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

January 20, 2014 – 6:21 pm

Report on A TRIBUTE TO WANDA COLEMAN (Part Two)

Monday, January 20, 2014

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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Books Ground Level Conditions Performance Poetry

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

January 19, 2014 – 9:09 pm

DOWNTOWN TRIBUTE TO WANDA COLEMAN – Saturday, January 18

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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Books Poetry

Successful Kickstarter Report

January 17, 2014 – 8:56 pm

FRIDAY, January 17, 2014

I’m very pleased to report that the “Kickstarter” campaign to raise funds for Jennifer Bartlett’s biography-in-progress of Larry Eigner has been successful. I have been following the steady growth of the money pledged to her research fund, and by late this afternoon the minimum needed to make all the pledges operational was surpassed. I was fairly confident three days that I would not have to send out a last-minute appeal; by January 14, 89 backers had pledged $4,580, compared to slightly less than a week earlier (when 69 backers had pledged $3,385). Another dozen backers by late this afternoon lifted the total number of people supporting Bartlett’s project to 101. An average donation of $50 a person, therefore, has turned out to be sufficient to make this fundraiser a genuine act of community action. I send out my appreciation to everyone who helped to make this possible.

On a personal level, I worked on correcting some typographical errors that had slipped into the English text of my book that Mantis Editores will be publishing sometime this year. José Rico wrote recently to let me know that Robin and he have decided to call the bilingual collection, Pruebas ocultas, which will extend the title of my first (and only) full-length book collection into the accretion of my life’s work. They have also reiterated their desire to have me visit Mexico City and to meet and talk with poets there under the aegis of the Fundación para las Letras Mexicanas, which awarded José Rico a two-year grant to work on his poetry. Given the schedule I face at CSULB this spring together with the other events already lined up, I’m not certain when the trip to Mexico City will take place, but now I’m grateful that I got a passport again a little over four years ago and at least I don’t have to deal with that detail.

 

 

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Poetry

“Possibly So”: Wanda Coleman, Nelson Mandela, Amiri Baraka, Franklin McCain

January 11, 2014 – 10:07 pm

Saturday, January 11, 2014

I was working in my office at CSULB late this afternoon when my cell-phone rang: it was Austin Straus, and he wanted to know about possible hotel accommodations in Seattle during the AWP conference at the end of February. After we also briefly discussed next weekend’s events at the Central Library in downtown Los Angeles on Saturday and Sunday’s gathering at the Church in Ocean Park, Austin mentioned that he continues to be caught off-guard by the extent to which Wanda was recognized as a cultural force. Most recently, he had a doctor’s appointment and decided to take some of the day’s mail with him, which included a book package with a copy of the latest issue of African-American Review (volume 45, no. 4). When he sat down in the doctor’s waiting room, he began to peruse the issue, but didn’t get much further than the dedication page:

For

Wanda Coleman

and Nelson Mandela

each of whom

belonged to the world

and

now to the ages.

For those of us in Los Angeles who lived within the near order (in Henri Lefebvre’s sense) of Wanda’s visions of empowering possibilities, the apprehension of her stature never required more than the briefest of considerations. To know that others committed to social change appreciated her indefatigable passion for the poetics of justice — as only poetry can justify it — enough to include this kind of dedication page is a consolation of the first magnitude. We thank our distant friends for their tribute to our city’s most prescient poet, and confess to being deeply moved that her passing would summon the aura of such a famous farewell. To continue that echo, I would add that a valiant fortitude marked Wanda’s life and transformation into one who deserves the full measure of our devotion.

The news has also arrived of the death of Amiri Baraka, another of the soul sustaining voices that refuse to make things easy for anyone’s social critique. Nor does the perishing seem to show any sense of pausing: Franklin McCain has died, too. Such profound intersections are rare, and ask to be heeded. One thinks of how Baraka’s life included lunch with Frank O’Hara, at the end of which O’Hara meditates on the likelihood to which our lives can overlap with others in even a minimal manner. “Possibly so.” Franklin McCain’s desire to eat lunch at any place that served the comfort of nourishment had more ramifications that he ever anticipated. That refusal ended up forcing a society to ask itself if other ideals were worth risking one’s life for. “Possibly so.”

 

 

 

 

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Poetry

The Next Poet Laureate of Los Angeles

January 9, 2014 – 10:00 am

Thursday, January 9, 2014

The Next Poet Laureate of Los Angeles

The past year has been a difficult one for the poetry communities of Los Angeles. In Wanda Coleman’s case, many of us knew that she was ill, though we did not anticipate a sudden change for the worse. On a nearby parallel track, the situation of our first poet laureate, Eloise Klein Healy, has also been on our minds for the past nine months, though we had no forewarning whatsoever of the precipitous erosion of her artistic and personal capacities. In the week before the spring break (2013) at CSU Long Beach, Eloise gave a lively and vigorous poetry reading, and it turned out to be one of her last public presentations as a poet laureate. Soon after that, she fell seriously ill and has subsequently had to resign from that post. The news is now official and reporter Pat Morrison’s account of this very unfortunate twist in Eloise’s life can be found in Wednesday’s edition of the Los Angeles Times. I thank George Drury Smith and Jim Krusoe for calling my attention to this article, which we hope someday will have a follow-up story in which we learn that her determined efforts to reclaim her considerable imaginative powers have beaten considerable odds.

http://fw.to/StKb7Gj

With Wanda Coleman’s passing, I cannot think of anyone who would be more deserving and capable of following Eloise as an inspiring and exemplary Los Angeles poet than Suzanne Lummis. I have noted how Brendan Constantine has been working the circuit the past several months and has seemed to serve as a kind of substitute laureate in maintaining the kind of pace that might be expected of someone who is the actual laureate. He would certainly be someone in the future who should be considered for the post, but there is no one else as qualified and ready to take on the job as Suzanne is and I hope the mayor of Los Angeles comes to the same conclusion and helps restore the poet laureate position to full deployment. Full employment for the post remains a distantly enchanting goal.

 

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Poetry

The 2014 George Drury Smith Award

January 4, 2014 – 9:21 am

January 4, 2014 — George Drury Smith Award

Beyond Baroque’s Winter 2014 reading schedule arrived in the mail the day before and folded into it was a separate sheet with the first public announcement of the poets who will be the recipients of awards at Beyond Baroque’s annual banquet and fundraiser, which has moved from mid-summer to the first week of April this year. I am grateful that Richard Modiano has changed the date of this event, since I was never able to attend it the first three years. I’ve been teaching a fiction writing class for teenagers at the Idyllwild Summer Arts since 1995, and that job is just far enough away that I could not easily get down the mountain, attend the event, drive home to Long Beach to sleep overnight, and then hustle back to Idyllwild to resume the next week’s instruction.

I brought up the logistics of all this when Richard quietly informed me before a reading at Beyond Baroque several months ago that I was the poet who had been selected by BB’s board of directors to receive the George Drury Smith award in 2014. When I mentioned the difficulty that being in Idyllwild posed for my attendance at the event, Richard mentioned that the board had decided to change the date of the banquet to coincide with National Poetry Month. I’m gratified, therefore, not only to have been chosen for this award, but to know that I will be more easily able to attend this event in future years.

I’m not the only one being honored, however. Rick Lupert is also being recognized with the “Distinguished Service Award,” which I hereby propose should be named (and retroactively bestowed with the full name) as the Alexandra Garrett Distinguished Service Award. I can’t think of anyone else who gave Beyond Baroque so much substantial and continuous service as Sandy Garrett (1926-1991). In fact, should she have lived into her nineties (as my mother has), I can’t think of anyone who would have been more deserving of being the first recipient of any awards ceremony held by Beyond Baroque. That’s a decision to be made by the board of directors at BB, however. I make this suggestion, however, in hopes of getting the discussion of this idea underway.

Here are the details for the upcoming event:

BEYOND BAROQUE LITERARY / ARTS CENTER’s

4th Annual Awards Dinner

This year’s honorees are:

William Mohr

George Drury Smith Award

&

Rick Lupert

Distinguished Service Award

Sunday, April 6, 2014 , 6:00 – 9:00 p.m.

Church in Ocean Park

235 Hill Street, Santa Monica, CA 90405

Tickets: $65 per person

Tickets may be reserved by emailing Beyond Baroque at:

specialevents@beyondbaroque.org or at Eventbrite: www.4thbbawards.eventbrite.com

 

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Music Performance Poetry

Bob Flanagan’s Birthday Bash

December 27, 2013 – 12:56 pm

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

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

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

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

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Poetry

“Becoming Beat and Post-Beat in L.A.”

December 18, 2013 – 10:38 am

Wednesday, December 18, 2013

The most recent issue of 5_Trope, guest-edited by Doren Robbins, is now posted on-line. I believe the magazine started in print format, but like many other literary magazines (especially those without institutional support) eventually availed itself of the internet. 5_Trope describes itself in its heading as “An Online Journal of Poetry and Prose.”

http://5trope.com/

The current issue (#27) contains poems by Lyle Daggett, Sharon Doubiago, Martin Espada, Ray Gonzalez, Susan Gubernat, Uri Hertz, Andrea Hollander, Christopher Howell, Stephen Kessler, Bill Mohr, Ed Pavlic, Carlos Reyes, Doren Robbins, John Solt, Julia Stein, David Swanger, Michael Warr, Cecilia Woloch, and Gary Young. (The contributors are presented in alphabetical order in the table of contents.) Several of the poets also have a review or essay in the issue. Last spring I gave a lecture at UCLA’s Special Collections library as part of the Bonnie Cashin Lecture series, which 5_Trope has now made available on-line.

“Becoming Beat and Post-Beat in L.A.: Strange Facts and Fictions about the Los Angeles Poetry Renaissance”

http://5trope.com/newissue/bill-mohr-becoming-beat-and-post-beat-in-l-a/

 

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Ground Level Conditions Music Performance Poetry

Justice for Victor Jara

December 14, 2013 – 12:18 pm

Saturday, December 14, 2013

Broken Hands Play Guitars – Rebel Diaz

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

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

For the Springsteen video, go to:

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

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

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

 

 

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Books Poetry

“Gaze” — Christopher Howell

December 10, 2013 – 10:04 am

Tuesday, December 10, 2013

Christopher Howell’s Gaze  (Milkweed Editions, 2012)

I once heard Richard Kostelanetz propose, at an event at the Bowery Poetry Club in NYC, a guideline for determining the stature or significance of a poet: someone who has several memorable poems in addition to the title poems of his or her books. Christopher Howell’s Gaze certainly meets the standard of having poems that match or exceed the quality of the title poem. In particular, “The Mystery of Names” is one of the best poems I’ve read in a long, long time. It’s almost eerie how the first half of the story-line of that poem catches and blends together a series of experiences that will be very familiar to most readers: a new year’s eve party, sleeping over at a friend’s house. Reading “The Mystery of Names” is almost like a dream-like, deja vu experience, out of which an epiphany flows which takes one’s breath away, and then restores it.

Although Howell’s poem has nothing in common with the structural form of the blues, “The Mystery of Names” similarly encapsulates so much knowledge of the fundamental conditions of human consciousness that it accomplishes that rare feat of arousing and satisfying one’s craving for wisdom; in other words, it attains a resemblance of universality. It does this without any pretension whatsoever or posing in the manner of Rilke. Instead, the quiet candor of its subtle transitions enables a reader to trust the poem completely. The visionary restraint of this poem is nothing short of astonishing. Not many young poets, even as they ripen towards their mid-30s, can realize how many years one has to work to perfect the skills that Howell displays in “The Mystery of Names.”  For once, I’m grateful to be old enough to begin to apprehend the full measure of a poem on this scale.

There are, of course, other very substantial poems in “Gaze,” such as “The Long Arm of the Lake,” with its audaciously blunt conclusion, but “Mystery of Names” is a mouth-dropper. The first time I read it, I had to put the book down and just walk away and let it flow in and out and around me, and then back into me again. I only needed to read it once for that to happen; it just kept floating alongside me for the next couple days. It was that stunning.

Over the years, I have not seen an abundance of anthologies with Howell’s poems, an omission that needs to be rectified. He has published ten books, so one would expect more visibility for a poet who has won two NEA fellowships and had several Pushcart Prize credits. One major obstacle to wider recognition is that his predominant publishers are considerably west of Pittsburgh. I’m happy that Milkweed Editions has made his poetry part of their booklist. One of the poets long championed by Milkweed, Jim Moore, has long been one of my favorite American poets. At this point, I can’t think of too many readings that would be much better than hearing Jim Moore and Chris Howell back to back. Come to think of it, one could build a very interesting poetry festival around those two poets.

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