Category Archives: Poetry

Books Obituaries Poetry

Austin Straus (1939-2017)

July 20, 2017 – 12:03 pm

Thursday, July 20, 2017; 10:30 a.m.

I just received a call from Laurel Ann Bogen to inform me that the poet and book artist Austin Straus has died. Born in Brooklyn in 1939, Austin moved to Los Angeles in 1978, and immediately settled into an ongoing renaissance of poetry in Southern California. He was the founder and cohost of “The Poetry Connexion,” on KPFK-FM, from 1981 to 1996. His guests included many of the most prominent poets in Los Angeles.

His books of poetry include Laureate without a Country, Drunk with Light, and Intensifications. His late wife, the poet Wanda Coleman (1946-2013), and he collaborated on a sequence of poems celebrating their three decades of marriage, The Love Project: A Marriage Made in Poetry. His poems were reprinted in many anthologies, including “Poetry Loves Poetry,” Suzanne Lummis’sGrand Passion, Charles Harper Webb’s Stand Up Poetry, Steve Kowit’s The Maverick Poets, and Men in Our Time: An Anthology of Male Poetry in Contemporary America.

Austin considered himself to be primarily a book artist, and that work can be found in many collections, including Chapman College, Occidental College, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. However, his poems will also remain a steadfast part of the community of poets he joined almost forty years ago.

You can hear Austin reading some of his poems and being interviewed by Lois P. Jones on KPFK at:
http://www.timothy-green.org/blog/austin-straus/

The poets who appeared in my anthology “Poetry Loves Poetry” (Momentum Press, 1985) who are now dead include:
Dick Barnes
Charles Bivins
Charles Bukowski
Wanda Coleman
Robert Crosson
John Harris
Bob Flanagan
Leland Hickman
Carol Lewis
Robert Peters
Peter Schneidre
Ed Smith
Austin Straus
John Thomas
Marine Robert Warden

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Photography Poetry

The Stoner Park Poets Picnic (Part Two)

July 15, 2017 – 7:57 am

PICNIC - Big Group

A slight different arrangement than the previous group shot. If anyone recognizes the other people, please write me.

Just now, working on this post, I remember that there was another poet’s picnic about four years earlier. It was in a park on the east side of town, and I remember Eloise Klein Healy, Deena Metzger, and Lee Hickman being at it along with enough other people to play a baseball game. I also remember that while I was playing centerfield, I tore my pants diving for a fly ball; and one of the other poets lent me a t-shirt so that the rip wasn’t too revealing. At the Stoner Park picnic, we played some soccer, which had a sad ending. The poet Blake Latimer broke her ankle about a half-hour into the game, and had to go to the hospital for a cast.

Scott Wannberg - Carol Lewis

Julia Norstrand; Carol Lewis; Scott Wannberg

Carol Lewis was one of my favorite poets in the scene at the time. I don’t believe she ever had a full-length book of poetry published. She was a thoughtful presence in the early years of the Beyond Baroque poetry workshop, and had poems in my 1985 anthology, “Poetry Loves Poetry.”

PICNIC - TRIO - BEST

Dennis Cooper; David Trinidad; Rick Lawndale (on guitar)

Bill Mohr - Bookstore T-shirt - 1

Bill Mohr, wearing an “Intellectuals & Liars” bookstore t-shirt

Bill Mohr - Green Shirt - 1

(costume change)

PICNIC - Big Group

Blog copyright Bill Mohr (c) 2017

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Books Photography Poetry Small Press Publishing

The Stoner Park Poets’ Picnic (1980)

July 14, 2017 – 11:54 am

The reading of “5 Editors” at Papa Bach in 1974 and the large group reading that took place on Valentine’s Day, 1976, at Beyond Baroque were definitive moments in the resurgence in the poetry scenes in Los Angeles in the mid-1970s. By the late 1970s, another groundswell of poetry magazines based in Los Angeles caught the West Coast still off-guard. No one was expecting Los Angeles to be the home base for so many activist editors. By the end of the decade, yet more editors were showing up, and their work provided the basis for many subsequent scenes to understand how complicated any account of Los Angeles must inherently be.

Among the most important editors were Dennis Cooper and Jack Skelley. Cooper’s Little Caesar magazine and Little Caesar press easily rank in the top 50 of all small press projects in the period between 1960 and 1990. Skelley’s magazine, Barney, was one of the rare magazines that accomplished more in its four issue run than other magazines manage to do in a dozen issues. David Trinidad and Amy Gerstler also had significant, though brief, projects at this time, too. One summer day found this new generation gathered at Stoner Park, along with two of the older editors, for a picnic.

Here are some photographs, never before shared, of “L.A. poets in their youth.” All photographs in this post were taken by me, and are (c) Bill Mohr. Group photograph (c) Cathay Gleeson.

Jim Krusoe - PICNIC - 2

Jim Krusoe holding court on a picnic table. In the background, one can see Dennis Cooper, David Trinidad, and Jack Skelley. I believe the man sitting on the bench in the foreground is Marshall Davis.

Dennis Cooper - Breaking on Camera
“Breaking on Camera”: Dennis Cooper, wearing a “My Aim Is True” t-shirt

Scott Wannberg - 1

From left to right: Joe Safdie; Julia Norstrand; (unknown person); Scott Wannberg, in red T-shirt, “McGovern 72”). Joe Safdie, it should be noted, went on to edit a poetry magazine after he moved to Northern California.

Picnic GROUP - 1

Standing, from left: David Trinidad; unknown; Amy Gerstler; Manazar Gamboa; Dennis Cooper; Rick Lawndale (with guitar); Jack Skelley; other figures in the back row, unknown); front row; kneeling, Bill Mohr; and two unknown individuals.)

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Poetry Poetry Readings

Two Crucial Los Angeles Poetry Readings in 1976 and 1980 (Part One)

July 11, 2017 – 7:43 am

July 11, 2017

A PAIR OF READINGS (1976 and 1980) — PART ONE

Along with Papa Bach Bookstore and Chatterton’s, Beyond Baroque became known for its variety of poetry readings as well as other events in the mid-1970s. At one point, I proposed to Jim Krusoe that Beyond Baroque hold an evening in which poets would read their favorite children’s stories. I believe that I read “The City Mouse and the Country Mouse.” The success of that evening led to other “special theme” nights.

One of the most important readings in the mid-70s was the “cover” evening in which poets read other poets. I use “cover” in the same sense that musicians will do a “cover” of a song. We all agreed that we would not read any of our own poems. Towards the end of the long evening, though, Jack Grapes couldn’t resist the temptation to underline the punch line of his own classic stand-up metapoem: “I Like My Own Poems Best.” The audience reaction was a mixture of sighs of disappointment (rather like a crowd at a baseball game seeing a perfect game ruined in the bottom of the eight inning by a bloop single) and laughs conceding the piquant irony of Grapes’s audacious prank. The list of poets who read at this event gives a quick census of the diverse communities beginning to emerge in the mid-1970s. One would note that it is hardly the homogenous community that the new poet laureate of Los Angeles fantasizes as being the poetry scene in Los Angeles at that time.

Friday, February 13, 1976 – Beyond Baroque
“An Old Fashioned Valentine: Poets reading their favorite poems by other poets.
Ameen Alwan, Georgia Alwan, Michael Andrews, Kate Braverman, Wanda Coleman, Dennis Ellman, Michael C. Ford, Jack Grapes, Joseph Hansen, John Harris, Eloise Healy, Leland Hickman, Dennis Holt, James Krusoe, Peter Levitt, K. Curtis Lyle, William Mohr, Harry E. Northup, Holly Prado, Frances Dean Smith, Otis Smith, Paul Vangelisti.

Beyond Baroque , 8:00 p.m.

LISTED BY AGE:
Joseph Hansen
John Harris
Frances Dean Smith
Leland Hickman
Ameen Alwan
Georgia Alwan
Harry Northup
Holly Prado
Michael C. Ford
Jack Grapes
Eloise Klein Healy
James Krusoe
Dennis Holt
K. Curtis Lyle
Otis Smith
Paul Vangelisti
Wanda Coleman
Michael Andrews
Dennis Ellman
Bill Mohr
Peter Levitt
Kate Braverman

Indeed, the extent to which other voices besides those of white males were beginning to be heard and given formal recognition can be found in a poetry reading series that was held at the Fifth Street Theater just a few years after this Valentine’s Day reading.

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Books Los Angeles bookstores Poetry Small Press Publishing

Five Editors Reading their Poetry at Papa Bach (1974)

July 9, 2017 – 1:09 pm

Shortly after the publication of Bachy’s second issue in the summer of 1973, I suggested to Ted Reidel that the late John Harris would be a superb poetry editor. John not only took on that position, but began coordinating the readings at Papa Bach Bookstore. One of the events he arranged in the early spring of 1974 was an evening that featured five editors of Los Angeles based literary magazines. The half-sheet of yellow paper that served as the press release and publicity flyer simply read:

(Five) 5 Editors Lay It on the Line at Papa Bach

Sunday, April 7 (1974)
11317 Santa Monica Blvd., West Los Angeles

Michael C. Ford (Sunset Palms Hotel)
John Harris (Bachy)
James Krusoe (Beyond Baroque)
William Mohr (Momentum)
Paul Vangelisti (Invisible City)

In the original announcement, the names of their magazines were not listed after their names, which is the reason the titles are in italics in the above list. At age 26, I was the youngest of these editors, though I confess that I didn’t let that fact diminish my self-confidence. The first issue had just come out, featuring a copy of the blueprint order form from my job at Larwin, an architectural firm I had worked out for two years along with an aspiring landscape architect named Steve Davis. The recession of 1974 had cost me my job, though I was hardly disconsolate at being able to stay home and work on my writing and editing instead of standing in front of a machine and feeding it sheet after sheet of light-sensitive paper.

I don’t believe that Michael, John, Jim, Paul, and myself thought of this evening as being particularly special, and yet in retrospect it amounted to an unusual gathering for any major city in the United States. How often did five editors of five memorable magazines ever read together at the same venue?

One of the DIY organizations that we launched at that time was Literary Publishers of Southern California (LPSC), which was an early attempt for form a book-distribution cooperative. We signed up for some tables at a book fair in Los Angeles in the mid-1970s. Rod Bradley took several photographs of editors at the fair.

Papa Bach - LPSC Book Fair
John Harris (leaning over table); Michael C. Ford (standing behind table), and unknown attendees at book fair.

Papa Bach - MCFord - John Harris - LPSC
John Harris; Michael C. Ford, and unknown attendee at book fair.

Grapes - Mohr
Jack Grapes (lifting cup); Bill Mohr (with motorcycle helmet crooked under arm with box of books); in the background, Luis Campos?

All photographs (c) copyright Rod Bradley, 2017. Permission to reproduce must be obtained from the photographer.

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CPITS Language Poetry Painting and Sculpture Poetry

The Papa Bach T-shirt Jaunt

July 2, 2017 – 12:45 pm

July 2, 2017

0701171351

At some point between late 1971 and 1980, I bought a Papa Bach t-shirt and wore it to readings and while I was teaching in the Poets-in-the-Schools programs. In the summer of 1981, I drove up to Eureka, California with Cathay Gleeson to visit an old friend of hers, Karin. It was my first jaunt that far north in California, and details of that trip appeared in a long poem I was working on at the time, “Your Move.” It wasn’t the first long poem I had attempted. In 1973, I had worked on a long poem entitled “The Resurrection,” parts of which had been published in The Lamp in the Spine (edited by Jim Moore and Patricia Hampl) and Intermedia (edited by Harley Lond). “Your Move” was influenced by my reading at the start of that decade of poets such as Kit Robinson, Ron Silliman, Lyn Hejinian, Rae Armantrout, and Barrett Watten. It quickly went beyond just reading of their work. Conversations with Ron when he came down to Los Angeles and a talk and reading at Beyond Baroque continued once we had left that venue, for he stayed over on that trip at my apartment in Ocean Park.

0701171352

Cathay and I spent a week up in the Eureka-Arcata area, and I commissioned Karin’s friend, Jim McVicker, to paint a portrait of me, for which I chose to wear the Papa Bach t-shirt, the same one I was wearing when I was photographed teaching a poetry class in Lone Pine, California. This particular classroom photograph brings back a set of contradictory memories, since working with CPITS was a problematic enterprise. The time spent in Lone Pine, however, remains one of my fondest occasions of working with other poets. Kit Robinson was there, too, and he mentions the gathering in the Grand Piano volumes as one in which he felt out of place. He probably didn’t realize how many of us didn’t feel quite at ease with each other, but our devotion to inspiring the students superseded the disparities in our poetics. I remain grateful to Eva Poole-Gibson for all she did to orchestrate two consecutive years in which poets from all over the state gathered in Inyo County to celebrate the joy of language surprising us when we least expect it.

CPITS Brochure - PB

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Books Poetry Small Press Publishing

Bachy Magazine’s Initial Announcement (1971)

July 1, 2017 – 10:04 am

July 1, 2017

The Los Angeles Times once had a Sunday section called “Calendar” that carried articles on film, theater, visual art, music and dance. It also provided free listings for a wide variety of cultural events. The section was sustained by a fairly substantial amount of advertising, including the following announcement, which appeared sometime in the early fall of 1971. The owners of Papa Bach Books had decided to start a literary magazine, which they entitled Bachy, that would primarily focus on writers and artists who were not yet “discovered.” Their choice of the poetry editor certainly fulfilled that aspiration: I was 23 years old when Ted asked me if I would take on the task of being the poetry editor, and I had not yet had a poem accepted for publication. Not wanting to rely only on word-of-mouth, Ted took out an ad in the LA Times Sunday “Calendar.”
filename-1-25

The mail started to pour into the store, and I would sit in the rear loft at a desk in the late evening and go over manuscripts from writers who were just beginning the process of getting repeated rejections. In general, I wrote back a comment on at least one poem that every person sent. As an editorial apprentice, I found myself a better judge of other’s writing than of my own. Perhaps the fact that I exuded more confidence in that regard was the key factor in being asked to be the poetry editor of Bachy at such a young age. In many ways, I found myself making use of my training as an actor just as much as all the reading I had been doing on my own since I had turned 20. Reading a poem was like getting to know the character an actor wants to inhabit: what does the character want to do? Bad editors, like second-rate actors, are always engaged in a reductionist agenda in which they appropriate the other personality for their benefit. Good editors are akin to benevolent actors, in that they accentuate the potential of the character to discover something unexpected. At the same time, the task of the editor is more rigorous than the translator in being faithful to the character of the poem. It turned out that I was a much better editor than an actor, though learning what makes theater theatrical as I set about editing poetry was extremely helpful.

The first issue appeared in the summer of 1972, and led off with poems by Jack Hirschman. The bulk of the poems came from three places, all of which represented solicitations on my part. I included poems by the poets I had met at San Diego State (Jack W. Thomas; Bob Kuntz; Marianne Johnson; Dennis Ellman); poems from the Beyond Baroque Wednesday Night Workshop (Joseph Hansen; John Harris; Paul Vangelisti; Harry Northup; Ann Christie; Luis Campos; Lynn Shoemaker; and Phil Taylor); and poems by young poets who submitted work because I had visited Philip Levine at Fresno State and asked him to tell students about this new magazine (David St. John; Roberta Spear; Sam Pereira). There were other poets, too, I would never meet: Pedro Montez, Anna Hernandez, Beau Beausoleil, as well as poets who were hardly “undiscovered”: William Matthews, John Haines, A. G. Sobin, and Charles Bukowski.

The graphic on the front cover was borrowed from the bookmark that the store gave away with each purchase. The back cover on each of the first two issues simply continued the front cover. The spine of the first two issues featured the only exterior information about the magazine (Volume 1, No. 1; July, 1972; and Volume II, No. 1; July, 1973).

Bachy 1 - 1972

Bachy 2 - 1973

The highlight of the second issue was Leland Hickman’s opening sections of “Tiresias.” The first issue had proved to be more expensive than the owner of the store anticipated, in part because he spent too much on paper stock. It was very high quality stock, and was almost trying too hard to be impressive in its production values. The second issue cut back in size, but I was still able to include John Harris and Harry Northup, along with Lee Hickman. Lyn Lifshin had done a reading tour of the West Coast, and I accepted one of her poems after she read at the store. Unknown poets included Sandra Tanhauser; Rick Smith; Frances Thronson; Bonita Hearn; and Pedro Montez, with whom I lost contact after this issue. One of the poets was still an undergraduate: Jim Grabill was a senior at Bowling Green State University. I continued to publish him after I started Momentum magazine in 1974, and his book, ONE RIVER, was the first one I published in my Momentum Press project.

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Books Painting and Sculpture Poetry Poetry Readings

Backlit by Blackness: Kerry James Marshall’s “Mastry” at MOCA

June 25, 2017 – 2:50 pm

Sunday, June 25, 2017

Backlit by Blackness: Kerry James Marshall’s “Mastry” at MOCA

A couple of weeks ago, Hye Sook Park reported that Kerry James Marshall’s retrospective exhibition at MOCA was a must-see event. Even before her enthusiastic commentary, in fact, I had made a note in my memory’s calendar of the closing date of his show, which grew ever closer as the month has gone by. Getting time to see his show has not been easy: my teaching work glided straight from the end of the spring semester into the summer session course I am teaching without the slightest pause.

Two days ago, on Friday, we might have headed north, but on Thursday the place where my mother is being cared wrote me and said that her doctor would be visiting her on Friday; since I had never talked to him face-to-face in the past eight months, that priority cancelled any other possibility. We did drive up to Beyond Baroque that evening, though, and heard David St. John read from The Last Troubadour, and Christopher Merrill read an account of his long friendship with Agha Shahid Ali. As always, it’s a long trip from Long Beach to Beyond Baroque, but this time it was truly worth it. David is one of this country’s very best poets, and Christopher’s recollections made Ali a living presence in the room. I would have liked to have heard Christopher read some of his poems, too, but his choice to read a single piece made it all the more memorable.

On Saturday, with a rare empty square on the kitchen calendar, we saddled up and headed north. Marshall’s show is easily worth more than one visit, and I hope to return before it closes, if only to spend more time with an unframed painting from 2003 entitled “7 a.m. Sunday Morning.” Before I briefly talk about that painting, I want to list several pieces that impressed me almost as much: “Beach Towel”; “Slow Dance”; “Red (If They Come In the Morning”; “Frankenstein” and “Bride of Frankenstein”; “School of Beauty, School of Culture”; “Heirlooms & Accessories”; “Chalk Up Another One”; “Fingerwag”; and “The Actor Hezekiah Washington as Julian Carlton Taliesen Murderer of the Flank Lloyd Wright Family.” If I have not included the housing project paintings in this list, it is only because they have already drawn more than sufficient critical attention.

The scale of Marshall’s work is often startling in its acute depictions of personal identity within the encompassing hemispheres of economic and racial confinements. Circling in a room of fermenting ordinariness, the figures in “Slow Dance” are both holding tight to each other’s poignant desires for more than has been allotted them, and grateful that at least they have each other for the moment. It more honestly addresses the romantic plight of marginal individuals, no matter what their race, than any painting I have ever absorbed into my memory.

The room the dancers inhabit is exactly what could have been foreseen by anyone who looks closely at the furniture of an engagement scene in a cheap restaurant. Even if one imagines the couple looking back at each other, and then unclasping to reach for a celebratory sip of their drinks, one would hardly expect either one to feel more comfortable in the minimally padded chairs the restaurant has provided them. Their fond ebullience is as much a performance meant for themselves as the onlookers they are posing for. The mise-en-scene of the restaurant extends to the smallest details of an urban backyard: the pink flip-flops being worn by the sunbather in “Beach Towel,” for instance. Equally pertinent in scope, one should not overlook the oversized earrings of “Fingerwag.” Marshall has a profound ability to augment his excavation of that which the ideological normative would prefer not to be present at all.

Jed Rasula mentions the contrast between “the politics in the poem, and the politics of the poem” in his intriguing study of American poetry anthologies. One could use the same distinction to talk about Marshall’s work, too, since in his case the politics in a painting such as “Red (If They Come in the Morning” are equally about the cultural politics of abstract painting and its reluctance to accept work done in that domain by African-American painters.

The street scene depicted in “Sunday Morning, 7 a.m.” has no overt politics, and yet the speeding white car that the running child seems to avoid by not much than a second and a half can hardly be separated from the more obvious repression cited in “Chalk Up Another One.” The adults in the post-dawn background stay safely on the sidewalk with its immediate access to the liquor store. The child has other comforts in mind. What might await that young man is hinted at in the right hand portion of the painting, in which Marshall’s synaesthetic handling of urban light portends some future visitation. Softened by a prismatic uncertainty, as if a late spring day will fulfill its potential for revelation, one can almost hear Whitman’s pure contralto sing the organ loft of some unanticipated destiny. Redemption is not an option, so don’t get carried away with hope, this light suggests. On the other hand, there is no reason to settle for mere survival of one’s ideals.

This show will be up through next weekend. As hard pressed for time as you might be, make every effort to catch this show. I agree with Christopher Knight’s concluding assessment in the LA Times: “Kerry James Marshall: Mastry” is the first time in a long time that MOCA’s exhibition program has felt essential. Don’t miss it.”

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/la-et-cm-kerry-james-marshall-moca-20170320-htmlstory.html

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Poetry Poetry Readings Small Press Publishing

A Pair of Readings in Santa Monica and Long Beach

June 18, 2017 – 11:17 am

Sunday, June 18, 2017

Peace Press - 1

(Photograph by Dinah Berland)

Traffic on the 405 freeway yesterday was every bit as bad as one might dread. One of the major problems of living and working in Long Beach is that I am often a three hour round trip away from attending any reading, and the task of driving to and from a reading I am part of is hardly less dispiriting. The reading itself at the Peace Press exhibition at Arena One Gallery in Santa Monica was a genuine pleasure, however.

Dinah Berland, the curator of the reading, had proposed to have the poets read in reverse alphabetical order, but Julia Stein was unable to make the event, so I led off the reading with a couple of poems that I don’t read that often: “The Big World and the Small World” (from Penetralia, 1984), and “Terrorism: The View from Century City,” which was published in the L.A. Weekly in the late 1980s when Deborah Drooz was the poetry editor. Her acceptance of that poem remains one of the more gratifying moments in my writing life. I also read “Complexities,” which had been featured on the Santa Monica bus system in the late 1980s for their poetry on the buses program, and “Slow Shoes,” which was published in Thoughtful Outlaw. Memoirist Deborah Lott followed me with a profoundly moving account of being at the Ambassador Hotel the night that Bobby Kennedy was assassinated. Michael C. Ford, whose book of poems The World Is a Suburb of Los Angeles, stands out as one of the ten best books of poems I published through Momentum Press, read as mellifluously as ever. His voice never seems to age or in any way lose its ability to pivot on the precisely illuminating syllable. Dinah Berland, the organizer of the reading, read ekphrastic poems that were not as explicitly political as the writing of the first three readers, but which pointed to the essential presence of the stranger’s gaze as the fundamental acceptance that makes politics possible. The surprise of the afternoon was Rhiannon McGaven’s presentation. The vocalization of her poems illuminated the room with their undulating cadences. Not to be mistaken for a slam poet, McGaven’s poems feature a mature diction for someone so young, and it is most likely the case that her poems will swirl with grace on the page, too. It would seem that she has been on tour quite a bit, but this was my first hearing of her writing, and I look forward to reading her debut volume of poems.

Arena One - 1A

Arena One - 2A

(From left to right: Bob Zaugh, Rhiannon McGaven, Doborah Lott, Bill Mohr, Dinah Berland, Michael C. Ford)

(Photographs by Linda Fry)

Bob Zaugh, as one of the founding spokespeople and prime instigators of Peace Press as a social, cultural, and literary force in Los Angeles, opened and closed the reading with brief remarks, and he received much deserved applause for all of his commitment to making this entire exhibit as well as reading possible. The most heartfelt applause in the course of the afternoon was most certainly for Gary Tyler, whose release two months ago from Angola prison, after over 40 years incarceration for a murder that he did not commit, was facilitated by Peace Press. Gary spoke to a small group of the audience in the dispersed conversations after the poetry reading, and his calm eloquence was a privilege to witness. He will be speaking at length at Arena One on July 1st, the final day of the exhibit.

Managing to get back through even more daunting traffic on the way back to Long Beach, it turned out that we were not late to the late afternoon/early evening reading at Gatsby Books, where Suzanne Lummis, Elena Karina Byrne, Richard Garcia, Charles Harper Webb, and Cynthia A. Briano read their poems. The four best poems were Lummis’s “The Lost Poem,” which was incredibly hilarious, Byrne’s “Richard Tuttle Behind Richard Tuttle,” the title piece of Richard Garcia’s latest collection of prose poems, Porridge, and a poem by Briano whose title I can’t remember but which I did mention to her afterwards as a poem with a gorgeous logic to its images. Briano’s soprano voice gave her poems a vigorous lilt, but there was a deeper register to the poems that made me wish that they could be recorded both now and at some future point decades from now when age has deepened her register. If one could mix those tapes, one would have a duet worth listening to repeatedly. One of the poems that Webb read seemed to be a revision of an e-mail scam satire that I remember hearing in 2010 at the Avenue 50 gallery. It was funny then, and even funnier now, and should help his forthcoming book of poems rebound from the slough of Brain Camp.

Quartet - Gatsby - 1

(from left to right: Sean Richard Moor, Suzanne Lummis, Charles Harper Webb, Cynthia A. Briano, Richard Garcia, Elena Karina Byrne, and Bill Mohr)

Quartet Gatsby - 2

(Photographs at Gatsby by Linda Fry)

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MFA programs Poetry Small Press Publishing Translation

Robin Myers, Poet-Translator: CONFLATIONS/Almagama

June 15, 2017 – 9:15 am

Thursday, June 15, 2017

Robin Myers, Poet-Translator: CONFLATIONS/Almagam

“Si tengo con qué escribir, sé que voy a detenerme a poner atención, a buscar entender cómo las cosas que me rodean se hablan entre sí.” — Robin Myers

Undergraduate students in creative writing often ask me about attending a MFA program. Since I myself do not have a MFA and often find myself in opposition to the constricted poetics that has dominated the Association of Writing Programs the past half-century, I am hardly the best person to go to for advice. I certainly encourage students to get the training that they feel is most appropriate for their talents and career goals. It’s important, for instance, for students to realize that the MFA is essentially a union card. It entitles one to apprenticeship status in the “brain factory,” which is to say that a person with a MFA can get teaching work at a college. Many MFA students who have attended CSULB have gone on to teach in the region’s community colleges, and a few have even taught at the four-year schools. Not only do they teach, but they continue writing, and several have gone on to publish novels and a fair amount of poetry. The success of the students is not surprising, given the quality of the MFA faculty. The other three poets who teach in the MFA program at CSULB (in seniority order, Charles Harper Webb, Patty Seyburn, and David Hernandez) all have national reputations; the fiction faculty includes two writers who have won N.E.A. creative writing fellowships. A student would be very hard pressed to find a better creative writing faculty at a public college, or many private colleges for that matter.

Any there other options, though? While it does require both aptitude and courage, one option is to empower oneself with thorough knowledge of a second language and to work as a translator. One young American poet who has done that is Robin Myers, who lives and works in Mexico City. She does not have a M.F.A., but she has developed something far more beneficial in the past several years; she has found a community of poets in Mexico whose commitment and knowledge of the art of poetry have enabled her to grow as a poet. Ultimately, one of the weaknesses of MFA programs in general is that they create networks and not communities. In undertaking this alternative course of maturing as a writer, Robin Myers has made herself part of a community which her affirmation of, in turn, has embraced her creative work.

Myers has just had her first book of poems, CONFLATIONS/Almagam, published in a bilingual edition in Mexico. I had the privilege of reading many of the poems in this book two years ago when the manuscript was still being finalized, and this collection deserves to be recognized as a superb debut by a poet who has just turned 30 years old. While this book might be difficult to obtain in the United States, you can find an interview with her that was published yesterday in the Los Angeles Review of Books:
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/a-sudden-taking-in-of-air-an-interview-with-poet-and-translator-robin-myers/

Her interviewer, Daniel Saldaña París, is an essayist, poet and novelist. Among Strange Victims was just published this month by Coffee House Press; it is his first novel to appear in the United States.

Here is the catalogue copy for Robin Myers’s book:

http://www.edicionesantilope.com
Amalgama / Conflations
Robin Myers
Amalgama, la palabra, está definida en el diccionario como la unión o mezcla de cosas de naturaleza contraria o distinta. Y eso es justamente Amalgama, el libro: un inventario que Robin Myers levanta para luego recordar no sólo las cosas en sí, sino la sensación de asombro al encontrarlas todas juntas. Con una sensibilidad poco común, la poeta observa el mundo y va recogiendo lo que encuentra para darle después un lugar a través del lenguaje. “Si tengo con qué escribir”, dice Myers, “sé que voy a detenerme a poner atención, a buscar entender cómo las cosas que me rodean se hablan entre sí”.

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