful accomplice of accessible astonishment.

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Biography Ground Level Conditions Performance Poetry Teaching

Jack Grapes remembers Bob Flanagan, too

January 5, 2016 – 10:49 am

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

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

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

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

Dear Bill:

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

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

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Books Performance Poetry

Bob Flanagan – On the 20th anniversary of his death

January 4, 2016 – 1:24 pm
Photo (c) by Rod Bradley
Photo (c) by Rod Bradley

THE KID IS THE ULTIMATE MAN: Bob Flanagan (1952-1996) and Sheree Rose

Today is the 20th anniversary of the death of Bob Flanagan, although this post happening to appear today is the result of pure accident. The photograph of Flanagan accompanying this post is from a set taken by Rod Bradley at a publication event for issue number 11 of Bachy magazine at Papa Bach Bookstore in the mid-1970s; I spotted the CD Bradley had given me with the photographs at my office last week and took another peek at them over the holiday weekend, at which point I decided to start work on a long overdue tribute to Bob Flanagan and his artistic collaborator, Sheree Rose. When I looked up Bob’s dates to get an exact bearing on his chronology, I found the anniversary of his death to be rapidly approaching, so I redoubled my efforts. It should be noted, by the way, that the title of this post is a reference to the words on the cover of a book in the lower left hand corner of the photograph.

Flanagan began reading his poems around Southern California beginning in the mid-1970s, when he was still in his early 20s. In point of fact, I attended a festival of poets that included Flanagan in what had to have been his first reading in any venue that got public attention whatsoever. The “festival” took place in an unfinished, multi-story office building somewhere near downtown Los Angeles. I suppose it would be possible to dig through my archives and find the name of the hapless organizer and the exact address, but this was not an event that merits much more citation than Flanagan’s appearance, which stood out because of the contrast between his earnestness and the abundance of clichés in his poems. Flanagan was not born with a natural flair for vivid imagery. I distinctly remember listening to him read at that festival and thinking to myself that he had as little talent as any young poet I had ever heard. The old truism that talent is mostly hard work is certainly demonstrated in Flanagan’s case, for it was due to his determination to become a good writer that he matured into one of my favorite poets. In addition to his willingness to work very hard at becoming a better writer, he also had the advantage of being a member of the Beyond Baroque workshop, where poets such as Jim Krusoe and Jack Grapes continued his education in poetry outside of the academy.

I published some of his poetry in Momentum magazine and was impressed enough by his first book, “The Kid Is the Man” (Bombshelter Press, 1978) to write a review of it. It was the first formal public notice that Flanagan’s writing received. “The Kid Is the Man” contained all of the poems that Flanagan had made famous within several coteries at work in Los Angeles back then. “Love Is Still Possible” and “The Bukowski Poem” remain two of the earliest instances of poems that deserve to be in the Hall of Fame for the Stand Up school, a point to which I will return in a moment. Nor did Flanagan cease to write poetry even as he increasingly began to focus on music, theater, and performance art as outlets for his creative impishness and considerable wit, not to mention his legendary masochism. When it came time to choose his poems for Poetry Loves Poetry (1985), the work was all from the period after his first book was published and included another stand-up classic, “Fear of Poetry.” He went on to publish several collections, including “The Slave Sonnets” and a superb collaboration with David Trinidad, “A Taste of Honey.”

Given all of this poetry by Flanagan and the degree of his visible presence through frequent readings in Los Angeles, it is astonishing to realize that he is absent from all three editions of “Stand Up Poetry,” the first of which appeared in 1990 as a project co-edited by Charles Harper Webb and Suzanne Lummis. I suppose one has to take on faith the sincerity of the editors when one reads in the first slim volume (84 pages) that the 22 poets appearing in the book are merely representative of the Stand Up poetry movement and are not intended to be seen as the essential members of its first wave. However, Flanagan does not appear in either of the subsequent volumes, either. In fact, Flanagan is also absent from “Grand Passion,” which was also co-edited by Webb and Lummis, and which appeared in 1994, while Flanagan was still alive.

I find Flanagan’s absence from this evolving series of anthologies to be nothing short of astonishing, especially since Flanagan had a generous selection of poems in my anthology, “Poetry Loves Poetry,” which appeared in 1985 and which contained the poems of Webb and Lummis, too. In other words, his work was right there in front of them. Now it’s true that by 1990 Flanagan was primarily known as a performance artist, but he was still active as a poet. In fact, Flanagan was one of the primary poets who ran the Beyond Baroque poetry workshop between 1985 and 1995. Despite the way that his notoriety as a “Super-Masochist” began to overshadow his poetry, I certainly regarded Flanagan as worthy of consideration as a working poet in the early 1990s; and when I asked him to be a guest on my poetry video show, “Put Your Ears On,” he did not hesitate to accept. It turned out to be one of my most successful shows. We had a monitor on stage with a video of David Trinidad reading his lines from A Taste of Honey that alternated with Bob reading his lines live in the studio. His wit was on full display: when I asked him if he ever considered moving to NYC, where he had been born, he responded that he “preferred his creature comforts, and New York is mostly creatures.”

In addition, his poems in “Poetry Loves Poetry” were among the very best one in that anthology. “Fear of Poetry” remains a classic example of a metapoem that should be studied by every young poet. It should also be mentioned that Flanagan’s prominence within the poetry community in the mid-1980s because his lover and artistic collaborator Sheree Rose was a very fine photographer. When I decided that full-page photographs of the poets should be included in “Poetry Loves Poetry,” it was Sheree Rose who drew the assignment of persuading several dozen poets to relax enough to let their private masks become somewhat visible in a public portrait. She did a superb job and I hope some day that Beyond Baroque can have a retrospective of her work.

Finally, to square the paradoxical circle of his absence, I would also note that Flanagan studied at California State University, Long Beach, where Gerald Locklin taught for 40 years. Locklin and his colleague Charles Stetler are the poets known for using the title of Edward Field’s book, Stand Up, Friend, with Me, as the basis for a moniker to describe a kind of poetry that became increasingly popular in Southern California in the years after the Beat scenes in Los Angeles and San Francisco began a period of diminishing returns. Both Locklin and Stetler are in the first volume of Stand Up Poetry, along with another CSULB professor, Eliot Fried, whose poetry I had also published in the first issue of Bachy magazine in 1972.

The line-up of poets in the first volume of “Stand Up Poetry” (Red Wind Books, 1990) is very impressive: Laurel Ann Bogen, Charles Bukowski, Billy Collins, Wanda Coleman, Edward Field, Michael C. Ford, Elliot Fried, Manazar Gamboa, Jack Grapes, Eloise Klein Healy, Ron Koertge, Steve Kowit, Jim Krusoe, Gerald Locklin, Suzanne Lummis, Bill Mohr, Charles Stetler, Austin Straus, Charles Webb, and Ray Zepeda. There are also two poets named Ian Gregson and Viola Weinberg. That the poems of Bob Flanagan and Scott Wannberg should have been there in place of Gregson’s and Weinberg’s is obvious now.

The importance of Bob Flanagan’s writing and art and of his collaborations with Sheree Rose recently was recently confirmed by the acquisition of his archives by the University of Southern California. You can access information about that archive at:
http://one.usc.edu/bob-flanagan-and-sheree-rose-collection/

On the 20th anniversary of his death, I would urge those who are looking for material to analyze through the lens of disability theory or queer theory to consider visiting that archive and to get to work. In doing so, it would also be worth remembering that Flanagan is an exemplary Stand Up poet and one of the primary members of the original core group. Those of us who were here in the early and mid-1970s know the accuracy of that statement, even if editors who didn’t arrive in Los Angeles until the late 1970s prefer a version that might reflect a fear of being tainted by Flanagan’s transgressive art. In equally emphasizing his stature as a Stand Up poet, critics might also consider how his writing fits within the Confessional school of poetry, which is all too often viewed as a movement with no important contributors after 1980. How about someone taking on an article with a stark contrast: Sharon Olds versus Bob Flanagan. Now that would generate an incandescence worthy of the audacious risks that Flanagan took and lived to tell about, far longer – decades longer – than anyone ever suspected he would, even those of who feel very lucky to have heard him read his poetry or to offer up his body to the demons of pain. Suffering is not redemption, but it is hard to know what is worthy redeeming if one does not suffer to test those boundaries. Flanagan’s art and poetry offer us a chance to redraw our boundaries and set off anew.

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Books Poetry Translation

David Ulin and “Wide Awake”

January 1, 2016 – 6:28 pm

January 1, 2016 — Top Ten Picks of David Ulin; The Monolingualism of American Literature

LA Times Book Critic David Ulin has edited several anthologies himself, a fact that deserves underlining when he includes Suzanne Lummis’s Wide Awake: Poets of Los Angeles and Beyond as one of his ten favorite books published in 2015. One doesn’t have to have edited an anthology of poets to gauge the value of such an effort, but it certainly tends to make one a more judicious reader of anthologies. Lummis, too, is a veteran of this kind of editorial project; she co-edited an earlier anthology with almost the same subtitle back in the early 1990s. The high marks that Ulin gives Lummis’s latest anthology are much appreciated in the Los Angeles poetry community, if only because L.A. poets have not always had a smooth ride in the L.A. Times. In particular, one can recollect that Robert Kirsch once anointed my first anthology, The Streets Inside: Ten Los Angeles Poets (Momentum Press, 1978) as an indication of a “golden age” of Los Angeles poetry. Unfortunately, not everybody who worked at the LA Times Book Review agreed with Kirsch’s assessment, and poets were regarded as cultural orphans of their own success. I’ll put it simply: it’s nice to be appreciated again. Ulin implicitly suggests the exponential growth of the diverse scenes here by pointing out that Wide Awake is “magnificent” both in quantity (it contains “the work of more than 100 poets”) and quality (it “reveal(s) the depths and power of the city’s poetic sensibility”). That David Ulin appreciates the efforts of the diverse communities of poets in this city enough to award Lummis’s anthology a top ten pick is very gratifying, and I hope Suzanne Lummis is savoring the acknowledgement.

The last paragraph in Carolyn Kellogg’s end-of-the-year commentary in the LA Times is also worth further consideration. In referring to the choice of a Russian writer for the Nobel Prize in Literature this year, Kellogg cites an article that appeared back in 2008 in which a member of the Nobel selection committee commented that American writing is “too insular.” The charge is true, I’m afraid, though the full quotation I’ve been able to dig up is even more revealing:

“The U.S. is too isolated, too insular. They don’t translate enough and don’t really participate in the big dialogue of literature,” (Horace) Engdahl said. “That ignorance is restraining.”

The real gripe that the Swedish academy has with American writing lies in the evidence of its insularity: “They don’t translate enough.” This could be translated, so to speak, as “You don’t care about us; so why should we care about you?” Fair enough, and it brought to mind how I recently found that my most widely distributed posting in this blog for the entire year of 2015 was “Against the Monolingual Torture of Writers,” which was originally posted back in early September. For some reason, it took off in December, and had over 300 pageviews, with 161 human visits, of which 149 were new visitors to my blog. My post was firmly on the side of the Swedish academy, and perhaps it caught the attention of someone in Europe who was surprised to find an American writer at odds with his peers.

Fortunately for me, my blog is not dependent on American book publishers for advertising in order to keep itself going. If it were, I could see retribution heading my way lickety-split. Believe me, I’ve seen it happen. The announcement earlier today of the death of Natalie Cole recoiled with references to “Unforgettable,” a song that her father had made famous and which the daughter reprised by having a version in which her voice was blended in a duet with his. Back when the father-daughter version was soaring up the charts, the newspaper I was working at as a typesetter started running cartoons with a slightly satirical edge to them about the music industry. The publisher must have thought it would make his paper “different” from the other trade papers. What he didn’t count on was that you can only get away with making fun of something that everybody shares a dislike of (i.e., politicians). The music industry takes itself very seriously, and when the front page ran a cartoon of Natalie Cole saying to a skeleton figure of her father, “Hey, Dad, you’re stepping on my lines,” (or something similarly sarcastic), the music label that released Cole’s remake let my paper know that it wasn’t just cancelling advertising of that particular song in the next issue or the issue after: all advertising by that label was forthwith cancelled. Or at least that’s the version that I heard in the hallway. I do remember some rather tense editorial and salespeople faces walking past me for a week or so until the crisis was resolved. The first thing to go, of course, was the contract with the cartoonist, nor was a replacement sought.

So, yes, once again, it would make American literature more interesting if the writers here asked themselves at some point if what they are writing would at all interest someone who can only read Spanish or Chinese. Are you saying something profound enough or insightfully witty enough to merit the travail required to translate it? I do appreciate how hard it is to attain that level of writing. My first book of poems in another language has only been published after over 40 years of writing. Surely, though, those poets who have won so many more awards that I have during that time have some explanation for why their work does not seem to make a transition beyond the wall of American monolingualism.

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Ground Level Conditions Poetry

New Year’s Eve: The Big One

December 31, 2015 – 11:03 am

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

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

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

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

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

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

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