Koan Kinship — Bill Mohr's Blog

Tuesday, June 17, 2014

This past spring I had the pleasure of giving a poetry reading at Beyond Baroque in Venice with Rick Lupert, one of the most stalwart and ebullient members of the Los Angeles poetry community. It was the first time I had ever read with him and I enjoyed the event very much. He subsequently invited me to read at the Cobalt Cafe, where I will be reading tonight at 8:00 p.m. Here is the information anyone interested in attending might need:

BILL MOHR plus OPEN READING Tonight!

Plus “Old Friend with New Project” MARIE LECRIVAIN

The Cobalt opens at 7:30 pm tonight

I probably have read in the San Fernando Valley about a half-dozen times during the past 40 years, and it’s a considerable drive from my current residence at the very southern edge of Los Angeles County, but I’m looking forward to it very much, especially since it appears that several of my MFA students are going to drive up there, too, to take part in the open reading. They have also started a new poetry magazine, American Mustard, which just had its inaugural issue posted on-line. In particular, I am pleased to see that they adopted the flip-the-page approach that Larry Smith’s Caliban magazine has made such good use of as a means of keeping the origins of print culture present in electronic production.

This past Friday Linda and I drove up to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art for a meeting with Susan Power and George Drury Smith to organize the presentation that George and I will make at LACMA this coming Saturday at 2:00 p.m. Here’s the link to LACMA’s announcement:

http://www.lacma.org/event/bill-mohr-and-george-drury-smith

I will be reading poems by Stuart Perkoff, Bruce Boyd, Eileen Ireland, and John Thomas, as well as a few of my own poems. Some of the poems I will be reading will also appear in a forthcoming anthology, Cross-Strokes, which Neeli Cherkovski and I have been back at work on during the past week. Our co-editing has been a process of commitment made intermittent by the multitudinous distractions of our other obligations, but we both now feel a renewed sense of urgency that will no doubt impel us towards completion of this project. Both of us are very grateful for the patience of our contributors.