Koan Kinship — Bill Mohr's Blog

Friday, February 23, 2024

Of the quartet of photographs in today’s post, only one somersaults back over 30 years ago: the second one, which features painted wooden panels leaning against a wall. I first saw those panels in the late summer of 1993, when I read with poet-actor Harry Northup at Portfolio Coffee House in Long Beach. Kitty-corner to the coffee house was an elementary school playground with a block-long chain-link fence on which the panels gleamed as public art. Harry and I were celebrating the release of our spoken word albums, VEHEMENCE and PERSONAL CRIME, along with fellow spoken word performer, the late Linda Albertano, and a local poet Pam Nielsen.

Portfolio Coffee House was forced to move by the landlord over a year ago, after being a landmark gathering place for poets and the occasional musician. Other coffee shops have opened up on Fourth Street, including Coffee Drunk and Rose Park Coffee. I have met and talked with young poets at both these places, but I miss Portfolio. My hair is all gray now. How dark my.hair still was, back then, 30 years ago. Of course, what do I expect of inevitability but its unwobbling fulfillment? I sit ere, grateful to be able to still move my fingers on a keyboard and to know that I will be reading my poetry on Harry’s Poetry Hour this coming Tuesday, February 27th.

I took the photograph of the panels a couple weeks ago, before a set of rainstorms pumped up the snow levels in the Sierra Nevada and pushed the annual precipitation totals in Los Angeles County above normal. I should walk over this weekend and see if they are still there, leaning agains the wall in the subdued, but vigilant light of a Southern California winter.

February 20, 2024

The California Faculty Association (CFA) is a union representing over 20,000 faculty in the California State University system. The overwhelming majority of its members are not tenured faculty, but part-time (adjunct) faculty who exercise the same franchise as the tenured faculty. Each member gets one vote. Since the majority of the faculty are not tenured, but at best have three-year contracts, guess which contingent gets the most attention from the union’s leadership?

When the CRA reported that 76 percent of the vote on the new contract was in favor of accepting it, guess which percentage of the CFA is adjunct faculty? You wouldn’t be far off it you name the same percent.

It certainly came as no surprise to me that the CFA called off its strike after one day. This union’s leadership would never be tolerated by the United Teachers of Los Angeles or the Auto Workers Union. In recognition of the extraordinary erosion of our paychecks the past two years, the Chancellor’s Office offered a five percent raise, and the CFA accepted it.

Supposedly, there is another five percent raise coming next year, but that depends on whether the Legislature and Governor deign to honor their promise. Well, I’m not waiting around to get spit on again.

I quit.

I quit the union, and why shouldn’t I? .The value of my pension (which I will finally at age 76 begin collecting this summer) was decimated the past two years, and the union did not lift a finger to protect it.

And to think that I endured a month of hell on behalf of this union back when things were really tough at the end of this century’s first decade.

Good luck, CFA, with negotiating your next contract when the current one expires in the summer of 2025. You won’t find me wasting my time on your picket line in 2026, when I am FERPing (half-time, tenured faculty), and when the deal you made is worth even less to membership than it is now.

If you ever get your courage back, let me know and I’ll reconsider. But CFA leadership has long refused to take the needs of its tenure-track and tenured faculty membership seriously, and I predict it will never change.

Post-script on Wednesday, February 21:
I was hired as a tenure-track assistant professor in 2006 with a salary that was below $60,000. Mind you, I had a Ph.D. and brought over 30 years of experience as an editor, publisher, and teacher to the table on day one. When I given tenure and promoted to associate professor four years later, I got a ten percent raise, which was 2.5 percent more than the minimum that often accompanies that promotion.

The fact remains that if I had not put in a tremendous amount of work and been promoted to full professor in 2017 and been awarded a 15 percent raise that year, I would now be only earning a pittance more as an associate professor than I did as a newly hired assistant professor, once inflation was factored in.

THe opera star of “Diva” recently died, and though it is an all too brief post on Valentine’s Day, I simply must take note of her passing. The excerpt of Wilhelmenia Wiggins Fernandez singing in a suspense thriller built around a “bootleg” tape of an artist who doesn’t believe in the commodification of her voice is one of the most poignant experiences of my entire life. I just listened to it once again, and it is more enrapturing than ever. I regret that I never had a chance to hear her perform live.

Oddly enough, my guess is that this film, which was released over 40 years ago, has probably not been seen by the majority of filmgoers between the ages of 18 and 30.

May the most exquisite operatic voice I have ever heard rest in eternal reverberation.

Sunday, February 11

This weekend I’ve been preparing to lead a discussion of MFA students about Terrance Hayes’s “American Sonnets for My Once & Future Assassin.” I’ve just finished jotting down notes on each of his sonnets and realized that I should have assigned Wanda Coleman’s sequence to them, too. While it’s too late for me to insist that they do so, I would like to post this brief note today (at 5:45 p.m., PST) to let my readers know that they can be found on-line:

https://paulenelson.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Wanda-Coleman-American-Sonnets-Complete.pdf

There are dozens of poets whose work deserves close attention and at least some brief commentary, and the sad part of being a devoted reader of contemporary American poetry is the fact that no one could meet that demand, even if she or he were paid a full-time salary. Nevertheless, it’s almost incumbent on any serious reader to record a small portion of their insights into a few poets.

In Hayes’s case, I would like to apply a rule I heard about years ago that claimed anyone who wanted to know what one of Shakespeare’s plays was about only had to read the line of poetry that was at the exact center of the play. I thought that was an interesting premise, even if it was nothing more than a premise meant to bolster and augment one’s motive for indulging in Bardolotry.

In the “Once and Future Assassin” collection of poems, the rule turns up a haunting line, which in fact circles back to the very first “American Sonnet.” You’ll find that line in the middle of the sonnet on page 43: “To be dead and alive at the same time.” That kind of simultaneity is exactly what happens when Orpheus draws an “X” across the eyes of the beloved.

Hayes is an astonishing poet, and I have more to say about this book on another morning.

Happy Valentine’s Day!

Last year, Semiotext(e) published Jack Skelley’s “Complete Fear of Kathy Acker,” the compilation of a project that began as a very small pamphlet in the early 1980s, or at least that’s when I remember seeing the first one. I have yet to obtain a copy of the finished edition, but I am hoping to have a chance to read it before I attend the theatrical adaptation that will have a brief run at the end of this month at Illusion Magic Lounge in Santa Monica located at 1418 4th St, Santa Monica, CA 90401.The performances will begin at 8:00 on February 27th, 28th, and 29th.

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/fear-of-kathy-acker-tickets-807381408527

If Skelley’s work seems somewhat familiar to readers of this blog, but you can’t quite place it, let me give you a little hint. My review of his book, “Pleased to Meet You Beastmaster 666,” was one of the top three dozen most visited posts in my blog during the past two years.In addition to his widely admired first book, “MONSTERS,” from Dennis Cooper’s Little Caesar Press, Skelley was also the editor and publisher oF BARNEY magazine in the early 1980s. In addition, he played in several bands, including PLANET OF TOYS with poet-performance artist Bob Flanagan, and curated the musical presentations at Beyond Baroque under the banner, “Beyond Barbecue.”

January 25, 2024 —

This morning, soon after a brief meditation and while doing some stretching on a yoga mat, I thought to myself, “maybe January 25the will the date for the anniversary of my death.” It’s a Thursday, I thought, so there’s a blending of Merwin and Vallejo. And it had been raining before dawn, when I first got up.

While I have no idea of course on what day I will die, I will remember this date as the one when a friend told me that D.R. Wagner, poet and artist, died a month ago, at age 80. I suppose I first heard of him over a half-century ago because of a magazine he edited called THE RUNCIBLE SPOON. Ah! Those were the glory days of poetry, when no one ever thought of it as a “career.” The AWP seemed like some obscure splinter group of a right wing political faction; it was of little relevance to the ever accelerating small press movement that D.R. Wagner was emblematic of.

Truly, may he rest in the muse’s dreams as one who spent his time on earth as only a poet can.
chttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oU50BCbfbp4

Some of Donald R. Wagner’s boos include:

The Lost Carnival and Other Places (Death Crater, California: Molly Moon Press, 1969. 22pp.)

Cruising’ at the Limit: Selected Poems 1968-1978 (1982)

April 15, April 16 : poems

Confessional poem to free the mind of its hang ups and keep the underworld free of its goofy
Cat’s Pajamas Press, 1970.

Round, earth, poems (Milwaukee : Gunrunner Press, 1969)