Category Archives: Poetry

Books Poetry

Bill Mohr Answers Three Questions Posed by Harry Northup

December 27, 2014 – 5:15 pm

Almost mid-way through the final week of 2014, I’ve begun to consider the top ten personal surprises of the past 12 months. I certainly could not have foreseen a year ago, at this time, that Stuart Perkoff’s one-act jazz play, “Round About Midnite,” would be staged at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in October. Many people deserve profuse thanks for helping to make this happen, including Stuart Perkoff’s family as well as S.A. Griffin, who rose to the demands of an extreme emergency in helping to cast the play in the last two minutes and making the cast a viable ensemble with virtually no time to rehearse.

I also could not have foreseen that Zach Mann would have requested an article on Joseph Hansen (“Emotions Doesn’t Change Facts”) for the Los Angeles Review of Books and have been such a fine editor in the course of developing and revising this piece.

I imagine that Suzanne Lummis could not have foreseen that she would have a poem in the “New Yorker” magazine several weeks ago, which in turn allowed me to stretch my prosodic muscles in a way that I usually don’t get to in this blog. I have been gratified that this entry in my blog has probably been read by more people than any other entry.

I was also surprised that the event at the Church in Ocean Park at which I received the George Drury Smith Award proved to be such a resounding success. I want to thank again all of the people from the poetry community who turned out for this fundraiser and to offer me their congratulations. It was a pleasure to walk down Hill Street to the Church past the six-unit apartment complex I had lived in between 1973 and 1993. A few months earlier, it had been a much sadder walk, for Linda and I were attending the memorial service at the Church in Ocean Park for Wanda Coleman, who had died late in 2013. I still find myself surprised at the thought that she is gone. A much smaller, but equally fervent crowd gathered again at the Church on Thanksgiving weekend of 2014 to celebrate her poetry once more.

On a very personal level, my dear companion Cordelia died on October 28. I still miss her terribly. The sorrow I feel has truly surprised me, even though I anticipated the severity of her loss.

Finally, old friends continued to surprise me with the abundance of their respect and affection for my writing. Most recently, Harry Northup has posted my responses to three questions he posed to me several weeks ago. If you go to the link at the end of this brief posting, you will also probably find Michael C. Ford’s responses to the same three question. It’s an honor to share a featured spot with M.C. Ford on Harry Northup’s blog.

For those who don’t know Harry Northup as a poet or actor, I would recommend a Jonathan Demme or Martin Scorsese film festival on your home screening facility. Northup had a fine career as a character actor in both of these directors’ films. In the early 1980s, I published his three-volume-in-one book, Enough the Great Running Chapel. In the years since, he has been a driving force behind Cahuenga Press.

In the past half-dozen years, Northup’s poems have begun radiating an inner luminosity that can only be found in truly great poetry. That he achieves this variegated sheen without any self-indulgent rhetorical flourishes is rare indeed. It can only be attributed to a level of integrity as a poet that he shares with many of my other favorite Los Angeles poets. This is not to say that poets in other cities don’t possess an equal amount of resourceful stability when it comes to dealing with rejection by those who have a firm grip on the canonical. Nevertheless, Northup and his poet-spouse, Holly Prado, exemplify the willingness to accept the burden of being marginalized by our culture’s illiteracy with amazing cheerfulness. My thanks to both of them for many years of inspiration.

http://timestimes3.blogspot.com/2014/12/bill-mohr-answers-harry-e-northups.html

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Books Poetry

“Emotions Doesn’t Change Facts” — Joseph Hansen

December 5, 2014 – 4:53 pm

Friday, December 5, 2014

Zach Mann has just written to let me know that my article on Joseph Hansen in now available on-line at the Los Angeles Review of Books. A print version appeared several weeks ago, but I am delighted that this is now more easily accessible. I also want to thank Zach Mann for his editorial assistance in writing the article. He’s a pleasure to work with and any writer would benefit from his feedback.

http://lareviewofbooks.org/essay/emotions-doesnt-change-facts-remembering-joseph-hansen

The article had to fit within certain length considerations, however, and one of my favorite sections had to be sacrificed. For those who are still learning about Hansen’s writing, this omitted section might help explain why I am such a passionate advocate.

(A supplementary portion of the article:)

One of Hansen’s finest skills as a writer is his capacity to integrate the small details in the progress of a narrative into the larger picture of his investigations. In The Man Everybody Was Afraid Of, an alcoholic landscape painter named Tyree Smith attempts to convince Brandstetter that his version of events is more than a clever plan to cadge a few free drinks. After a conversation at a restaurant at which he is seen talking to Brandstetter by the character who eventually proves to be the murderer of the town’s sheriff, Brandstetter drives the aging artist out to his trailer at the edge of town.
The bartender had been right. The trailer was an eyesore. Dented aluminum, spattered with dried mud, a square of rain-stained cardboard where a window bad been, it hung on a weedy point of land above jagged black rocks the tide was backing away from. Three respectable-looking campers kept their distance, sheltering at the edge of the trees. There was a long telephone booth. From wooden poles with tin meter boxes limp wires fed electricity to the campers and trailer. Smith had passed out. Dave opened the old man’s door, undid the safety strap, and hauled him to his feet. 99
Then, twenty pages later, Brandstetter gets a phone call in his motel room. At first, Brandstetter doesn’t recognize the caller’s voice: “Is this Tyree Smith?” Brandstetter inquires, but the caller does not identify himself or where he’s calling from, instead focusing on letting his own pent-up internal monologue boil over.
“I could have told you who killed the son of a bitch,” Smith said. “All you had to do was ask me.”
“You told me,” Dave said. “Mrs. Orton – remember?”
Something banged the phone at Smith’s end. A glass? Bottle, more likely. “You don’t want to pay” Smith belched – “too much attention to my dramatic improv—“
He backed off and tried the word again. “Improvisations.”
“You mean she didn’t threaten him?”
“Way I told you,” Smith said. “But, face it—she couldn’t step on an ant.” The banging happened again. He must have dropped the receiver. It swung on its wire against the glass of the lonely booth under the eucalyptus trees. Then Smith had it again. “My car’s missing. You come here.”
Hansen deftly handles the syncopation of details in a deceptively simple scene; Hansen’s skill at enabling the reader to experience Brandstetter’s shift from initial confusion to chronotopic clarity is nothing short of understated mastery. “The banging happened again.” The image of the phone booth, all but forgotten by this point, bounds forth from the peripheral imagination and seizes the stage of the sentence being read. As archaic as phone booths have become in the second decade of this century, the image of a phone banging on the side of the isolated booth will retain the poetic shimmering of thumping synechdoche for Tyree Smith’s faltering grip on his life.

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Books Poetry

Allan Kornblum — Coffeehouse Press

November 28, 2014 – 10:12 am

“Ask not what literature is doing for education, but what education is doing for literature.”
Allan Kornblum, 1949-2014

The AWP national convention will take place in the Twin Cities in about four months and I have no idea of the kinds of panels and readings that are scheduled. I do know that a panel honoring the work of Jim Moore, who has made Minneapolis-St. Paul his home base for 40 years, was turned down. If such is the case, then who knows if Allan Kornblum will get a moment of silence. If anyone would deserve such a gesture, it would be Allan, who died this past week. If any small press founded in the 1970s has a chance to still be publishing in 2050, then Coffee House is an exceptionally strong candidate. Its primacy derives in part from Kornblum’s willingness to publish writers who for the most part do not fit into the syllabi of traditional literature or creative writing courses.

In urging the AWP to honor Allan in some manner, I cannot help but note that a memorial gesture would have a certain degree of irony. Although Coffee House certainly had a strong presence at the AWP convention in Seattle this past spring, it is not a press that focuses on writers who are held up as models in most MFA programs.

In honor of his lifetime of devotion to writing that takes a risk, I have spent the morning going through the backlist of Coffee House Press, which Allan Kornblum was the founder of. In addition to Michael Davidson’s Bleed Through, I would especially urge readers to take a sustained look at Ron Padgett’s Collected Poems.

Allan Kornblum made use of his cultural capital in a profoundly empowering manner. Writers and readers in the next quarter century will continue to mature and ripen as socially renitent and imaginatively playful citizens of a minor literate republic.

SELECTED TITLES FROM COFFEE HOUSE PRESS
I Hotel NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST
A Novel by Karen Tei Yamashita

Moment’s Notice: Jazz in Poetry and Prose
An Anthology edited by Art Lange and Nathaniel Mackey

Bleed Through New and selected poems by Michael Davidson
“Michael Davidson refuses to treat history, philosophy, and the lives we live as separate phenomena. The language of intimate experience interrupts that of public atmospheres and vice versa. Heavens and aprons ‘slightly melt’ into each other; Kant is at the mall, while our leaders eat cereal. These poems—many from rare and out of print books—converse as lucid shocks under a critical sun.”—Jena Osman

Truth, War, and the Dream-Game
Parables and Prose Poems by Lawrence Fixel

Returning a Borrowed Tongue: An Anthology of Filipino & Filipino American Poetry — Edited by Nick Carbó

Cant Be Wrong — Poems by Michael Lally

Fugue State Stories by Brian Evenson

In the Builded Place — Poems by Michael Heller

Entrepôt Poems by Mark McMorris

Necessary Distance — Essays and Criticism by Clarence Major

Notes on the Possibilities and Attractions of Existence: Selected Poems 1965 – 2000 — Poems by Anselm Hollo

Blood Dazzler — Poems by Patricia Smith

Living Will — Poems by David Hilton
Foreword by Warren Woessner
Afterword by David Clewell

The Architecture of Language — Poems by Quincy Troupe

The Eros Conspiracy — Poems by Greg Hewett

Irish Musicians/American Friends — Poems by Terence Winch

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Poetry

“The Asteroid Interview”

November 17, 2014 – 9:21 pm

The November, 2014 issue of “Poetic Diversity” has just been published. I gave a poetry reading in the San Fernando Valley last June in Rick Lupert’s Cobalt Cafe series, after which Marie Lecrivain, the editor of “Poetic Diversity,” asked for one of the poems I read. Here’s the link to it:

Volume 11, No. 2 (November, 2014) — “The Asteroid Interview” — Bill Mohr

http://www.poeticdiversity.org/main/poems-fea.php?nameCode=WilliamMohr&date=2014-11-01

You can find Rick Lupert’s marvelous broadside of my poem, “In the Ocean of Nothingness,” that he ran off for the reading at:

http://poetrysuperhighway.com/cobalt/061714.pdf

And here are links to three other poets in this issue:

Terry Wolverton

http://www.poeticdiversity.org/main/poems-fea.php?nameCode=TerryWolverton&date=2014-11-01

Julia Stein

http://www.poeticdiversity.org/main/poems-fea.php?nameCode=JuliaStein&date=2014-11-01

Rick Lupert

http://www.poeticdiversity.org/main/poems-fea.php?nameCode=ricklupert&date=2014-11-01

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Books Poetry

Suzanne Lummis in “The New Yorker”

November 9, 2014 – 2:07 pm

The first time I had any contact with Suzanne Lummis was a short letter passed on to me by Lenny Durso, the last of the three original owners of Intellectuals & Liars Bookstore to be holding out against the onslaught of Crown Books. Suzanne was looking for venues to give a poetry reading; unfortunately, I & L was on its last legs and so she never read there. At that time, she was collaborating with a songwriter, as well as working on plays and doing some acting. Her versatility and talent intrigued me and I was pleased to include her in my second anthology of Los Angeles poets, “Poetry Loves Poetry” (1985). Suzanne has gone on to become one of the major literary activists in Los Angeles during the past thirty years. She has edited or co-edited a series of anthologies, including the first thin volume of “Stand Up” poetry as well as a subsequent collection, “Grand Passion.” In addition, she is co-editing a new anthology of Los Angeles poets to be published with the Beyond Baroque imprint in 2015.

As a poet, she has not gotten anywhere near the attention that she deserves. Her first full-length collection, “In Danger,” was more than strong enough to expect that other presses would have solicited the next manuscript. Instead, her work has languished in that peculiar zone of incomprehensible marginality that frequently seems to be the birthright of many poets working in Los Angeles. Nevertheless, her writing has continued to gain widespread respect; in fact, as a successor to the wonderful poet, Eloise Klein Healy, Suzanne Lummis would have been my choice for the second poet laureate of Los Angeles.

Finally, though, 15 years after “In Danger” was published, her second substantial collection has been published. “Open 24 Hours” won a contest sponsored by Blue Lynx Books and the book is now available at Beyond Baroque Bookstore as well as the on-line outlets. Suzanne has just had another break-through occasion, too, in having a poem appear in “The New Yorker.” On one level, of course, such a standardized level of accomplishment is not something that changes my opinion of her writing, which I would respect no matter if she collected 184 rejection letters in a lifetime of submitting to that magazine. On the other hand, she should be justifiably proud of getting printed there. If Rae Armantrout feels comfortable about having a poem in “The New Yorker,” then why shouldn’t the rest of us lounge by its poolside, too? Rae’s poem, “Before,” which appeared in a mid-December, 2013 issue, is worth looking up.

Suzanne’s poem, “How I Didn’t Get Myself to a Nunnery,” which appears in the November 3rd issue, is probably the best “response” poem to one of my favorite poems of all time, “Dimanches,” by Jules LaForgue. The poem comes close to being an ekphrastic rendition of a teenage wasteland, and I suppose part of its appeal to me was how the landscape caught all the dreariness of Imperial Beach, the border city I had the misfortune to spend my adolescence in. LaForgue’s poem opens with an epigraph from “Hamlet” that points to the invocation of Ophelia’s fate that his poem makes use of. “Let her not walk in the sun,” Hamlet advises Polonius. As for walking in the rain, LaForgue picks up an impressionist paintbrush for his nine couplet poem, which begins and concludes with the same line, “Le ciel pleut sans but, sans que rien l’émeuve.” In between, yet one more frail young woman joins what Lummis calls “the season of self-drowned maids”:

Une qui n’a ni manchon, ni fourrures
Fait, tout en gris, une pauvre figure.

Et la voilà qui s’échappe des rangs,
Et court ! Ô mon Dieu, qu’est-ce qu’il lui prend

Et elle va se jeter dans le fleuve.
Pas un batelier, pas un chien Terr’ Neuve.

In contrast with the melancholy despair of LaForgue anonymous suicide, Lummis’s protagonist is a survivor. Her poem opens:

That girl they found ensconced in mud and loam,
she wasn’t me. Small wonder, though, they jumped.

A number of things happen here that have the touch of a chess master handling the opening gambit and its and counter-moves, not the least of which is how the diction and colloquial syntax pull the reader close for a moment of sneaky intimacy. The voice is more reflective than one might find on a dramatic stage, and yet what’s at stake is equally compelling. The use of blank verse in a nine-line stanza (but without any Spenserian rhyme scheme) is impressive. I particularly admire the spondee of the third foot of the second line and would argue that this accentual nuance (SMALL WONder) is exactly what underscores the irony trembling throughout the poem. That spondee, in turn, can only be fully appreciated if one notes that the placement of the caesura in the poem’s first line is not necessarily in the “obvious” place (after “found”). The fact that there is not a comma after “found” is a clue that the caesura’s placement is more open to interpretation than the naive reader might think.

That girl they found ensconced in mud and loam,

she wasn’t me. Small wonder, though, they jumped.

If the caesura is placed after “ensconced,” one magnifies the sense of a fateful anticipation being fixed in certainty, as opposed to the counterpunch of the opening of the second line: “she wasn’t me.” In other words, the sense of displacement in the narrative gets underscored by the spot, in the first line, where the hemidemisemiquaver of an internal pause gazes inward at itself.

I have my doubts that anybody who wrote to Suzanne to congratulate her on the poem commented on her metrical tactics, but if Suzanne has brought her knowledge and skill to the task, then it deserves some measure of specific commentary. As is often the case, I wish I had more time to extend my analysis. This is merely a start on her poem’s subtle effects. I urge all of you to turn to it with ears wide open.

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/11/03/didnt-get-nunnery

— Bill Mohr

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Ground Level Conditions Poetry

Cordelia (1999-2014)

October 28, 2014 – 3:52 pm

IMG_2291Cordelia was a starving, stray cat who wandered into my mother’s garage in the early fall of 1999. I was allowed to have cats at graduate student housing at UCSD, so I took her in and she accompanied me through qualifying exams, my marriage to Linda shortly thereafter, the writing of my dissertation, the arduous years of adjunct work, and the slow triumph of a tenure-track job. She has a featured role in a poem that was published in “OR” magazine a few years back and which was one of the poems that Jose Luis Rico and Robin Myers chose to translate as part of their project on their book of my poems.

A few people over the years, such as Zach Mann, has caught the reference to King Lear’s daughter immediately, but I would add that she was equally given that name in honor of P.D. James’s detective, Cordelia Gray. Cordelia should have been dead two years ago, according to the vet. She had a reputation at the vet’s office for being feisty, but “those are the ones that live longer.”

Five years of chronic kidney disease had taken its toll, however, and she was very thin, though still full of a fair amount of energy. She still enjoyed the sunlight in the window and spent time on the windowsill late this morning. In fact, that was the last place in the house she spent time at. She had stopped being able to digest dry food several months ago, and in the past two months ate constantly, but still lost weight. Fluids didn’t seem to help that much. After one such treatment, in fact, she was rather sick for three days, after which she improved temporarily. She still slept with us at night. I am going to miss her terribly.

She went across the country with us. I can see her in my mind’s eye sitting on a windowsill in late December, looking in feline amazement at all the swirling snowflakes of the first heavy snowfall we endured on Long Island.

Today, at noon, Linda and I took her to the vet, and she is now (I hope) frolicking with other cats I have lived with (Miko, Stan, Nanni-zaza) as well Kevin McNamara’s beloved Chairman Meow

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Painting and Sculpture Poetry

Caliban — Issue Number 17

October 15, 2014 – 8:03 am

Larry Smith sent me a notice last night that issue number 17 of Caliban magazine is now on-line. This particular issue includes one of my personal favorites of all the poems I have ever written, “Speed Ratios.” The issue includes not only poetry but some extraordinary visual art, too.

www.calibanonline.com

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Poetry

“Beveled Poise” — Cecilia Woloch

October 14, 2014 – 8:03 am

Tuesday morning, October 14, 2014

Cecilia Woloch read her poetry at CSU Long Beach last night. The Soroptimist House must have been closed up since Thursday, since the room seemed to have only been opened at a half-hour before the event. The space obviously had not been aired out at all for some time; the temperature of the room made it almost unsuitable for the event. Several fans were at work, but they were more effective in minimizing the usefulness of the microphone than in making the audience comfortable. Despite the performance conditions, Cecilia gave a very fine reading. Here is my introduction.

The first time I heard Cecilia Woloch read her poetry was at the Gasoline Alley Coffee House on Melrose Blvd. in Los Angeles. Phoebe MacAdmas and I were running a reading series that had originally been started by actor and poet Harry Northup, and Cecilia was a poet who was beginning to earn her living working as a poet-in-the-schools. This is almost impossible to do, and I can attest to the difficulty of doing so because I gave it a try myself. If Cecilia succeeded, it was because of two things: 1) she is simply the most inspiring teacher of poetry I have met; 2) her inspiration derives from a passion for poetry that never stops being curious about the origins of emotions and where their destinies might take us, both as readers and writers.

Indeed, Cecilia Woloch’s poetry invites us all to make more of a journey out of our lives, not necessarily a heroic journey, but the journey that surprises itself in the telling. In her case, it is the unexpectedness of form that keeps me alert to the true degree of risk that she takes as an artist. What’s next? – a prose poem? A pantoum? If L.A. poets are known for their formal variety, they are also known for how an emotional intimacy radiates from their poems like a voice that understands what Whitman whispered to each reader: “I may not tell everyone, but I will tell you.”

Her poetry, however, is not just an intense revelation of personal cross-purposes of life and fate. Like one of her favorite poets, Muriel Rukeyser, she summons history and demands that it account for its often preposterous occurrences. If she is able to recalibrate the narrative of tragic history, such as that imposed on the Romani during World War II, it is because she has traveled a distance (both literally and metaphorically) sufficient to understand the truth of art’s limited redemption.

In the first three paragraphs I hope that one can begin to detect the problem with introducing this wonderful poet. It is almost impossible to acknowledge the full range of qualities that make her such an intriguing figure in contemporary American poetry. One could focus on how rare it is that an outstanding teacher of poetry is also a poet who refuses to take any predictable path of poetics, or one could focus on the different way her writing can be contextualized. In terms of the latter, she is unabashedly a Los Angeles poet, and her love for this city and its poets shines throughout her work as the founding organizer of the Idyllwild Poetry Festival. As a teacher and poet, she has personified the indivisibility of those roles. To learn from her is to hear the language made anew. At the same time, she is a poet who can keep her visionary balance no matter what part of the world’s stage she finds herself writing about. Such a sense of internal centeredness and external poise is a gift that I savor each time I get to hear her poetry. I am delighted to present to you a poet whose poems are beveled with history, knowledge, and vision. Please join me in welcoming Cecilia to CSULB.

 

 

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Performance Poetry Theater

The Cast, Director, and Introduction — “RAM”

October 11, 2014 – 10:50 pm

IMG_3466 2PLACE: Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Bing Auditorium

Photo: Copyright Linda Fry. All rights reserved. (Click on photo to see full picture. From left to right: Devin Falk, Joshua Grapes, Kyle Jones, and Robert Edward.

DATE/TIME: Saturday, October 11, 2014; 2:00 p.m.

S.A. Griffin did an extraordinary job at LACMA this morning in getting the cast prepared for the staged reading. I had never met half the cast, nor had they met each other, and the first task was to assign the parts. Unfortunately, Eric Morago had an emergency that required him to relinquish his role in today’s production, but I had had a gut feeling earlier this week that an understudy might be needed and I asked a recent CSULB graduate, Kyle Jones, to show up just in case. He ended up playing the role of the Poet, while Robert Edward took on the part of the Dealer. Devin Falk and Josh Grapes played the Hipsters, and Cheryl Fidelman joined in as the Girl. Eric Reed’s piano accompanied the recitation.

This event at LACMA grew out of a small exhibit focused on Venice, for which a mural painted on linen that had hung in the Venice post office for many years had been restored. The mural will return to home after the exhibit concludes, though the building is no longer a post office, but a movie production company headquarters. The mural itself is cited in Stuart Perkoff’s long poem, “Voices Heard in Venice,” which he composed during the same period in which he worked on “Round About Midnight.”

Originally, in terms of mounting this event, I had a peripheral role. I was only supposed to deliver an introductory talk, which I will include in this post. I only delivered about two-thirds of this introduction, however. (The Bing Auditorium was on a tight schedule, and I wanted Eric Reed and his company to have as much time to play as possible.) My role in this project changed radically two weeks ago when Mary Lenihan wrote me an e-mail and asked if I could find some new actors, since the group that had committed to do had taken on a new project. I spent a good portion of the past two weeks assembling the cast and discussing approaches to this staged reading with S.A. Griffin, who agreed to serve as director about a week ago. If the cast was unfamiliar with Perkoff’s poetry, it was crucial to have a director who knew and profoundly respected his writing. I could not possibly have made a better choice for the job than S.A. Griffin.

The rehearsals took place downstairs in the small auditorium. I was able to be present for most of the run-throughs and S.A. was gracious enough to let me make comments now and then that helped clarify the tone (or “the true sound”) of the lines. I have always missed theater ever since I left the Burbage Theater back in the mid-1970s, but it was impossible to do a small press project and be a playwright/actor at the same time. I made a choice, and I’ll never know whether it was the right one.

The cast managed to get in about three hours of work before, including a run-through with Eric Reed, on the Bing Auditorium stage before the audience was let in, starting at 1:30. About 150 people eventually took seats, including Marsha Getzler, the head of the Temple of Man. Venice West itself was represented at the event! In the transition between rehearsal and performance, the cast had its first chance to relax since they had first met and they began chatting very amiably, so much so that no one seemed to notice that they were only five minutes away from hitting the boards. My old training kicked in, though, since I kept my eye on the clock. With five minutes to go, I called everyone together to re-focus on character, and to let nothing else distract them. To their credit, they immediately dropped back into the script and stayed focus on it as Mary Lenihan welcomed everyone and I gave the following introduction.

Round About Midnite: An Introduction to the Jazz-Poetry Scene in Venice West and the Poetry of Stuart Z. Perkoff

         by Bill Mohr

Venice West was the name bestowed by poet and painter Charley Newman on an artistic movement of underground poets, painters, and musicians who made an area known as “the slum by the sea” a nationally recognized part of the Beat movement in the 1950s. It is Charley Newman’s friend, Stuart Z. Perkoff, however, who is generally acknowledged as the primary figure in that scene. Born in 1930 in St. Louis, Perkoff’s formal education ended with high school graduation. He dropped out of college after only one week of classes, moved to NYC and in the late 1940s became the first well-known case of a man who resisted the renewal of military conscription after World War II. In his early 20s, Perkoff settled in Venice, California, and by mid-decade, Jargon Press had published his first book of poems, The Suicide Room. By the end of the decade, both Perkoff’s poetry and that of fellow Venice West poet Bruce Boyd had achieved the distinction of being included in Donald Allen’s magnificent anthology, The New American Poetry. While such prominence might give the impression of a scene with at least a hundred poets at work, the actual number of poets, all told, who constituted the core of Venice West probably numbered no more than somewhere between a dozen and a score. Their impact, nevertheless, is the stuff of legend. Perkoff died from cancer in 1974, but two of the Venice West poets are still alive and writing, and I wish at the start of today’s program to acknowledge once again the very fine poetry reading that Frank T. Rios gave at this museum several months ago. It took place in the room where the Biberman mural is on exhibit, and I hope all of you have a chance afterwards to visit it.

As was the case with all the poets in Venice West, Perkoff represented a distinct subculture within the Beat movement. In particular, one notes a lack of interest in pursuing publication. If it has taken so long for Perkoff’s  “Round About Midnite” to come into the public view again, part of it is due to the fact that it has only been available to readers since Perkoff’s Voices of the Lady: Collected Poems appeared towards the end of the past century. Before then, the only evidence that such a play existed was in a chapter of Lawrence Lipton’s bestselling encapsulation of the Venice West scene, The Holy Barbarians, which appeared in 1959.

Among the passages quoted in The Holy Barbarians were two pages of dialogue between characters designated as “Hipsters,” “Dealer,” and “Poet.” Even though Lipton described it as a “long poem, an oratio for the speaking voice,” it would appear that Perkoff always saw it as a poem mean to be staged in the presence of jazz musicians. If one turns to pages 40- 43 of The Holy Barbarians, in fact, one gets a glimpse of how a living room in Venice became the rehearsal hall for Perkoff’s “Round About Midnite,” On one such occasion, which probably can be dated to 1958, Lipton claims that the ill-fated jazz musician Les Morgan showed up at Lipton’s residence to serve as the musical half of the poem’s thematic investigation. The poets who complemented Perkoff were Tony Scibella, Charley Newman, and Charles Foster.

It’s hard to know how many such occasions occurred. They were certainly not all successful. As Lipton noted, “Nobody knew, as yet, how to integrate the two arts form into something like modern idiom that would lend itself to improvisation, at least on the musical level. There were those who insisted that even the poetry should be improvised. These were the fanatical jazz buffs who that the wordman had everything to learn from the jazzman and the jazzman could do no wrong.” On the occasion that Lipton wrote about in The Holy Barbarians, Les Morgan was not one of that haughty choir. Morgan listened to the dialogue, Lipton noted, and then “began to blow, a yearning, haunting theme, in perfect mood with the words. This was it. This was that we had been working towards for months.”  As exciting as that intersection was, it was only one instance of the process by which “Round About Midnite” reached its final draft. Lipton mentions months of “experiment and public performance” that still had to be worked through in order for them to have “a real grasp of the problems involved in this revival of music and poetry.” And it was Perkoff, not Lipton, who produced and directed the culminating version of “Round About Midnite.”

In regards to the interweaving of jazz and poetry, in general, The Holy Barbarians only records a very small part of the total work done in Venice West and Los Angeles. According to his poems, journals, and letters, Perkoff was working with Shelley Manne, one of the legendary figures of this period, as early as August, 1956 and Perkoff was also involved in the staging of a major jazz and poetry concert in the Crenshaw district of Los Angeles in December, 1957, at which the musicians included Shorty Rogers, Bill Holman, Ralph Pena, Buddy Collette, Red Mitchell, and Marty Paich. By the time that “Round About Midnite” was staged in 1960, therefore, one could say this “poem for voices and music” represented an invocation of jazz’s affinity for poetry akin to Langston Hughes’s classic Montage of a Dream Deferred. One of the links between Perkoff and Hughes to keep in mind would be that forgotten classic of jazz history, John Clennon Holmes’s “The Horn”.  In listening in on “Round About Midnite” this afternoon, I would urge you to keep in mind how this play absorbs the advice of Charley Parker that Holmes quoted as an epigraph for his novel: “Music is your own experience, your thoughts, your wisdom. If you don’t live it, it won’t come out of your horn. They teach you there’s boundary line to music. But, man, there’s no boundary line to art.” Perkoff took Parker at his word and revealed the alleged boundary line between jazz and poetry to be an illusion. If you can hear how poetry itself becomes the session of a community of transformation, then for an instant I hope you will find yourself in the company of those whose visions are meant to bring us together in a new state of ethical and imaginative relationships.

For those of you, by the way, who want to know more about poetry or jazz, there are two writers I would recommend: for information on Perkoff’s community, you should check out John Maynard’s Venice West, and for jazz in Los Angeles, there is no better resource than Steve Isoardi’s pair of in-depth surveys, Central Avenue Sounds and the more recence volume, The Dark Tree.

Finally, it should be mentioned that in a world with an ideal budget for this kind of project, we would have been able to be graced with the presence of Sy Perkoff, Stuart’s brother, who is still alive and working as a jazz musician up in San Francisco. We are, however, extremely honored to have Eric Reed and his Trio with us today. They have come up all the way from San Diego to be with us and honor Stuart Z. Perkoff. I also wish to thank Rachel DiPaola, Stuart’s daughter and the keeper of his literary estate. Her generous permission has enabled LACMA to move ahead with this project.

So sit up, take a deep breath, and prepare to savor “Round About Midnight.”

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Music Poetry

“Round About Midnite” — TODAY, 2 p.m. – LACMA

October 11, 2014 – 8:05 am

7:45 a.m.

Linda and I will be heading off soon to LACMA to start a last-minute (the one and only, in fact) run-through of Stuart Z. Perkoff’s “Round About Midnite,” which will have a staged reading at the Bing Auditorium this afternoon at 2:00 p.m. The event is free and features the Eric Reed Trio. The play, written in the late 1950s and last presented in public in 1960 in Venice, CA, was written as a homage to Thelonius Monk, and in the printed version of Stuart Perkoff’s Voices of the Lady: Collected Poems, it is dedicated to Tony Scibella, Charley Newman, as well as Monk. Newman was a poet and painter who came up with the term “Venice West” to distinguish their “community in transition.” 

I am pleased that S.A. Griffin has joined this project during the past two weeks. Any chance that this presentation has of becoming memorable in the slightest degree will owe itself to the hard work he has put into it the past week. He consented to help out on a moment’s notice and has proven himself once again to be a stalwart member of the extraordinary clusters of poets in Los Angeles. I have yet to meet in person the majority of the actors in the cast, so this presentation will certainly partake of the improvisatory quality that characterizes jazz.

A special note of thanks goes out to Rachel DiPaola, Stuart Z. Perkoff’s daughter, for her permission to present the play, and to Perkoff’s brother, Si, a jazz musician who works in the Bay Area. I wish LACMA’s budget would have allowed him to come down and play the music today.

The event is free. If you attend, plan to linger at the museum afterwards.

 

 

 

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