June 18, 2024
I turned in my retirement application a couple weeks ago and will cease teaching full-time at California State University, Long Beach as of mid-August. It’s not that I don’t want to keep teaching full-time. I simply don’t have the physical stamina to do it anymore. The CSU system has a program in which tenured professors who retire are allowed to teach one semester a year for up to five years. I have my doubts that I will be capable of teaching even one semester a year in 2029, but if I’m still alive, I will not have enough money coming in from the pittance of a pension and social security to get by on at that point, so I had better darn well be able to rouse myself enough to get into the classroom in the meantime.
In looking back on what little I have been able to accomplish, I want to acknowledge the contributions of friends, editors, publishers, reviewers, translators, and cultural workers who have assisted me along the way. Thank you. Collectively, you shaped my life in a way that no one would have ever predicted sixty years ago, when I was about to enter my senior year of high school as an abject outcast and object of utter derision to my classmates at Marian High School in Imperial Beach. Well, I can’t deny that I was indeed the ugliest man on campus and only minimally coordinated. That I didn’t deserve to be bullied should go without saying. My ability to endure the daily torture I was subjected to — and those in charge of the school knew perfectly well what was going on — grew out of some inexplicable inner conviction that I would someday meet people whose lives my decisions and actions would benefit. I fell short, of course, of what I might have done for all of you, had the times been more auspicious, but at least the ministers of grace helped me to redeem what little I could.
Once again, thank you, and let not a dozen people whose names I have retained in cherished memory but who are not listed not think I have forgotten them.. In the garden of my heart, you arethe ones for whom I recite the lines: “Surely thine hour has come, thy great wind blows / Far-off, most secret, and inviolate rose.”
Friends and Editors/Publishers/Translators/Cultural Workers
Paul Vangelisti
Jim Krusoe
Jack Grapes
Brooks Roddan
Lea Ann Roddan
Harley Lond
Lawrence R. Smith
David Garyan
Laurel Ann Bogen
Anthony Seidman
Jose Luis Rico
Robin Myers
Harvey Robert Kubernik
Bob Peters
Leland Hickman
Alicia Ostriker
Christopher Buckley
Linda Fry
Jim McVicker
Terry Oates
Susan Hansell
Gail Wronsky
Gerry Locklin
Doren Robbins
Natalija Grgorinić and Ognjen Rađen
George Drury Smith
Michael C. Ford
Charles Harper Webb
Suzanne Lummis
Cecilia Woloch
Neeli Cherkovski
Kenneth Funsten
S.A. Griffin
Lynn McGee
Lynda Claassen and Brad Westbrook (UCSD Special Collections)
Holly Prado
Harry E. Northup
Phoebe MacAdams
Kate Braverman
Jim Cushing
David James
Wanda Coleman
Kevin McNamara
Steven Axelrod
Timothy Steele
Ronna Johnson
Nancy Grace
Kevin Opstedahl
Michael Davidson
Donald Wesling
Alan Golding
Stephen Motika
John Lowney
Alexis Rhone Fancher
Terence Diggory
Frank Kearful
Kathryn McMahon
Natalie Gerber
Edward Brunner
Jim Moore
Brian Kim Stefans
Dennis Cooper
Cathay Gleeson
Audri Phillips
Rae Armantrout
Sandra Tanhauser
William (“Koki”) Iwamoto
Jim Conn
Rod Bradley
John Harris
Joseph Hansen
Helene Ali
Patricia Hampl
Lenny Durso
David Antin
Gail Newman
Ron Silliman
Marine Robert Warden
About Bill Mohr