Friday, April 25
Carlye Archibeque just sent along a short video clip that provides some highlights of this year’s Beyond Baroque awards ceremony at the Church in Ocean Park. I’m posting the link so that those of you who could not make the event can get a taste of the setting and the presentation. Thanks again to all who attended this fundraiser.
Monday, April 21, 2014
http://soundcloud.com/arroyo-arts-poets
On Saturday, April 19, the Arroyo Arts Collective held a Poetry in the Windows walk in which poets whose poems had been selected for display in store front windows walked up and down N. Figueroa Street and read their poems. Linda Hoag, a fine poet herself, has just sent me a link to the recordings of the poems that are imprinted into the corner of the posters for downloading.
In addition to my poem, “Scorpio in the Summer,” you can also hear poems by Linda Albertano, Lois P. Jones, Jenny Factor, Helene Cardona, Erika Ayon, Yvonne Estrada, Liz Gonzalez, Steve Kowit, Victoria Melekian, Ceci Peri, Marilyn Robertson, Candace Pearson, Sherman Pearl, Charles Harper Webb, Sonya Sones, Mary Torregrassa, Thom Cagle., and Charles Hood.
Treat yourself to a half-hour of auditory bliss. I heard many of these poems read outside such stores such as the Bird Man Pet (Store), Delicias Bakery, Quick’r Print’r, the Slow Culture Gallery, Highland Appliances, Folliero’s Pizza, and the Bearded Beagle. Appropriately enough, I read my poem on the sidewalk outside the Twinkletoes Dance Studio and I thank the owner for putting my poem in her window. I am hardly along in my gratitude; all the poets appreciate the storeowners who have helped make our poems visible as well as giving us a platform to make them audible.
Here’s the link:
Easter Sunday, April 20, 2014
Several of the poets whose poems were selected for exhibition in storefront windows on Figueroa, in Highland Park, went to a restaurant after we made a tour of the posted poems yesterday afternoon. One of the people serving our table of 10 was a young woman who had just arrived in town three weeks ago. Upon learning of what brought us together on this particular afternoon, she asked about our favorite poets and Suzanne Lummis promptly rattled off a list that went from T.S. Eliot to Denise Duhamel. She seemed content with a single response and valiantly tried to show that she, too, just read. She knew of Alice Walker and how Zora Neale Hurston’s work was rediscovered, but she seemed to think that Hurston had died very recently. She had not ever heard of the late Wanda Coleman, whose death and final reading at the Last Bookstore in downtown Los Angeles was recorded in one of the poems in a storefront window.
One poet I would have added to Suzanne’s list of favorite poets, which also included Weldon Kees, would have been Harry Northup, who sent me a recent poem this morning that is so deeply moving and full of solemn exhileration that I asked his permission to reprint it in my blog. He has kindly sent his permission, so it is with great pleasure that I celebrate this holiday with you by sending out this poem.
For My Love Sleeping
What do I see but the pressures
beating down
From all directions on the blue stone
with bright spots like burning coals
What do I see but headdresses & peacocks’
spread tails
An enormous rain
A sword as place a lightning point
What do I hear but flowers blooming
Like tails reaching upward
Like lights as bracelets forming
a bridge on water’s surface
What do I believe but a flower
in the moon
A shadow blocking its width in
front of the sun
To say who’s right would be to
recognize a sunflower fronting
my face close as a lion’s open mouth
To welcome would be to listen
To focus within the blue sky’s cycle
To turn within its circle
To remember missing the answer
that followed reason’s logic
To count stands in the middle
To find means to rescue
Stay within & not hide
To not escape means forever
To hand over above hands reaching
from the fire
The vase of flowers & clouds in the
sky remain lonely daffodils
Remembrance offers concision
the center of the propeller
Within stillness desire surenders
What desire has no fruit
What silence ignores hunger
What red flowers transform dusk
to death with twin yellow brightness
Glow dusk with white doves in trees
3 27 14
Harry E. Northup
http://timestimes3.blogspot.com/2014/03/for-my-love-sleeping-by-harry-e-northup.html?view=sidebar
About 80 people showed up for Beyond Baroque’s fundraiser at the Church in Ocean Park. This annual event is beginning to gather some degree of momentum. As Brendan Constantine, who was an absolutely pitch perfect m.c. last night put it, it’s become more of a family reunion than anything else. It was a delight and honor to witness Rick Lupert being honored for all of his work on poetrysuperhighway and at the Cobalt Cafe. I’ve been reading his “Death of a Mauve Bat” ever since reading with him at Beyond Baroque on Saturday afternoon and finding poems that manage to find the one subtle edge of any given experience that everyone else would overlook. Mike the Poet Sonksen gave Rick a fine introductory welcome.
Linda and I sat alongside Holly Prado, Harry Northup and Doug Knott. Harry led up to the presentation of my plaque by first reading a poem he had written for me back in 1997 and then shared some comments made by Holly, Diane Wakoski, Phoebe MacAdams, and Jim Krusoe. When I got up behind the pulpit, I couldn’t resist simply being quiet for a short moment and taking it in. I remain grateful to each of you who showed up last night. Here’s what I had written out on two sheets of paper:
Thank you, Board of Directors of Beyond Baroque and all the staff. In particular, thank you, Richard Modiano for getting this award established, and Brendan Constantine and Harry Northup for your introductions tonight. Above all, thank you to George Drury Smith, for making all this possible in the first place.
I was at a reading by Ellyn Maybe at Beyond Baroque a couple of years ago during which she proposed that “one becomes a poet in order to meet the people one wishes that one could have gone to high school with.” Tonight is a perfect example of the truth of that statement. I wish to thank the Class of 2014 for choosing me as your valedictorian and to say that I couldn’t be happier than to have Rick Lupert as the salutarian.
In accepting this award, I cannot refrain from sharing my pleasure at how my complementary role as a literary historian requires once again the conjunction of place and memory. I lived up the street from this Church, at 512 Hill St., Apartment 4, for twenty years and it was there that I edited and published Momentum magazine and Momentum Press, which has deservedly attained the aura of a minor literary legend. It happened right here in this neighborhood. I had moved to Ocean Park shortly before this church was re-opened under the direction of a young Methodist minister, Jim Conn, and I became a member of his renewed congregation. To have this gathering here means more to me than I can say, since I gave the debut reading of my first effort at a long poem, “Your Move” here in this very space in the early 1980s. In addition, it was in this very sanctuary that I was dancing one evening in early 1982 and heard the words, “hidden proofs,” spoken by my muse to mind’s ear. Those words became the title of my first, full-length of book of poems and have become the title (Pruebas Ocultas) of a volume of poems translated by Jose Rico and Robin Myers, forthcoming from Mantis Editores in 2015.
Despite all these fond associations, however, the Church in Ocean Park, was not the cynosure of my poetic development after I graduated from UCLA in 1970. The Beyond Baroque workshop, led by the John Harris and the late Joseph Hansen, was where I served an apprenticeship as an aspiring poet and Beyond Baroque’s New Comp Graphics was where I typeset and pasted-up my books for Momentum press. Beyond Baroque’s reading series was the venue at which I first had a crowd of over 50 people listen to an extended reading of my work, and Beyond Baroque was the first place to offer me a chance to teach poetry on a volunteer basis to adults in a weekly workshop. In other words, everything I have managed to accomplish has had the flow of BB carrying me forward. I can only hope that some of the younger poets in the audience will find in Beyond Baroque during the second half-century of its programming and services to the community an equally vital repository of knowledge and inspiration.
There are a number of people who have been especially supportive over the years, the first of whom I wish to mention is the late Leland Hickman, whose memory is revered by several people in this room, including Holly Prado and Harry Northup, as well as the late Wanda Coleman. Other people whose support has been absolutely crucial include Jim Krusoe, Paul Vangelisti, Suzanne Lummis, Laurel Ann Bogen, Brooks and LeaAnn Roddan, Alicia Ostriker, Jack Grapes, Cecilia Woloch, Harvey Robert Kubernik, and Anthony Seidman. I am an academic, and the security this profession has given Linda and me at a very late stage in the game would not be possible without the assistance of colleagues and comrades such as George Hart at CSU Long Beach, Michael Davidson and Donald Wesling at UC San Diego, Steve and Rise Axelrod at UC Riverside, and especially David James at USC. I also want to thank my translators in Mexico, Jose Rico and Robin Myers, for believing in my poetry.
There are a number of people who can’t be here tonight because they are no longer alive or no longer live in this neighborhood or in the Los Angeles area. Their presence is here in my heart tonight. Finally, I want to thank Janet Klein for singing at this event. She sang at my wedding to Linda Fry over 12 years ago and it feels part of a lovely unbroken circle to hear her once again.
Named and unnamed, equally, thank you all for being here. Onward.
Onward.
SATURDAY, APRIL 5, 2014
Bill Mohr and Rick Lupert
Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Center
681 Venice Blvd.
Venice, CA 90291
(301) 822-3006
FREE
This will be the first time I’ve ever read with Rick, who heads up poetrysuperhighway and the Cobalt Cafe Reading Series. I’m looking forward to the entire weekend.
The past month has been a whirlwind, starting with the trip to AWP convention in Seattle in late February and the first two days of March. Linda and I have attended several events at art galleries and the Autry Museum in what little time is left over from teaching and committee work. I have some partial entries typed up that I hope to insert in the coming weeks.
Onward!
February 20, 2014
The past several weeks have been very busy at school. This semester I am teaching a graduate seminar in 20th century American literature that I’ve never taught before, so I’ve been kept busier than usual in preparing for my classes. Linda and I have had the chance to eat out more often than usual, in part because a couple of good new restaurants have opened nearby. Portfolio Cafe at the corner of Junipero and Fourth Street most certainly be getting close to its 25th anniversary; it recently underwent a renovation that mainly seemed directed at shedding any image it might have of a 20th century coffeehouse. The rear area still retains its laid-back ambiance, but the front now seems to possess more of a Peet’s polish, though still having some measure of individuality. The storefronts next to Portfolio’s, which I read at back in 1993 with Harry Northup and Linda Albertano, had been vacant for almost two years, or so it seems, but very recently two restaurants have opened up, one featuring an Argentinian menu and the other specializing in Peruvian cuisine. We had a free meal at the latter a couple of days before it officially opened because the owners apparently wanted to conduct a trial run of the kitchen. We can’t wait to go back.
Bridge Markland presented a one-actress performance of Robbers in a Box last this past week at CSULB. The advance publicity hinted that she was adept at playing both female and male roles, and perhaps she is accomplished in that regard if she avails herself of speaking in her native language. Unfortunately, she presented what amounted to a karaoke version of Schiller’s drama. Recorded voices intoned the dialogue as Markland toyed with puppets and a wig to enact an adult variation of a child’s fantasy of theater. Indeed, the title of her evening suggested the mise-en-scene, several short linked walls were unfolded as to resemble a large cardboard container, such as the kind a child might appropriate from the leftovers of a moving-van. Markland use of that space would have been much more lively if she had spent time thinking about ways to incorporate that element into a metatheatrical meditation rather than assembling a collage of pop music songs that rarely seemed to apply to the mood of the moment in the play.
Linda and I saw Sarah Jones in a performance of her Bridge & Tunnel in NYC, and the gap between the Markland’s and Jones’s quality of performance and talent is enormous. I still fondly recollect the manner in which Sarah Jones managed to play a variety of roles with extraordinary dexterity. I would hope to have a chance to see her again. Markland’s performance was simply another evening of theater aspiring to be memorable, but never getting past the first whiff of possibility.
Far, far more accomplished than Markland’s staging was a one-time performance of Langston Hughes’s Ask Your Mama, It opened with a trumpet solo by Ron McCurdy, who walked out of a darkened passageway to the side of the auditorium’s seating onto the stage in a elegant, understated arrival. McCurdy led his band through the paces of a dozen or so compositions with joyful affirmation of one of Hughes’s lesser-known works. Actor and director Malcolm-Jamal Warner read Hughes’ book-length poem. There were several very witty moments in the text. Hughes recounts Louie Armstrong being asked if he could read music. “Not enough to hurt my playing,” Armstrong replied. (That response reminds me of the section in WC Williams’s Spring & All in which the assessment of technique runs like this: “That sheet stuff’s a lot of cheese.”)
The film collage that accompanied the music and reading of the poem added little to the public performance, which was free and open to the public. I’m happy to report that the Bovard Auditorium was almost completely full. We sat in the first section of the balcony and there are were only a handful of empty sets behind us in the rear balcony.
Thursday, January 23, 2014
By the time that I got up to speak late Sunday afternoon at the Church in Ocean Park, I knew that the event had been more than long enough to reaffirm Wanda Coleman’s manifold contributions to Los Angeles literature. I cut my presentation short in order that the afternoon could accommodate the three or four remaining speakers. I would have loved to have read a poem by her from “Poetry Loves Poetry,” for instance.
One of my favorites is an early poem called “Word Game.” Its ending seems to allude to Zhuangzi’s famous question about reality being a dream within a dream. Coleman’s uncertainty is not the self-serving cynicism of the fatuous postmodern. It seems, instead, to meditate on the pleasure of the imagination’s essential, chiastic gift exchange, Wanda, your poems will keep us dreaming that we are the poets we dreamed of becoming when we were young.
WORD GAME
once upon a time, i a poet, transformed myself into a poem
i was very happy
my line was intriguing and audacious
it could take many forms – a gun, a sword, a heart that throbbed
a hand gentle as a kiss
it could express any emotion i sought to convey, as well as
i could master it
then one day i was published
now i do not know whether i am a poet writing a poem
or a poem writing a poet
(Mad Dog, Black Lady 97)
Wednesday, January 22, 2014
Race, Class, and Fracking: Stuart Hall, Wanda Coleman, and Alfred Kreymborg
“Race is the modality in which class is lived,” Stuart Hall proposed as a fundamental component of social analysis. Wanda Coleman was one of the most important poets who dramatized in her poems and prose the compressed struggle to make that modality audibly visible to a variety of communities. Today, I wish to dig back to a book that was published the year that Wanda was born for a passage that brings to our attention a passage of writing by Abraham Lincoln that needs to be quoted as often as the Gettysburg Address.
My decision to present excerpt from Kreymborg’s book-length poem today is in part because I want to keep the extraction of oil by fracking in California (and elsewhere) as a crucial, turning-point issue in our ecology. Governor Brown has declared a state of emergency in regards to the drought, yet he has been very supportive of the corporation-sponsored drive to accelerate the deployment of fracking as a profit-making enterprise. It is my understanding that a minimum of two and a half MILLION gallons of water must be injected in an oil well in order to siphon off deep deposits of oil. At the same time, the ordinary citizens of Long Beach are being told to cut their average daily use of water from 114 gallons to under a hundred. Kreymborg’s call for a new political party has never been more pertinent. We cannot possibly hope that the so-called Democratic party really wishes to slake our thirst for ecological justice.
Finally, in bringing this matter back to the top of the list of concerns I wish to address in this blog, I need also to remind the reader of what should be obvious but cannot be overemphasized: the impact of pollution on communities of color is far more disproportionate than any “neutral” demographics would lead one to expect. The corrosive effects of ecologically damaging production processes on communities of color show up, in particular, in areas that affect public health. Wanda Coleman’s protests against the inherent racism of a capitalist economic system are not just against the most visible agents of that repression (e.g., the police force), but ultimately raise substantial questions about the practices of those who police our ecological well-being.
from MAN AND SHADOW: An Allegory: Second Movement, Part V (“Another Testament”) by Alfred Kreymborg. (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1946, 132-135)
All of us know the Gettysburg address
And how it was composed in tragic haste.
Stylists riddled the thing who made their prose
Much more cultivated and verbose
Than Lincoln had the time for. Yet it seems
That most of us today have never read
A pregnant message Lincoln sent to Congress
During the War, a speech men now suppress
Or fail to quote in after-dinner speeches.
Loving the truth and not expediency,
I read it aloud at a school for debutantes.
Oddly enough, I was a teacher then
Giving a course in our native poetry
In relation to our lives and destiny.
I felt so much of Lincoln in the style
Of Whitman’s Leaves and biblical tone they shared,
I couldn’t resist the occasion and therefore read
Lines containing a worthy parallel:
‘I see in the near future a crisis approaching
that unnerves me, and causes me to tremble
for the safety of my country. As a result
of war, corporations have been enthroned,
and an era of corruption in high places
will follow, and the money power of
the country will endeavor to prolong
its reign by working on the prejudices
of the people until all the wealth
is aggregate in just a few hands,
and the republic is destroyed.’
There was a pause,
A puzzled hush, until some bright girl said,
‘It sounds like free verse to me,’ and another,
‘No, it’s Karl Marx –‘ she said this angrily.
‘No,’ said I, ‘it’s President Lincoln – Listen!’
‘Capital is only the fruit of labour,
and could not have existed had labour not
first existed. Labour is the superior
of capital and deserves much the higher
consideration. I bid the laboring people
beware of surrendering the power they
possess, and which if surrendered will be used
to shut the door of advancement for such as they,
and fix new disabilities and burdens
upon them all till liberty shall be lost…’
Where are we now or whither shall we go
With so much in the air like Lincoln’s age?
. . . .
I’m quite against a double-party system
That worked in our youth; that day is out of date.
….
We need some check beyond the yearly check
Demos employs beyond his chosen column,
Or a progressive party deep enough
To keep our Constitution and Bill of Rights
In shape from first to last against miscarriage
In Washington lobbies and the subtle chains
Of the yellow press and purple radios.
Inside our double system we need a third,
Or one endowed with every right to say
A word for workers here and everywhere.
Tuesday, January 21, 2014
In Memoriam
Today, I walked with a nuance; it has its vocation
& is of the spirit.
Where the muse allows us to go, blesses the spirit.
To not bully or order words around,
To not interrupt words.
Marriage was a waist around her, sheltering.
With her fires & flowers blooming
adoration aside, she shelters our
journey, beckons, subsides, the quarter
moon invites star-shaped sea flowers mighty mist.
What do we have but a road & a sky.
The red sash dashes towards the door & a hand
made of red roses sends childhood pictures.
The nuance is there is no childhood; it’s a mint
green flower at the pool’s end. For within the opening I
leave the nuance, sit in shadow, face hidden.
Lexington & Kenmore, I look up & all the lights in the sky
are Wanda’s eyes.
11 28 13
Harry E. Northup
(Published with the permission of the author, Harry E. Northup. Copyright Harry Northup. All rights reserved to the author.)
About Bill Mohr