Category Archives: Poetry Readings

Anthologies Books Poetry Poetry Readings

A Poet in His Youth: Reading in NYC; October, 1977

Wednesday, January 9, 2019

In the course of editing Momentum magazine in the mid-1970s, I began to realize that a new anthology of Los Angeles poets was needed to reflect the growing scenes. I took it upon myself to test this material out “on the road,” first with a reading in Boulder, Colorado, and then with a reading at Bragr Times Bookstore in NYC, in late October, 1977. At both places I read the work of Leland Hickman, Jim Krusoe, Peter Levitt, Holly Prado, Harry Northup, Dennis Ellman, Eloise Klein Healy, and Sandi Tanhauser, the last of whom read with me in Boulder, Colorado. The anthology I eventually put together was The Streets Inside: Ten Los Angeles Poets (1978). It was officially published at the very end of December, 1978, and there was a party at my apartment in Ocean Park which was more crowded than I ever anticipated. I believe that it was at that party that Jim Krusoe met Michael Silverblatt for the first time.

Four months later, Robert Kirsch ran a review in the LA Times that called my anthology indicative of a “golden age” in Los Angeles poetry. Other reviews by Robert Peters, Stephen Kessler, and Laurel Ann Bogen soon appeared. I realized as time went by that I really should have

Here are some photographs of me reading in NYC, taken by Reavis Hilz-Ward.

Bragr Times - 3

Bragr Times - 1

Bragr Times - 2

Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Center Books Performance Poetry Poetry Readings

More BB Gala Photographs

Beyond Baroque’s 50th anniversary gala event managed to be as successful as it was due to a number of facilitators, one of whom was Mike Bonin, the Los Angeles Councilperson representing the 11th district. Mr. Bonin’s assistance enabled Beyond Baroque to hold the event outdoors, at night, under a tent put up on a public parking lot adjacent to SPARC and behind the Pacific Resident Theater. In celebrating this anniversary, one thing that was not mentioned was how much Mike Bonin’s predecessor, the late Bill Rosendahl, advocated for Beyond Baroque so that it could be assured of a home at the Venice City Hall well into the future. It was due to the hard work of Fred Dewey and Bill Rosendahl that Beyond Baroque was given a 25 year lease late in the last decade.

Mike Bonin - Gala
(Mike Bonin)

In addition to Exene Cervenka and John Doe, here are some other poets and musicians who contributed to an extraordinary evening of imaginative affirmation:

Will Alexander -- BB Gala 1
(Will Alexander)

Kamau - BB Gala 1
(Kamau Daáood)

Trio - BB Gala -3
(Dwight Trible; John Densmore; Bobby Bradford)

Trio - BB - 1
(standing, left to right: Kamau Daáood, reading his poetry; Dwight Tribble; Bobby Bradford; in rear, on drums, John Densmore)

Densmore Finishing Set
(John Densmore)

Matt Watt -- BB Gala 1
(Mike Watt, center stage)

Chris D
(Chris D. and Julie Christensen)

The entire evening, of course, would have been impossible for the founder of Beyond Baroque to imagine back in the late 1960s. The organization was surviving because of his devotion as well as the volunteer labor of Alexandra Garrett, Jim Krusoe, and Lynn Shoemaker, supplemented by a steady trickle of envelopes with $5.00 donations from readers of its early publications. One of the first items of the evening was the presentation of an award to Beyond Baroque’s founder, George Drury Smith.
GDS - BB Gala
(GSD, left)

Also, in attendance, were other people who have played significant roles in the emergence of several communities of poets in Southern California. Jack Skelley, for instance, is a poet, musician, and songwriter who ran the NewComp Graphic Center in the 1980s at Beyond Baroque, and organized a memorable series of musical events, under the title Beyond Barbecue. Jack performed a song, “Fun to be Dead,” he wrote with Bob Flanagan the following weekend during a retrospective gathering of poets associated with Beyond Baroque.

I am also including some photographs of those in attendance at the tables, some of whom would take the stage to make moving acceptance speeches. If there is not a close-up photograph of Viggo Mortensen on stage, for instance, it is simply because I did not want to intrude on him. His observation in his speech that he chose to work in Los Angeles when he was “unknown” because he had a “freedom to create” that he did not find available in New York City confirmed the long-held assessment of an earlier generation of poets who gathered at Beyond Baroque.

Pedro-Paul-Viggo-Exene
(foreground, l-r, Linda Fry; Pedro Arujo; Paul Vangelisti; sitting and standing behind Pedro Arujo are Viggo Mortensen and Exene Cervenka)

Jack S - BB Gala 1
(Jack Skelley)

Linda Fry-Pedro-Paul
(Linda Fry; Pedro Arujo; Paul Vangelisti)

Molly B - BB Gala
(Molly Bendall, center)

Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Center Books Music Poetry Readings

Exene Cervenka and John Doe — Four Gala Photographs

Saturday, December 15, 2018

One of the highlights of the recent 50th anniversary gala celebration of Beyond Baroque was a brief reading by Exene Cervenka and John Doe of their poetry, as well as a performance of three of their songs as a finale for the entire event. I was sitting close enough to be able to share four photographs of these very special moments.

Once again, these two artists significantly contributed to the enduring success of Beyond Baroque. In point of fact, there would never have been a 50th anniversary celebration if the band X had not stepped up and done a fundraiser for Beyond Baroque in the mid-1980s. The institution would have folded then, and now be only a distant memory. Exene and John seem very modest about their contribution, but I will not by shy about saying it: they have my deepest admiration.

For those not familiar with anthologies of Los Angeles poets, by the way, I would mention that I included both Exene Cervenka and John Doe in “POETRY LOVES POETRY”: An Anthology of Los Angeles Poets (Santa Monica: Momentum Press, 1985). This anthology also included poems by Wanda Coleman, Kate Braverman, Laurel Ann Bogen, James Krusoe, Paul Vangelisti, Martha (Lifson) Ronk, Charles Bukowski, John Thomas, Dennis Phillips, Michael Lally, Ron Koertge, Aleida Rodriguez, Suzanne Lummis, Doren Robbins, Dennis Cooper, David Trinidad, Ed Smith, Michelle T. Clinton, Bob Flanagan, Jack Skelley, Holly Prado, Harry Northup, Peter Levitt, Leland Hickman, Bob Peters, Peter Schjeldahl, Max Benavidez, Peter Schneider, Austin Straus, Murray Mednick, Dave Alvin, and many others.

Exene Reading Her Poetry

John - Exene - Poetry - 2

John and Exene - Poetry

Exene - John singing

(c) copyright Bill Mohr 2018

Books Poetry Readings Translation

The “Headwaters / Manantiales” Reading / Art Tour

WHAT BOOKS / GLASS TABLE COLLECTIVE
is proud to announce the publication of

The Headwaters of Nirvana / Los Manantiales del Nirvana:
Reassembled Poems

by Bill Mohr
(a bilingual edition translated by Jose Luis Rico and Robin Myers)

THE HEADWATERS OF NIRVANA / Los Manantiales del Nirvana is an expanded version of Pruebas Ocultas, a bilingual edition of Bill Mohr’s poems published in Mexico by Bonobos Editores. Both editions reflect the translators’ preferences; in selecting these poems, Jose Luis Rico and Robin Myers aspire to share their perspectives of a poet who is exceptionally difficult to classify. Touching on a multitude of tender as well as sardonic themes, Mohr’s poems are most often associated with a contumacious West Coast poetics centered in Los Angeles. While Mohr has vigorously championed his fellow poets since the early 1970s as an editor, publisher, critic, and literary historian, The Headwaters of Nirvana surpasses his other noteworthy achievements. Mohr now stands poised to claim an enduring place among the handful of American poets whose work will continue to be acknowledged on an international level. As Margarita Cuellar observed in selecting Pruebas Ocultas as one of the two dozen best books of poetry published in Mexico in 2015, “Si hay una palabra qui identifique sus textos esta podria ser ‘vitalidad’.”

The ”Headwaters / Manantiales” Tour

Long Beach Open Studio Tour
Painting by Linda Fry and Bill Mohr
Artist Co-Op Gallery, Studio #2
1330 Gladys Avenue
Long Beach, CA 90804
Saturday, October 20, Noon – 1:30 p.m.
Sunday, October 21; Noon – 2:30 p.m.

POETRY READING: New Unpublished Poems by Bill Mohr
El Segundo Public Library
Saturday, October 20 – 3 p.m.
(Reading with Elena Karina Byrne, Suzanne Lummis, and Gabriel Meyer)

Long Beach Open Studio Tour
Paintings by Linda Fry and Bill Mohr
Artist Co-Op Gallery, Studio #2
1330 Gladys Avenue
Long Beach, CA 90804
Saturday, October 27, Noon – 5:00 p.m.
Sunday, October 28; Noon – 5:00 p.m.

WHAT BOOKS FALL DEBUT READING
Book Launch: The Headwaters of Nirvana / Los Manantiales del Nirvana
Bill Mohr (also featuring poet Paul Lieber)
Skylight Book Store
1818 N. Vermont Avenue
Los Angeles, CA
Sunday, October 21, 2018 – 5 p.m.

BEYOND BAROQUE — POETRY READING
The Headwaters of Nirvana / Los Manantiales del Nirvana
Bill Mohr (also featuring poet Paul Lieber)
681 Venice Blvd.
Venice, CA 90291
Saturday, October 27, 2018 – 8 p.m.

THE PAPA BACHALIA TABLE
Beyond Baroque
Gala 50th Anniversary Celebration
681 Venice Blvd.
Venice, CA 90291
Saturday, November 10, 2018 – 5 p.ml – 10 p.m.

Ventura Artists Union presents
Bill Mohr
Thursday Night Poetry Series
Hosted by Marsha de la O and Phil Taggart
EP Foster Library – Topping Room
651 E. Main Street
Ventura, CA 93001
Thursday, November 15, 2018; 7:30 p.m.

The Rapp Saloon Poetry Series
Hosted by Elena Secota
presents
Bill Mohr’s The Headwaters of Nirvana
1436 2nd Street
Santa Monica, CA 90401
(with Beth Rusico and Leon Martell)
Friday, November 16, 2018 – 8:30 p.m.

Poetry Readings

Ron Silliman and Rae Armantrout Reading Together – San Diego/New York

One of the benefits of attending UCSD is that the reading series there is not the usual academic menu. I remember in particular readings by Rae Armantrout, Ron Padgett, Dennis Cooper, Edwin Torres, Elizabeth Alexander, Mary Jo Bang, Michael Heller, Kit Robinson, and Barrett Watten. Paul Naylor. I recollect, read a series of poems he had been working on about flowers and gardens, which he had started in the summer of 2001. There were daily entries, and when he got to September 11, the poem was very brief.

“There will never be enough flowers.”

I remember the sense of quiet beneath some ultimate quiet slithering through the room, then twanging like that distant string in one of Chekhov’s plays.

On another occasion, in San Diego, Ron Silliman and Rae Armantrout read together, though I remember the reading having Ron as the featured poet and he invited Rae to read a piece they had collaborated on. Joseph Ross gave the introduction, and then sat down in the front row next to the poet Stephen Cope, who would go on to edit a volume of George Oppen’s writings. I’m not sure if Ron’s blog had even started at this point, and Rae was still working as an adjunct professor at UCSD. I would have the good fortune to be her T.A. for one quarter before I graduated in 2004. All three of our lives have changed considerably since the evening of that reading.

I was inspired, in part, to run these photographs in my blog because I noticed recently that Ron and Rae are reading in New York in two months.

https://as.nyu.edu/cwp/reading-series.html

Thursday. October 18 7:00pm – 9:00pm
Rae Armantrout and Ron Silliman
Lillian Vernon Creative Writers House
58 W 10th Street, New York, NY

If you’re in the vicinity, and you’re old enough to realize that many poets younger than you might need a little reminder in the midst of their whirligig lives, then do the right thing, and make certain they don’t neglect this chance to hear two of America’s finest poets.

Ron-Rae-Joe Ross

Ron-Rae-SD-1

Ron-Rae-SD-3

Ron-Rae-SD-5

Ron-Rae-SD-2

Ron-Rae-SD-4

Books Performance Poetry Poetry Readings

Laurel Ann Bogen’s New and Selected Poems

Monday, June 18, 2018

“The Terror to be a Magician”: Laurel Ann Bogen’s Metaurban Self-Portraits in Psychosis in the Produce Department

Midway through the second decade of the 21st century, American poetry written and published in the first decades of the Cold War has rapidly receded into movements or schools, such as the Beats or Confessional poetry, in which the best known examples seem to isolate themselves into a distant cul-de-sac. Indeed, the current century’s difficulties in accommodating the rapid oscillations of post-modernity have relentlessly enlarged the gap between mid-20th century poetry and contemporary verse. Literary criticism itself is largely responsible for generating this disenabling fiction in which a limited set of canonical writers in the Confessional school, born before the end of World War II, has become a self-enclosed pantheon that precludes their successors from redefining the legacy of that school’s poetic progeny.

The Confessional school is often presented as a closed case; actually, not just a closed case, but as a kind of minor sub-plot within post-modern poetry that does merit having a single anthology dedicated to its practitioners. Given the abundance of anthologies that manage to plump out volumes on comparatively smaller subsets, such as feminist avant-garde poetry, this aporia is extraordinarily puzzling, especially given how many of Confessionalism’s first generation have found their way into anthologies during the past thirty years. The assiduous campaign against this school’s alleged limitations seems to have been successful in confining its success to its mid-century insurrection against academic poetry dominated by New Criticism.

This widespread dismissal has genuine consequences, especially for poets on the West Coast who have chosen to work at least some of the time within the Confessional milieu. Even though Laurel Ann Bogen’s Psychosis in the Produce Department was published well over two years ago by Red Hen Press, I have not been able to locate any reviews whatsoever of it. The neglect would seem in part to be due to the discomfort that Confessional poetry still manages to generate. Stephen Burt, for example, notes that the “confessional model has become so predictable …. that it has become something many sophisticated poets and critics avoid or even disparage.” Confessional poetry in recent years, however, is no more predictable than Beat or Language or Feminist poetry; rather, it is the imagined template of sophisticated critics that is predictable.

Before considering Bogen’s volume of poems, therefore, let us examine the template of Confessional poetry that has become fixated in critics’ views as overly predictable. The confessional poem, according to Burt, derives from a quartet of suppositions, including its self-reflective performance as “part cri de Coeur and part diary; it draws contrasts between present and past self; its lack of obvious structural constraints connotes speech from the heart; and it deploys post-Freudian claims about generational succession, sexual attraction, or gender identity … as central to what and how we know and feel.” Nor is Burt alone in this assessment by contemporary critics. As seen in Miranda Sherwin’s preference for “psychoanalytic poetics” over Helen Vender’s term “Freudian lyric,” the general consensus in framing confessional poetry is to assign it a default mechanism of mental crisis, instability, and psychic redemption.

It is the second item in Burt’s checklist that I want to call particular attention to at this point, for it rather sloppily attempts to square the circle of personal consciousness. The “self” that Burt invokes in regards to confessional poetry is not subjected in his account to any interrogation whatsoever, let alone the kind of layered distinctions he makes in examining Terrance Hayes’s poetry. In Hayes’s case, the self becomes inherently deserving of post-modernist critique: “Is the self (whatever that means) a performance? What makes for a good performance, or an authentic one (what that means)? Such questions have generated enough recent scholarly books to weigh down an ocean liner, but they have proved hard to make into good poetry.” If so, these questions were not too hard for Terrance Hayes to take on with efficient playfulness, Burt would argue, and I would agree, but also add that so, too, have a number of poets working in the Confessional mode.

Furthermore, the uses of psychoanalysis and mythic figures as generative imaginative strategies for addressing emotional distress, vulnerability, and trauma are more widespread than has been critically acknowledged. While Bogen’s writing has been primarily categorized as belonging to the “stand up school,” as defined by Charles Harper Webb, her poetry is also an intriguing instance of the hidden heterogeneity of more recent practitioners of the Confessional School. It is in the ways that her poetry goes beyond the Confessional that we will find its most appealing value, though it is in being a permutation that it derives the primary impetus for its longevity.

Within the original poetic domain, Bogen’s title for her most comprehensive collection of poems, Psychosis in the Produce Department: New and Selected Poems 1975 2015 steps on stage with the casual confidence that a mature actress has exuded ever since she was a demurely witty, droll ingénue. As her title suggests, the intensity of mental breakdowns careers throughout the selection. Echoing rather deliberately the psychological travail of the narrator in Allen Ginsberg’s “With Walt Whitman in the Supermarket,” the easy way to categorize Bogen would be to consign her to the confessional bracket, and the book’s title rather flamboyantly – almost flippantly – announces the ordinariness of this debilitating mental condition. Even in the midst of plenty, the title suggests, one can easily dissolve into a state of acute mental distress.

Indeed, there are more than a sufficient number of poems in Psychosis in the Produce Department to stamp Bogen’s union card in the Confessional School. Titles such as “27 Years of Madness,” “The Power Lines Are Down,” “Vulnerable Street,” “Bones Dig This Dream,” “cold cold cold,” “Spankings I’ve Known,” “Doppelganger Redux,” “Guilt,” “I Eat Lunch with a Schizophrenic,” and the mordantly witty “The Virginia Woolf Guide to Rock Collecting” all intimate a coruscating set of self-portrait canvases. However, if a vulnerable candor underscores Bogen’s free verse lyricism, it entails a more rigorous imagination that one might expect from the confessional impetus. In a poem from the 1970s, she confronts the seductive ministrations of institutional psychiatry:

The hospitals were clever

They said: you have the gift
why do you want to destroy it?
And I will tell you now
it is not a gift
to know that words are not your own
to know you can produce
a prism from nothingness
it is a terror to be a magician

The dispossession of words, in this instance, is not meant to serve as a swift detour to the confrontation with language as it has played out in various avant-garde guises since the early 1970s. Rather, it is paradox and metaphor that Bogen summons as emotional states of consciousness aligned with that supreme emotion, surprise, without which all over emotions lose their internal momentum. To be a magician is to have the capacity to conjure both presence and absence.
In Bogen’s vision of the social identity of a poet, this polar paradox of affirmation and negation – “words are not your own” // “ a prism from nothingness” – goes to an extremity of absence-presence in “Live Steam at 8:40 a.m.”:

In this poem there are no words
all language has stopped
but the pumps boil
live steam
live team
live steam at 8:45

Heart poach / we rip at skin
alone and without noise
to get at the beat
the color
and where the words are
but this is a poem
where there are no words
and all the colors are extinct
rising like steam
that hisses in our throats
like wordless lies

In this poem the words sizzle
and evaporate

in this poem the words rise crazy

In this poem ourbodies ache
our fingers can nurder us
but even though we fear death
we offer ourselves to each other
as if the muscle and breath
of our bodies can also heal

This poem cradles in its palm
those things that cannot be said

It asks that you touch this page.

The deictic accentuation of “Live Steam at 8:45 a.m.” is far from the only poem in Psychosis in the Produce Department that pushes through the familiar boundaries of Confessional poetry and suggests that other discourses are at work, including the performative self-transformation of an imagined self within a specific urban environment. Among the poets who both live in Los Angeles and frequently perform their poems in a manner befitting the city’s flaunted ambiance, Laurel Ann Bogen stands out for the profuse invocation of her milieu as a trampoline for metaphors. It is the city’s incandescent awareness of itself as the producer of the individual’s theatricality that gives her poems a haunting plasticity. As in the case of that expert witness of flaneurship, J. Alfred Prufrock, Bogen is on very familiar terms with the significant role that fantasy plays in reassuring one’s fallibility, and how the dialogue between absence and presence coils and recoils; the erasure of intimate revelation by a voice “at home in the shadows” continuously palpitates in her poems.

In whose dreams will these stars shimmer
100 light years from now?
Their blown-up images snipped
of imperfections – the errant mole,
an ingrown hair, when paste
does not pass for diamonds.

Confined by fame, Pilates and exfoliation,
tucked in canyons, behind gated walls,
some corner the market on chihauhuas
others collect bags of kudos.
They tell me Rodeo Drive is a state of mind.

As for mine,
it skims along
Hollywood Boulevard like a chauffeur.
From the back seat
I hear my voice
at home in the shadows –
I don’t want to sleep yet, Bogen,
Drive.

I can see and not be seen – invisible to a world
in which I was born. Now you see
me, now you don’t.

If the first half of the poem critiques both the illusions of immortality and the limitations of rewards and public recognition, the second half savors both the self-determined control and the pleasure of evasion. The poem anticipates the sleep that will bring dreams that are no more than “a state of mind.” The iconic street itself, with all its quotidian tawdriness, promises a more substantial cinematic arousal in which the narrator can embolden one’s imaginary biography. If Bogen’s poems concern themselves with the resilient vulnerability of her self-consciousness, they do so with a deliberate display of the consequences to the singular identity.

Funny how failure and falling
sound alike – the firings failing
and falling pling pling pling
in my brain
my managed care brain
my climate control brain
That fiction and fission
sound alike is funny
this friction and fiction
sound alike, ha-ha.

The final two parts of this eight part poem both point to the endless present tense of self-portrait work in an epiphora of apparent singularity.

The friction of my life
against my life is my life.

The fission of my life
despite my life is my life.

The singularity of “my life” is deceptive, though, for it is always already splitting into the fissures of other lives and other imagined roles, including that of the quintessential Los Angeles figure, the private detective, or as Bogen stamps her calling card: L.A. Bogen, Detective Supremo:

My very name
rolls on the tongue
like an apertif
or a recalled cheese
an open parenthesis of mayhem
on the make
in the sulky afternoon
of Los Angeles

The “private surveillance” she offers the reader, however, is that of the guidance that leads to unexpected encounters:
And suddenly
the bougainvillea greet you
like a happy extortionist

and it’s Cinco de Mayo
everywhere you look
as I melt into crowds
just one step behind you.

In this instance, the poet enables the reader to see the possibility of reconciliation between the self and the things of the world. The bougainvillea’s audacity is that it demands we surrender the “cherished image” that the “hardened arm” so deliberately clings to and experience the flowering in and of itself as the holiday of independence from self-dependency. It is not “crowds” of people that the Detective Supremo flows into, but crowds of meaning.
Perhaps the most surprising aspect of this collection is the number of poems that have little to do with any personal crisis. Bogen’s ability to distance herself as the author or even the protagonist of the poems would seem to run counter to Confessional poetry’s privileging of the first person pronoun. Indeed, even though there is a steady undercurrent / groundswell of references to the typical topics of confessional poetry such as guilt, corporal punishment, suicide, etc., Bogen’s poetry uses these topics as a means of grounding the transformation she has yearned for all the while, a transformation that can only be fully accounted for and comprehended if one embeds Confessional poetry within the discourse of the feminist poetry of the 1970s.

In thinking of the development of feminist awareness in the 1970s, when Bogen was first writing, publishing, and reading her poems in public, one must remember that group activities such as consciousness-raising were an important – indeed, crucial – ritual in breaking free of patriarchal domination. To read poets, born after World War II, who aligned themselves with the Confessional movement without emphasizing a feminist context is to oversimplify their literary project. As Alan Williamson has pointed out, “confessional poetry – almost from the moment that unfortunate term was coined – has been the whipping boy of a half a dozen newer schools.” Or instead of “whipping boy,” should we say “nasty woman,” which might clarify that point of the attacks on confessional poetry. Feminist poetry was the single area of poetic activity in the 1970s, but in poetry’s politics, it would not have been acceptable to cast aspersions on feminist agency. Dismissals of confessional poetry, however, were far more palatable, and accomplished a severance of the links between confessional and feminist, thereby reducing the power of continuity within the critical discourse.

In a poem such as “I Dream the Light of Reason II,” Bogen demonstrates that her confessional poetry has not confined her imagination to the genre of memoir-in-verse. As if dealing from a deck of cards to a table full of patriarchal gamblers, each face card demands to be played, “as it lays.”

The Reasonable Woman is a hope chest, a locked cabinet.

The Reasonable Woman is pleasant enough.

The Reasonable Woman is the converse of sex.

The Reasonable Woman is a durable good, a sound diagnosis.

The Reasonable Woman is a subordinate clause.

The Reasonable Woman is childproof, although Heidi is already up to her knee.

The Reasonable Woman is a skillet, a war bond.

The Reasonable Woman is a fugue heard on the intercom.

The Reasonable Woman is a graph of stock options, the percentage of return.

The Reasonable Woman is open to suggestion.

The Reasonable Woman is a string bean, a cauliflower, a field of potatoes.

The Reasonable Woman is a packet of Alka-Seltzer in the Accounts Payable file.

The Reasonable Woman is considering bankruptcy.

The Reasonable Woman is a stacked heel, a running shoe.

The Reasonable Woman is a pair of pantyhose in the bathroom sink.

The Reasonable Woman is fat free.

The Reasonable Woman is a shadow of herself.

Why would The Reasonable Woman become unreasonable?

Bogen’s sardonic titular character enumerates the options and expectations imposed on women as a collage list of grievances and conditions that can have but one outcome. To be “unreasonable” would be to make herself the primary clause of a sentence; it would mean that self-definition takes place in a social economy activated by a contract not dependent on war bonds, stock options, and the economic repression of bankruptcy.

The remote chance of success in this metamorphosis has been obvious from the start of Bogen’s calculations. In an early poem from the late 1970s, “The Disappearing Act,” the anonymous female narrator admits that:

women are such fools
I am like those fools
with my shackled independence
tunnel vision
of soiled diapers
and dishes

For this narrator, the choice to become otherwise will require the capacity to laugh at the outcome in choosing to be an author:

a pen to save me from the cold
my wits
forced autonomy

Yes, there is something to be said for farce

Nevertheless, Bogen reminds us of the power within each person’s grasp to confront these velleities and use the symbolic power she invokes in “The Red Pencil” and to start anew, even if crossing that boundary requires the surrender of everything marked with inextricable sentiment:

My fingers still close
around red pencils
still move blindly
across paper
canceling time and recrimination
like an exile returning without baggage.

Bogen’s poetry is unlikely to get the full measure of attention it deserves, but that could easily be said of a thousand working poets in this country right now. That it will not receive even a minimally sufficient recognition is more dismaying. Nevertheless, the work will find its own intriguing path in the years to come. Bogen has produced a body of work over a forty year period that has a vibrato of tonal consistency while being able to look into more than the mirror of her own self-consciousness, and the poems taken as a whole shimmer on the tongue of a reader’s memory unlike any other aftertaste. The difficult trek of a mind and body at odds with each other resolves in a quiet advice:

The unopened gift is still a gift. It is given like a forecast or traffic report – backgound to common cash and carry or extraordinary good fortune. There’s a high pressure front ahead: A hand is offered.
Take it.

Bill Mohr / Summer, 2017 / Long Beach, CA
(Accepted for publication in Poetry Flash a year ago. Printed in my blog out of frustrated impatience.)

(Note: An earlier version of this review was presented as a paper at a panel on poetry organized by Steven Gould Axelrod at the PAMLA conference in Pasadema, CA, in October, 2016. My thanks to those who attended and made comments and suggestions.)

Poetry Poetry Readings

“Route 66 through the Eyes of Poets”

Tuesday, April 24, 2018

Tomorrow evening, seven Los Angeles poets will gather at the West Hollywood library for a follow-up reading to last year’s “Sunset Blvd. through the Eyes of Poets.” Sticking with a vehicular trope, Kim Dower selected Route 66, the subject of a famous song that has been reworked quite often over the years by a variety of musicians and bands.

The event is free, and starts at 7 p.m. Each poet will read for seven minutes.
The reading will feature Laurel Ann Bogen, Elena Karina Byrne, Brendan Constantine, Yvonne Estrada, Bill Mohr, Lynne Thompson, and the poet laureate of West Hollywood, Kim Dower.

625 N. San Vicente Blvd.
Wednesday, April 25

I will reading a poem that was published in Rob Cohen’s fine magazine of the 1990s, Caffeine, in addition to debuting a new poem, “The One Exception,” that I finished revising a few weeks ago. It’s the first “stand up” poem I’ve written in some time, and I’m looking forward to reading it very much.

Poetry Readings

A literary party in Venice, California

Saturday, April 21, 2018

Linda and I enjoyed the company of a score of people interested in writing, acting, as well as cinema, in the early part of the evening. I don’t know who catered the event, bu the sandwiches and cookies were far above the usual quality of such a repast. Several of the people in attendance had recently moved from Northern California to the Los Angeles area, and it was refreshing to hear their appreciation for what this city and region has to offer in terms of its cultural environment.

FOR THE RECORD:
My original account of a reading at Beyond Baroque on April 21, 2018, featuring Matthew Mauldin, Don Kingfisher Campbell, and Kerry Tepperman Campbell has been removed because it has been brought to my attention that it contained erroneous information about how Mr. Mauldin and Mr. Campbell came to be a part of that evening’s program. Though I was not the source of this misinformation, and though I had no reason to doubt its veracity at time of writing my blog post, I sincerely regret repeating it in my account of the program. I apologize to Mr. Mauldin and Mr. Campbell for any imputation that they were placed on the bill through anything other than the normal process by which artists are booked at Beyond Baroque, or that they were awarded their reading for any reason beside their own merit. It should be noted that Mr. Mauldin, in particular, as an honest writer and performer, solicited his inclusion as a featured reader at Beyond Baroque with complete integrity, truthfulness, and forthrightness at every step of the process, which includes his nomination of Mr. Campbell as an additional solo performer.

Books Poetry Poetry Readings Small Press Publishing

The Jackson Wheeler Poetry Reading Report

Friday, March 30, 2018

French Concrete One

Linda and I drove up to the Carnegie Arr Museum in Oxnard, California this past weekend for the reading with Vincent Mowry, a poet from Ojai who deserves to be much better known. The plan for the return trip was to stop by Linda’s sister house and relieve her of her care for Linda’s mother for a couple of days.

The reading went better than I ever could have expected. Almost 40 people showed up, which is over two dozen more than usually show up for readings in Los Angeles. I was especially grateful that several poets I knew as a youth showed up: Ricardo Means-Ybarra, Florence Weinberger, ellen, as well as their painter friend, Annie. The reading started with some earnest, intriguing work by a young poet, Sarah Krashefski, and then Marsha de la O introduced me with some very kind remarks.

I led off with “Big Band, Slow Dance,” and followed with “Why the Heart Does Not Develop Cancer”; I then read “The Eviction,” “Wrinkles,” “In the Ocean of Nothingness,” an untitled haiku that was recently published in Hummingbird, and a large section of “Scorpio in Transit,” which appeared in KYSO.

Vincent Mowry read several very fine poems, including one exquite poem that almost eerily served as a parallel vision to one of the poems I had read in the first half of the reading. I have almost never been combined with another poet in a reading whose work I don’t know ahead of time and found that we had much in common; somehow, though, it turned out that Vincent’s poetry had more in common with mine that either of us could ever have expected. His poem about a dream of swimming in the ocean took on the bleakness of Dickinson’s “without even a report of land / To justify despair” and broke through to another realm of vision, closer to that occasion she describes as being a vision of “morning’s nest.” Mowry’s poem about that vision was one of the best I have heard in recent years.

After the reading, neither Vincent nor I had any books for sale, so we mingled with the audience. The museum, though, made copies of Was I Asleep: New and Selected Poems by Jackson Wheeler available for purchase. The reading series is named in his honor, and he deserves it. Marsha read an extraordinary poem that Wheeler wrote about a visitation by his dead father, a World War II veteran, to his bedroom the night before leaving his Appalachian hometown. It’s as deeply moving and poignant as anything in Winesburg, Ohio. In other words, a classic poem. I have been reading Wheeler’s book since I returned, and certainly hope to review it by this summer.

By chance, in Oxnard the next morning, we happened to meet one of Linda’s oldest friend, Vicki, who was having breakfast with her companion, who turned out to a manager for a concrete delivery company. I told him that I had always liked those trucks and like many very young boys thought about driving one of them when I grew up. I mentioned to him that such a truck had recently been in my neighborhood to pour concrete for a roundabout at the intersection where we live, and I had taken photographs of its massive cylinder. When I showed him the photographs, he said, “That’s my company,” which turns out to be owned by a French family. In fact, he explained, the three dots inside the triangle represent the three generations of the family’s commitment to the company.

As Darwin pointed out, the success of any individual in an evolutionary scheme can be gauged by whether its offspring have offspring. It’s as true in poetry as it is in concrete. Here is to the names of the poets I have invoked in my lifetime of work being written in concrete along with their solemnly joyful affirmations of our shared journey.

Once again, thanks to Marsha and Phil for being kind enough to include me in this series.

French Concrete Two

Books Poetry Readings Prose poetry

Alexis Rhone Fancher on Margaret Tynes Fairley’s Poetry

Wednesday, March 21, 2018

“Don’t let the civility of a bygone century deceive you. Upon first reading, these poems to nature, gathered by season, highlight the surface transparency of Margaret Tynes Fairley’s work. All are beautifully crafted gems. All celebrate nature in her capricious glory. Yet on closer examination, each of these complex, exquisite poems contains facets somewhat off; the natural world, its order gone slightly awry. The human enters the equation, sometimes with joy, but often with heartbreak. Underneath the natural order: disorder. Even chaos. ‘The dark conspiracy of spruce.’ And below that, ‘a hint of insurrection;’ below that, a knowing calm. The earth’s pull, a centering, as the years swirl around the recurrent themes of birth, death, and renewal. Fairley, ‘dressed in motley,’ ‘playing the fool,’ delves into a nature so profound that it takes on and explores a chameleon persona – lover, sister, protector, and yes, beloved mother.

“Margaret Tynes Fairley transcends the centuries with poems lyrical yet terse and biting enough to satisfy the 21st century sensibilities in each of us.”

– Alexis Rhone Fancher, author of State of Grace: The Joshua Elegies, poetry editor, Cultural Weekly

Both Alexis and I drove up from the South Bay area to Beyond Baroque this past Sunday to celebrate the publication of Fairley’s collection poems, The Years Wear the Seasons, by Bambaz Press. Alexis drove from San Pedro with the smoothest flow of traffic that one could hope for; and Linda and I were equally fortunate. All three of us were exceptionally impressed by the passionate renditions of Fairley’s poems by her granddaughter, Rose, who works as a nurse in North Carolina.

I was also pleased to meet Matthew Hetznecker, who had a book entitled A.S. for sale, which was published four years ago. I have just begun to read its quartet of short prose installations: “Loose Ends”; “Ties That Bind”; “Laced”; “Knots.” The titles seem reticent to admit the subtle rambunctiousness of Hetznecker’s notations. His writing reminds me of the kind of work that George Drury Smith was seeking — and having a hard time finding — when he started his literary magazine, Beyond Baroque, a half century ago. Sometimes one must wait a long time for the right antecedent to show up.