October 25, 2022
Twenty five years ago, today, I was sitting in a seminar room in the Literature building at the University of California, San Diego. I had been accepted into the program at age 49. During the first four weeks of the ten weeks-long quarter, the other eleven students who had been admitted into that year’s first year class had all assumed I was around 42 years old. One other student, though, Tania, had mentioned the week before that her birthday was on October 25. “So’s mine,” I said. “I’m turning 50.” They looked at me as if in slight astonishment that someone so old would start a Ph.D. program, especially one with only a B.A. “Better than living out of one’s car,” I said. I was an typesetter who had become unemployed at the very moment when computers eviscerated that occupation.
Seven years later, I was teaching ESL students in Long Island, New York how to spell “above.” It was hardly a situation that justified my choice to get a Ph.D. I was determined, however, to find some way to revise my dissertation into a book that would pay tribute to the poetry scenes in Los Angeles over the past half-century. The first time I had applied to the NEH for support, the evaluation said, “Too bad he doesn’t have a Ph.D. That would give us confidence he could finish this very interesting project.”
When I applied the second time, they still said, “No.”
Despite the imposition of overwhelming committee work at CSULB between 2006 and 2010, I managed to get my book published by he University of Iowa Press in 2011. The NEH’s expert panel had predicted publication by “a minor university press.” So much for their experts’ ability to assess the cultural work being done on the West Coast.
On this occasion, therefore, I wish to thank the friends and comrades of the past half-century for all you have to inspire the journey I have undertaken the past half-century. I hold you close in the heart of my memories.
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Post-Script:
Among other people who called today was Paul Vangelisti, who happened to mention that Christopher Knight had written an appreciation of the late Peter Schjeldahl for the L.A. Times. While it’s true that Schjeldahl stopped publishing any poems he wrote in the years after he began specializing in art criticism, I doubt he shared Knight’s view of poetry and poets. Here, for the record:
https://www.laweekly.com/perhaps-these-are-not-poetic-times-at-all
“I try not to read poetry, not even dead people’s poetry, It’s hard to explain why. I find something embarrassing about poetry. It’s such a weird, atavistic thing to do.” — Christopher Knight, L.A. Times art critic
About Bill Mohr