Books

The Analogy Quiz of HMO Health Care

A simple analogy quiz today:

Health Insurance is to Medical Care

as

Marriage is to ___________:

A.) connubial bliss at least once a day
B.) constant, lingering caresses
C.) daily, joyful flirtation with one’s soul mate
D.) Celibacy

If you chose “D,” you are correct.

Health insurance only means that you are paying for the “privilege” of having that specific status. It does not mean that you are entitled to medical care. It only means that you are theoretically eligible for medical care.

Just as a spouse can legally deny intimate access of their body to another spouse, a health insurance company can deny (and DOES deny, on a constant basis) prompt access to medical care.

“Denial of benefits” is likely to lead to a divorce court in the case of a marriage.

In the United States, however, HMO denial of benefits is imposed on those who pay for it without any possible recourse. There is no way to divorce oneself from a medical system that subjects a person to the constant violation of their dignity by forestalling medical treatment.

One of the Bob Dylan’s lines is “Is there a hole for me to get sick in?”

That about sums it up, wouldn’t you say?

**********

In case anyone is wondering, “Well, why don’t people file a complaint?”

Ha! Ha! Ha!

Don’t you understand that all you will get back is a form letter with boilerplate language about how the provider (be is Blue Shield or Kaiser) appreciates your evaluation of service and that it will take into account your comments as it works to improve its service?

Translation: We treated you badly and we got away with it. There was no penalty. No one investigated us. No fines were levied. Therefore, we continue to establish and refinforce the bottom line of how little service we can give and face no repercussions whatsoever. A complaint only helps the corporation give even worse service, since they learn how much they can get away with, with complete impunity.

“The Masters of War” are also the Chancellors of Health Care.

************************

Finally, if you believe this is just some isolated crank who sees health care as his chosen conspiracy theory, I would suggest you consult an article by a journalism enterprise that takes the truth seriously:

https://www.propublica.org/article/health-insurance-denials-breaking-state-laws

Insurance companies willfully and knowingly break the law. At the very least, they do not hesitate to violate the dignity and well-being of those whose labor has earned the right to access to health care.

Books

Richard Modiano Interviews Bill Mohr on POETS CAFE (KPFK)

Thursday, November 30, 2023

I got an email a few days ago from someone who had heard me being interviewed by Richard Modiano on KPFK’s POETS CAFE. I did a little browsing on the internet and I’m pleased to report that the interview can be accessed at the following link:

This is just part pne of the interview, which was recorded about three months ago.
Hosted by Richard Modiano
Produced by Marlena Bond
Originally broadcast on KPFK 90.7 FM 11/29/23

Some of the literary magazines that published poetry referred to in this interview can be found in the following list:

Literary Magazines in Los Angeles or adjacent counties (1948-2023)

Line (three issues published in the late 1940s)
Variegation (Grover Jacoby, Jr.)
Recurrence (Grover Jacoby, Jr.)
California Quarterly (Tom McGrath)
Coastlines (Gene Frumkin; Mel Weisburd)
Trace (James Boyer May)
Nomad (Don Factor; Anthony Link)
Beyond Baroque (New; Newletters; Magazine) — George Drury Smith, et al. (James Krusoe; Lynn Shoemaker)
Laugh Literary (Charles Bukowski)
Invisible City (Paul Vangelisti;John McBride)
Sunset Palms Hotel (Michael C. Ford)
Bachy (John Harris; Leland Hickman)
Momentum (Bill Mohr)
Intermedia (Harley W. Long)
Electrum (Roger Suva)
Third Rail (Uri Hertz; Loren Robbins)
Rara Avis (Aleida Rodriguez; Jacqueline De Angelis)
NeWorld (Inner City Cultural Center)
Chrysalis (Woman’s Building)
CQ: California State Poetry Quarterly. 1972 – 2020. Between 1976-1980, edited in Los Angeles by Kenneth Atchity)
Nausea/Maelstrom Review (Leo Mailman)
Urthkin (Larry Ziman)
Con Safos ( https://repository.library.csuci.edu/handle/10139/2523 )
ChismeArte (Manazar Gamboa; Guillermo Bejarano)
Little Caesar (Dennis Cooper)
Barney (Jack Skelley)
Snap (Amy Gerstler and Lori Cohen)
Asylum (Greg Boyd)
Marilyn (Peter Schneidre)
Pearl (Joan Jobe Smith; Barbara Hauk; Marilyn Johnson)
Boxcar (Leland Hickman; Paul Vangelisti)
Sulfur (Clayton Eshleman)
Temblor (Leland Hickman)
Santa Monica Review (James Krusoe; founding editor; Anthony Tonkovich)
Bakunin (Jordan Jones)
Blue Satellite (Amelie Frank and Matthew Niblock)
Tsunami (Lee Rossi)
Saturday Afternoon Journal
Blue Window
Poetry L.A. (Helen Friedland)
ONTHEBUS (Jack Grapes, Michael Andrews)
Arshile (Mark Salerno)
Caffeine (Rob Cohen)
Ribot (Paul Vangelisti)
New Review of Literature (Paul Vangelisti)
OR (Paul Vangelisiti; Otis College of Art and Design)
Parrot (Matthew Timmons)
Shattersheet (April and Jim Burns)
The Moment (S.A. Griffin)
Sic (Vice and Verse) — (S.A. Griffin; R.J. Alvarado)
Spillway (Marsha de la O; Phil Lummox (R.D. Armstrong)
Lana Turner (Cal Bedient and David Lau)
Pool (Patty Seyburn; Judith Taylor)
Caliban (on-line) (Lawrence R. Smith)
Los Angeles Review (Red Hen Press; Kate Gale)
sin cesar (drylands) — (founded, 2015)
Website: https://drylandla.wordpress.com/
Cultural Weekly; Cultural Daily (Alexis Rhone Fancher, Poetry Editor)
Rattle (Timothy Green)
WEBZINES:
HINCHAS DE POESIA — Website: http://www.hinchasdepoesia.com/wp/
THE OFFING

It should also be noted that there were other editors working on magazines published outside of Los Angeles. Jean Burgen, for instance, editoed Yankee magazine for several decades.

Finally, many colleges in Southern California have published on a regular basis a literary magazine. CSU Long Beach (RipRap); Cal State L.A. (Statement); UCLA (Jacaranda Review); CUC Irvine (Faultline); etc.

Aya Tarlow was the editor, I believe, of Matrix: For She of the New Aeon.

Bill Mohr is a professor in the Department of English at California State University, Long Beach. He has a Ph.D. in Literature from the University of California, San Diego, and has taught at CSU Long Beach since 2006. In addition to being an internationally recognized poet, Mohr has worked as an editor and publisher (Momentum Press, 1974-1988) and literary scholar and historian. His poems, prose poems and creative prose have appeared in dozens of magazines in the past 40 years, including 5 AM, Antioch Review, Beyond Baroque, Blue Collar Review, Blue Mesa Review, Caliban (On-line), KYSO (Knock Your Socks Off) Miramar, ONTHEBUS, OR, Santa Monica Review, Skid Row Penthouse, Solo Nolo, Sonora Review, Spot, Upstreet, Wormwood Review, and ZYZZYVA. His poems have also appeared in a dozen anthologies, including all three editions of Charles Harper Webb’s Stand Up Poetry (1989, 1992; 2002); Suzanne Lummis’s Grand Passion and Wide Awake; and Coiled Serpent, from Tia Chuca Press. Mohr is one of less than a half-dozen Los Angeles-based poets to have appeared in all editions of those anthologies.

Books

Could Bob Dylan’s “Masters of War” Be Regarded as “Hate Speech”?

Wednesday, November 29th, 2023

“In the kingdom of the blind / the one-eyed man is murdered.” — Don Gordon (blacklisted American poet)

Regardless of whether the current cease-fire holds and extends its brevity long enough for Israel’s government to realize that it can no more vanquish Hamas than the United States was able to make the Viet Gong give up, the distrust between Jews and those of the Islamic religion has only solidified into volcanic permanence. As I have written before, I see no way out of this impasse: neither side wants a two-state solution.

The ever-sharpening tempers on both sides has led a significant uptick in accusations of “hate speech.” Since confrontations orchestrated by one side or the other are not likely to dwindle in the years to come, I wonder if “free speech” will soon find itself subjected to a discursive apartheid in which anything provocative or critical of another’s actions is immediately condemned as “hate speech.”

How bad might it get? Imagine that I show up at a rally in support of Israel’s massive retaliation for the massacre of over 1,000 people in early October and that I play a cassette of Bob Dylan’s “Masters of War.” As the final stanza’s fantasy of dancing on the graves of munitions manufacturers snarls its disdain for the amorality of the global military-industry complex, how would the demonstrators not see it as directed at them? And would not the same be true if I played that same song to a crowd gathered in support of Hamas?

The song, as such, is directed toward those who assemble any large-scale weapons of destruction, whether fission-based or more conventional detonations, such as the 2,000 pound bombs “that can flatten apartment towers,” according to the New York Times, and that have been used by Israel in areas associated with the civilian population of Gaza. When a nation hits 15,000 targets in its enemy’s territory, it’s inconceivable that there will be not significant “collateral damage” and mass graves, the images of which make me realize that I deserve no better. Let me repeat: I deserve no better. Let my corpse, when “I” no longer breathe, be placed in a plastic bag and lowered next to a pile of similarly encased bodies. Nothing I have done merits any better.

Whether Netanyahu and his cohort want to be remembered as a very minor version of the late Henry Kissinger is a question he will have to answer, just as the leaders of Hamas need to reflect on whether their goals make them indistinguishable from Pol Pot’s methods of aggrandizement. The answer, I assure you, is not blowing’ in the wind.

The odd part of the world today is that I am more likely to be punished for asking questions than the people who refuse to give answers will be.

**********

https://www.yahoo.com/news/henry-kissinger-america-most-notorious-015455590.html

****

Footnote: Please note that I have treated “tempers” as a collective noun.

Books

Catherine Christer Hennix (1948-2023)

Saturday, November 25, 2023

The New York Times Book Review has a standard question that they end their brief interviews with: “Name three people you would like to invite to a dinner party.” If I had to mix genres, and I wanted the conversation to be primarily of interest to my guests (even if I myself couldn’t follow the conversation), I would invite Hilma af Klint, Catherine Christer Hennis, and Laura Riding.

After dinner, I would invite them to listen to Michael Hedges’s “Aerial Boundaries” and Wim Martens’s “Maximizing the Audience.”

I admit that I’d never heard of Hennix until she died, but then again I’d never heard of Klint until I saw her work at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in the mid-1980s. Both Cathay Gleeson and I were deeply moved by her work and felt fortunate to live in a city that was open to exhibiting her work.

Catherine Christer Hennix

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catherine_Christer_Hennix

The Electric Harpsichord: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eXxobmct4xY

ARTFORUM article on Hennix:
https://www.artforum.com/columns/canada-choate-on-the-writings-of-catherine-christer-hennix-241922/

******************

To acknowledge her passing in a way she might find acceptable, I include a link I believe to be relevant to her life and work:

https://quran.com/24/35?translations=83,84,17,26,101,20,85,18,95,19,22,28

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Books

“The Weighing of Feathers and Gold”

Monday, November 20, 2023

Fifty years ago, I was circulating a full-length play I had written about Frantz Fanon and the Algerian war for independence from the colonial grasp of France. I wrote the play soon after acting in John Groves’s award-winning play, “A Circle on the Ground,” which focused on Ghandi’s quest for India’s liberation, and which ran at the Gallery Theater, on Santa Monica Boulevard, in the winter of 1972. Fanon was the opposite of Gandhi; for Fanon, the oppressed could only exorcise their abjection through a willingness to rebel in a violent manner. Colonial masters, of course, only regarded such extreme insubordination as a justification for merciless retaliation. As the film “The Battle of Algiers” made clear, this was a conflict in which the French felt perfectly comfortable with using torture to maintain their empire.

In doing research on the Algerian war, which resulted in the deaths of as hundreds of thousands of people, I happened to find a comment that was made by one of the French settlers in Algeria, in which he summed up the value of Arab lives: “They weigh in the scales as feathers against gold.” When one considers the predations of several major European powers, as well as the United States, over the past five centuries, that disproportionate assessment seems to have been applied to each instance of appropriation and exploitation, whether it was Great Britain in India or Belgium in the Congo, or the United States in the Philippines, or Spanish in the Caribbean or South America, or the United States against the indigenous people in their enclaves and nations. The close to ten to one death ratio of Arab women and children in the current conflict reeks of the same hierarchical racism.

Even as the Kurdish and Ukrainian people deserve political autonomy, Israel has both a right to exist and to defend itself. It does not have carte blanche to commit war crimes. Since those who are suffering this pulverizing revenge will never forget what has taken place, it makes no difference if Hamas is “destroyed.” Another organization will emerge from the rubble, and the cycle of hideous attack and counter-attack will continue until the planet itself finally “loses its cool” and becomes uninhabitable by any human. Couldn’t happen to a nicer species!

We are all equally feathers, but as a species we have deliberately chosen to ground ourselves in debasing narratives.

********

“”Far more children have been killed in Gaza in the past six weeks than the 2,985 children killed in the world’s major conflict zones COMBINED — across two dozen countries — during all of last year, even with the war in Ukraine, according to U.N tallies of verified deaths in armed conflict.” — page 1.

So how much of Hamas has been destroyed, in turn, for exacting the lives of 5,000 children (aka “feathers”)?
Ten percent of Hamas?
Twenty percent?

If 20 percent, does that mean Israel is prepared to murder 25,000 children to make certain that Hamas will not attack again?

I am utterly certain that no one in Israel is willing to answer those questions. With a straight face, the uniformed authorities will say, “We cannot comment on ongoing operations.”

Of course, any estimates of Israel’s “success” might be reviewed within the context of how the United States grossly underestimated the actual situation on the ground in Vietnam, even as it enforced a policy of “We had to destroy the village in order to save it.”

Perhaps, indeed, a ceasefire might enable those in Israel responsible for the above obliteration of life to ask themselves how far they are willing to go before they define an exit strategy. The United States’ invasion of Iraq ultimately generated the extremist factions that made up the Isis Caliphate. Israel should not pretend that its current military path is exempt from that outcome.

Meanwhile, in Tehran, those responsible for assisting Hamas sleep well, and eat well, knowing that they will never be held responsible in any court of international law for the events of October 7th. Their culpability is fomenting this conflict is all too easily reduced to a footnote, whereas that regime’s blatant anti-semitism needs to be categorized as a choice indulged in as if it had smirking impunity.

**************************

In posting these observations and comments, let me emphasize that I don’t believe I could safely live in any nation in which the governing apparatus is permeated by the influence of the Islamic religion. In Iran, for instance, I have no doubt that I would be summarily tortured and executed. In Saudi Arabia, why would I not be subjected to strangulation and dismemberment?

Human dignity on this planet at this point is in a no win situation. To pretend that meaningful, consequential civil discourse is even remotely possible is to be egregiously self-indulgent and sentimental. Survival is a matter of random contingency; and as Brecht (whose use of songs in his plays influenced my script on Fanon) said in his poem “To Posterity,” “If my luck deserts me, I am lost.”

It is also worth noting that large-scale massacres are not limited to “white” civilizations. Extermination projects, whether of populations or cultures, have been launched in recent decades by governments in China, Burma, Rwanda, Nigeria, etc. etc.; and how could it be possible to overlook the Turkish atrocities to the Armenians, or the Russian pogroms, or the German-led genocide of Jews and Romani. See the final sentence of third paragraph and repeat it as a mantra.

Couldn’t happen to a nicer species.
Couldn’t happen to a nicer species.
Couldn’t happen to a nicer species.
Couldn’t happen to a nicer species.
Couldn’t happen to a nicer species.
Couldn’t happen to a nicer species.

****************

Wednesday, November 22nd update:

“The (ceasefire) offers only temporary respite for Gaza’s 2.3 million residents, half of whom have been forced to flee their homes by ferocious Israeli missile and artillery fire.

Once the prisoner releases end, “we will continue the war … until we achieve all our objectives,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told his government this week”

(https://www.csmonitor.com/Daily/2023/20231122?cmpid=ema:ddp:20231122:1170602:toc&sfmc_sub=13824377#1170602)

The phrase “all our objectives” is particularly noteworthy in its vague comprehensiveness. The 9/11 attacks on the United States ended up with the Bush administration expanding the goals of its counter-attack at a great cost to the people of Iraq, who were not in any way part of that attack, despite GWB’s claim in a debate with John Kerry that they were.

Anyone who accepts the justifications for what is happening to children in Gaza as being based on Israel’s right to attain “all our objectives” cannot evade indefinitely the retribution that is inevitable. Maybe not next year. Maybe not in five years, but I flinch to think of its ineluctability, just as I flinch to think of how Israel will strike back ten-fold, once again. And again. And again. And again, each side will show no compassion or kindness.

I join with Bernie Sanders in calling for a restoration of sanity.

https://newrepublic.com/article/177050/democrats-conflict-israel-aid-conditions

****************

I wish I were a poet capable of writing a poem that catches the self-deceiving logic that is at work on the part of all the protagonists in this debacle.

There is a poet, however, worth reading in this regard: the late Tom Lux.

See how poem, “The People of the Other Village”

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/48485/the-people-of-the-other-village

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Books

Bill Mohr’s “set list” for Natsoulas Gallery Reading (in Davis, CA)

When Dr. Andy Jones asked me to read a poem toward the end of our conversation for his radio show this past Wednesday afternoon, I had not yet picked one out of my book from the What Book Collective. By chance, the book opened to “Portrait in McVicker’s Garden”; afterwards, I realized that I would enjoy linking up my reading on Thursday with my conversation with Andy by starting the public reading with that poem. The set-list fell together quite easily then, since I knew that the obvious segue was to read a poem that inspired one of my wife’s paintings, “In the Ocean of Nothingness.” (Question of the day: Whereas everyone knows the term for a poem that is based on a piece of visual art, what is the word for visual art based on a poem?) The third poem I chose was also a logical choice: one that I had written two days earlier called “Poem for a Painter,” which is an ekphrastic poem about a painting for which I gave Linda the suggestion of embedding it in a grid.

The rest of the set list:
“Art of Poetry”
“Vallejo”
“The Restoration”
“How to Play Ping-Pong with a Mirror”
“Pancho’s Tacos”
“Milk”
“How to Quit Writing Poetry”
“Big Band, Slow Dance”
“A Vision”
“Why the Heart Never Develops Cancer”

What would have been one of a half-dozen other alternative sets, you might ask?

“Death’s Real Job”
“Eye Chart for an Orbiting Space Station”
“Cro-Magnon”
“Dream Drain”
“Manifesto 1984
“Terrorism: the View from Century City”
“The Ghoul Convention:
“Rules for Building a Labyrinth”
“Real Days Off”
“Renaming the Bridge”
“Underaged”
“Wrinkles”
“Tomato Skins”
“The Bulldozer”
“The Timing Chains”
“The Scanvengers of Paradox”
“Bittersweet Kaleidoscope”
“The Trolley Problem”
“The Headwaters of Nirvana”

Someday I’d like to do a reading that featured only poems written between 1970 and 1977. Each of the above lists includes one or two poems from that period. Are there enough poems from my earliest years that could hold their own as equivalents of my more recent work? While I have enough work from my long poem in progress, “REMIGES,” to enable me to give two completely separate readings just from that portion of my total writing, it’s the question of the earliest writing that I want to test out at some point in the next two years.

****************

Launched in 2011, the Poetry Night Reading Series in Davis is held on the first and third Thursday of every month at the John Natsoulas Gallery (521 First Street, Davis CA). Recent readers have included Richard Loranger, DR Wagner, Dave Boles, and California Poet Laureate Lee Herrick. The series is hosted by Dr. Andy Jones, the poet laureate emeritus of Davis.

Other past readers include the late Francisco X. Alarcón, Joshua Clover, Sandra Gilbert, Brad Henderson, Pamela Houston, Clarence Major, Sandra McPherson, and Alan Williamson, as well as many regional and traveling poets, including Molly Peacock, Jane Hirshfield, Dana Gioia, and James Ragan.

Future readers will include Joe Wenderoth, Kim Stanley Robinson, and Julia Connor,

Books

Dr. Andy’s Poetry Hour — Davis, CA

November 17, 2023

Virtual readings via Zoom will no doubt continue to enhance a dialogue between contemporary poets and their audiences for the rest of the decade; but poetry readings with “live” audiences in which listeners are physically sharing the same room at a specific geographical conjunction not dependent on IP are once again the dominant form of poetry presentations. In the past four months, for instance, I’ve been part of a half-dozen live poetry events. The first was organized by Lynne Thompson, and was called “A Day of Poetry in L.A.” at the Downtown Public Library. That was followed by a pair of readings at Page Against the Machine, the first of which celebrated the BEAT NOT BEAT anthology, and the second was a reading with Long Beach legend Fred Voss.
Then, sandwiched in between a reading a the Sacramento Poetry Center in mid-October and this past Thursday night’s reading at the John Natsoulas Gallery in David, California, I read with Michael C. Ford at Dizzy on Vinyl records store on East Seventh Street in Long Beach. In contrast, I’ve only been part of one Zoom event, which was a celebration of the poetry of Harry E Northup broadcast by Beyond Baroque.

Regardless of this swing back to in-person events, the internet is allowing cultural workers to complement the live events with recorded materials that are easily accessible. The organizer and host of the reading in Davis, Professor Andy Jones, interviewed me the afternoon before, and has posted the interview as a podcast.

You can find it at:

https://www.buzzsprout.com/1912726/13982763

Thank you, Andy, for a chance to share my work with your audience.

Books

Translation’s Hound: The Interlitq Interview with Paul Vangelisti

Paul Vangelisti recently gave a reading at Beyond Baroque, along with Vincent Katz, under the title of “Urbanity’s Hounds.” You can find this reading on-line at the following link:

Before you watch it, however, I would urge you to read the just published interview with Paul which was conducted by David Garyan in Italya year ago.

https://interlitq.org/blog/2023/11/13/interlitqs-californian-poets-interview-series-paul-vangelisti-poet-translator-editor-and-journalist-interviewed-by-david-garyan/

I’ve read Paul’s work for over 50 years, and have heard him speak about his early years as a poet and translator many times, but never have I encountered a conversation that so candidly enfolds a poet’s personal recollections with an examination of the poetics of translation. One new thing I learned from this interview is how Paul uses Italian to help reorient himself when the initial version in English reaches a point of perplexed indecision.

While I myself never attempted to become a published translator, I have spent time translating work from the French by several writers, the first of whom was Jules Laforgue. Would I have even thought about becoming a poet if I hadn’t assiduously worked on a poem by LaForgue in the Fall, 1966? All of the poets I’ve helped in my life have no idea how much they owe to my French teacher that semester, who left me enchanted with the capacity of languages to intertwine.

Books

Beyond Baroque’s Pre-Thanksgivin November Schedule

Wednesday, November 8, 2023

Beyond Baroque, back in the glory days of small press print culture, used to mail out a calendar that one could tape to one’s kitchen wall or refrigerator door. I haven’t received one in the mail for quite a few years, which only serves to remind me of how much older I am than Beyond Baroque. If I had been born in 1968, the year of BB’s founding by George Drury Smith, I would be 55; but I first showed up at its workshop in the Fall of 1971, as the recently appointed poetry editor of BACHY magazine, so you can figure out from there what a tortuous path it’s been.

What is especially impressive about its current programming is how it is keeping in touch with its progenitors. This coming Friday, the reading series will feature Exene Cervenka and Jack Skelley, both of whom had poems in my anthology, POETRY LOVES POETRY. Exene’s journey as a poet is one of the extraordinary parts of Beyond Baroque’s history and I wish I could be there in person to hear her read along with Jack, who at one point also formed a band called PLANET OF TOYS with Beyond Baroque poet BOB FLANAGAN. Exene, of course, was co-founder of the band, X, with John Doe, whose memoir UNDER THE BIG BLACK SUN provides a poignant recollection of a decade that was more both more hopeful and more daunting than many care to acknowledge.

Kim Rosenfeld also started at the Beyond Baroque workshop. My recollection is that she was only 15 years old when she first dropped in and caught everyone off-guard with poems so full of grace and simmering poise that one suspected she had been assigned a muse three times her age. She moved to to New York City, where she has equally impressed her audiences.

Here are the details:
MAXIMUM RETURN: Exene Cervenka, Kim Rosenfeld, Jack Skelley
Friday, November 10, 8:00 PM PST
In person at Beyond Baroque and Live on YouTube

The following weekend is a celebration of poetry that deserves a larger paradigm than “festival.” One would be justified in trying to figure out a way to camp out in the nearby parking lots so that one could stay there round the clock!

I’ll be coming back from giving a reading in Davis, California when this gets underway, so I’m not sure how much of it I will be able to attend, but I hope to see you there for part of it.

Onward!

SoCal Poetry Festival
November 17-19, 2023
In person at Beyond Baroque and Live on YouTube

The festival opens with Terrance Hayes, Mimi Tempestt, Luis J. Rodriguez, Sesshu Foster, Pam Ward, and Laurel Ann Bogen reading as Beyond Baroque celebrates Wanda Coleman by renaming its theater in her honor. Festival highlights include the debut of original commissioned work by former U.S. Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera, Safia Elhillo, and Marcelo Hernandez Castillo, plus readings by Sally Wen Mao, féi hernandez, Dana Gioia, Truong Tran, J. Jennifer Espinoza, Muriel Leung, Katie Ford, Taz Ahmed, and many more.

Other programs include a panel on experimental poetics featuring Michael Davidson, Will Alexander, Diane Ward, and others; a bilingual conversation moderated by Sonia Guiñasca, featuring poets included in Donde Somos Humanos/Somewhere We Are Human Authentic Voices on Migration, Survival, and New Beginnings; and a reading of Iranian poetry in translation curated by PEN America and featuring Frieda Afary, Sheida Mohamadi, Majid Naficy, and other poets involved in the Woman Life Freedom Movement. Literary showcases have been curated by Graywolf Press, Lambda Literary, Huizache, Air/Light, Tuesday Night Project, World Stage Press, and Inlandia Institute. Amanda Ackerman leads a workshop on plant poetics, while Mimi Tempestt, William Archila, and Marcelo Hernandez Castillo offer generative workshops.

FICTION WORKSHOP (MONDAY NIGHT, FREE)

Raquel Baker earned a PhD in English Literary Studies from the University of Iowa, specializing in Postcolonial Studies and 20th- and 21st-century African literatures in English, and an MFA in Creative Writing from Mills College. Baker is currently an Assistant Professor of Postcolonial and Transnational Literatures at California State University Channel Islands, teaching courses on creative writing and contemporary African literatures. She has published poetry in Africology and The Arrow; fiction in Enculturation, The Daily Palette, The Womanist, and Crux; and nonfiction in Little Village.

POETRY WORKSHOP
The West Coast’s longest-running free poetry workshop welcomes new and seasoned poets to share new work and provide feedback. Please be prepared to share one poem. This Zoom workshop is currently facilitated by James Fujinami Moore. Please sign up for each workshop session at least 24 hours in advance of the meeting, and you will be contacted with instructions on how to join the meeting.

James Fujinami Moore’s debut poetry collection is indecent hours (Four Way Books, 2022), winner of the GLCA New Writers Award in Poetry and finalist for the Golden Poppy’s Martin Cruz Smith Award & the Lambda Literary Award in Bisexual Poetry. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Asimov’s Science Fiction, Barrow Street’s 4×2, The Brooklyn Rail, Guesthouse, Jet Fuel Review, The Margins, the Pacifica Literary Review, and Prelude. He has received fellowships from Poets House, Bread Loaf, and the Frost Place, and received his MFA from Hunter College in 2016. He lives in Los Angeles.

Books

California Driver’s License: In Your Face Reminder of Genocide

Sunday, November 5, 2023

I had to get my driver’s license renewed recently; apparently, because I was turning 76 years old, the bureaucracy of the State of California believed that my knowledge of the driving laws needed to be tested. With Steve Lopez’s column about the process in mind, I studied the handbook thoroughly, only to end up taking the DMV’s eLearning course test instead and working my way through it with only one wrong answer.

After my new license arrived yesterday, I immediately checked the expiration date: my current trajectory has me still teaching at CSU Long Beach in 2028, so it looks like Professor Mohr’s knowledge of speed limits will once again be subjected to the scrutiny of the DMV on-line testing system in the not too distant future. By then, I hope to be teaching only in the spring semester, so I should have plenty of time to review the handbook and get prepared for the zig-zag of trick questions.

In the meantime, I wonder if there’s any chance that my next new license might not feature an image that should be accompanied by a trigger warning. It’s not a new image. I just checked my old license and the iconic gold prospector image associated with California is featured on that one, too.

Say, what?

I know that people are tired of “political correctness,” but I am going to speak up anyway. What does the recitation of “land acknowledgements” mean if the State of California can brazenly subject its residents to a reminder of a period in which the indigenous people of California were murdered and robbed of their land? How does the State of California have the nerve to subject the handful of descendants of that genocide to carrying around a legal document that valorizes that iniquity?

This is an outrage. Now I realize that other, infinitely more egregious outrages are being committed right now, and that the invasion of Ukraine has caused enough sorrow there to need a thousand years to subside; and that the invasion of Gaza by Israel, as retaliation for the mass slaughter of women and children in early October, will only perpetuate the cycle of vindictive justice. Deliberating killing non-combatants, which Israel knows full well it is doing, is a war crime no different from what Hamas has done. A cease-fire is long overdue, as are the murder trials of extremist settlers who believe that they can murder Arabs in cold blood with impunity. The unlikelihood of anyone, whether they be Hamas leadership and its rank and file executioners or the marauding network of those in Israel who believe in perpetual expansion, being brought to judicial reckoning is almost certainly 100 percent. The non-existence of any succor in this situation is almost more than I can allow myself to acknowledge in any degree. The punitive rage of both sides seems more interested in targeting those who want the shared consciousness of all human beings to be the first priority, and I can only hope that my profile is low enough not to warrant some variant of a fatwa or imposition of a demand to resign my job.

With that said, let us consider how the image of the prospector on the California driver’s license shows the sifting pan in his hands to be tilted directly alongside the image of the driver’s head. This image is in the “background” of the license, but it suggests exactly what is happening with AI. Our minds are being mined for knowledge, and the gold of social control is being stored in the vaults of a coded cloud. If this is not yet officially delineated by the legal allies of Silicon Valley in the California state legislature, then it is only a matter of time before it comes to pass. The image on the driver’s license is merely a proleptic meme.