Tag Archives: Paul Vangelisti

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LINK to the latest “W – E Bicoastal Poets” Reading and Cahuenga Press

May 17, 2021 – 8:04 am

Monday, May 17, 2021

“W – E Reading Series and Cahuenga Press

I still have some grading to do, but final examinations last week more or less wrapped up the spring semester in terms of teaching students. Other matters remain on the table, though, since the administrators and faculty at CSULB don’t seem to be sharing on a simultaneous basis all the pertinent information about workload for faculty who are teaching in what is call “FERP” (Faculty Early Retirement Program). The outcome is that I’ve spent at least 40 hours the past couple weeks trying to get the information that should have been on the table from the very start.

The weekend involved a round-trip drive from Long Beach to Ramona on Saturday and Sunday, getting back to Long Beach on Sunday afternoon in time to give an introduction to Beth Ruscio on the zoom poetry series I have been working on as a co-host for its first several presentations. Lynn McGee was the one who came up with the concept for this series: to present poets from both sides of the continent. It’s been a pleasure to work with Lynn and Susana H. Case on this series, and I am turning over my slot to another poet. Originally, I was the only West Coast poet on the curatorial committee, but now there will be two poets on the West Coast (Carolyne Wright and Sandy Yannone) along with the founding poets on the East Coast. Along the way all of us realized that the program needed some “tech support” so that we could enjoy the show ourselves, and so we added Madeleine Barnes to the team.

I seem to have a habit of joining things to get them off the ground and then moving on. Back at the start of the final decade of the past century, I was a founding member of Cahuenga Press and did the typesetting for several of their titles. I was very squeezed for both money and time back then and I dropped out of the project, which is still publishing books thirty years later. For the record, the founding members were Holly Prado, Harry Northup, Phoebe MacAdams, James Cushing, Cecilia Woloch, and myself. I was the one who came up with the name of the press. Cecilia had her first two books of poem published by Cahuenga Press, and she subsequently won a NEA fellowship and had books published by Boa Editions.

After an electrical fire destroyed Holly and Harry’s apartment, they moved to the Motional Picture and Television Fund home, but still kept the press going. Harry has been producing a poetry show, “Creative Chaos,” at MPTF through zoom in the same spirit as the “W – E” series. This past Friday, I was part of a group reading of Rilke’s “The Duino Elegies.” I had never read that poem straight through, and it felt a bit like sitting through one of Mahler’s great symphonies, something so encompassing and lingering that it left one buoyantly subdued, reconciled to previously paradoxical conditions.

The readers of “The Duino Elegies” for Harry E. Northup’s program were Paul Vangelisti, Phoebe MacAdams, James Cushing, Aram Saroyan, Richard Modiano, Garrett M. Brown, Bob Beitcher, Bill Mohr, Corinne Conley, and Marie Pal-Brown. Marie read a portion of it in German, which surprised many of the listeners with its mellifluousness. Thank you, Harry, for continuing to be such. a stalwart advocate of poetry, as well as such a superb poet yourself.

Here’s the Link to yesterday’s show of the “W – E Series,” which was one of our very best ensembles.

Kim Addonizio, Suzanne Cleary, Gary Copeland Lilley and Beth Ruscio, the poets appearing for “W-E Poets of the Pandemic and Beyond,” hosted by Susana H. Case, Lynn McGee, William Mohr, and me, with tech support from Madeleine Barnes on Sunday, May 16

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The Thirtieth Anniversary of Leland Hickman’s Death

May 12, 2021 – 7:00 am

May 12, 2021

On May 12, 1991 Lee Hickman died. I remember that I was sitting at my desk in the apartment on Hill Street that I shared with my first wife, Cathay Gleeson, when Charles called and said that Lee’s struggle with AIDS was over. He asked me to write an obituary statement and send it out. I immediately got to work and soon after the Los Angeles Times more or less printed exactly what I wrote, though there was no byline.

I had first met Lee about twenty years before he died, and he became a mentor whose life I, in turn, affected. After I published his first book, GREAT SLAVE LAKE SUITE, and it was nominated by the Los Angeles Times as one of the five best books of poetry published in the nation in 1980, many people expected to see more increments of the six-volume project, TIRESIAS, that he had been working on since the mid-1960s.

Instead, he turned his energies primarily to editing. He told me once that my example of working as an editor and publisher had shown him a model of the cultural work that could be accomplished by a devoted individual. It was 40 years ago this coming September that I started working as the first poetry editor of BACHY magazine at Papa Bach Bookstore. When I left that magazine to start my own project, I suggested that John Harris take my place, and Harris in turn not only ended up buying the store, but appointing Leland Hickman as editor of BACHY. When BACKY ceased publication, Lee started BOXCAR magazine with Paul Vangelisti, and then launched TEMBLOR magazine as a solo project.

After Lee died, his poetry seemed to fall by the wayside, and I often worried that it would not get the continued attention it deserved. In the fifteen years after Lee died, my own life went through an economic and emotional ordeal that tested me to the limit. At one point, the best that I could do with a Ph.D. in Literature and all of my years of experience was a full-time job as an ESL teacher. In December, 2004, No one would even give me an interview for anything else. At age 57, I was being told that no one cared about what I had done or accomplished.

Perhaps it was a sign, though, that not all was lost. One day Linda and I went into NYC to visit Poets House, and I met Stephen Motika. We talked about Los Angeles poets, and I mentioned how much I still admired Lee Hickman’s poetry. By the end of the decade, I was helping Stephen edit a “Collected Poems,” which he co-published with Paul Vangelisti’s Seismicity Editions.

Lee’s poetry has continued to find enthusiastic readers. This past March, Stephen and I heard from Gordon Faylor, a poet and editor of the online publication Gauss PDF. He wrote that he had “recently acquired a copy of Leland Hickman’s Tiresias: The Collected Poems and adore it! Last year I was fortunate to find a copy of Hickman’s Great Slave Lake Suite, and so appreciate that Nightboat gathered all his work, which is otherwise so hard to find. I only wish he were better known—his writing is so astonishing and terrifying and beautiful.”

Thanks to the efforts of Gordon Faylor, as well as Quentin Ring at Beyond Baroque, one can now download a portion of a reading Lee gave at Beyond Baroque in 1984 (Barrett Watten also read that night).

Here is the link that will then allow you to download and listen to Lee reading his poetry.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1t-QgFyNFkkmBBsCee9oxQpxpbIwhcI2U/view?usp=sharing

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1t-QgFyNFkkmBBsCee9oxQpxpbIwhcI2U/view?usp=sharing

And, of course, my profound thanks also go out on the occasion of this anniversary to Stephen Motika at Nightboat Books, as well as to Dennis Phillips and Paul Vangelisti, whose friendship in Lee in the final decade of his life made an enormous difference to him.

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Interlitq: the California Poets Issue (Part 1)

August 27, 2020 – 5:46 am

David Garyan is a poet who received his M.A. as well as his MFA degree at California State University Long Beach, and subsequently moved to Italy, where he is currently studying International Cooperation on Human Rights and Intercultural Heritage at the University of Bologna. He lives in Ravenna. Main Street Rag has published three of Garyan’s chapbooks, along with a full collection, (DISS)INFORMATION. A three-part poem, “Ravenna,” was published in Peter Robertson’s magazine, Interlitq:

David Garyan’s poem “Ravenna” published by Interlitq

Garyan is the guest co-editor of a special feature issue of Interlitq, concentrating on California poets.

http://www.interlitq.org/californiafeature1/index.php

The following twelve poets introduce the project, which has just been officially published:

Rae Armantrout
Bart Edelman
David Garyan
Suzanne Lummis
Glenna Luschei
Bill Mohr
D. A. Powell
Amy Uyematsu
Paul Vangelisti
Charles Harper Webb
Bruce Willard
Gail Wronsky

TABLE OF CONTENTS

RAE ARMANTROUT
“Fox”
“Reliable Sources”
“Running the Numbers”

BART EDELMAN
“Whistling to Trick the Wind”
“How I Came to You”
“Footnote”
“Anyone But Barrymore”

SUZANNE LUMMIS
“Those Poets Who Write About Loss”
“Why I am Not the Los Angeles River”

GLENNA LUSCHEI
“Mourning Doves”
“Daughter-in-Law”
“Calving”
“The Fifty-Two Year Cycle of the Aztec Caldnear Stone”

Bill Mohr
“The Predicate”
“Turn Lane”
“Breaking Camp”
“Morning Wood”

D.A. POWELL
“Lost Bible”
“Mike the Band”
“24 Hours from Tulsa”

AMY UYEMATSU
“The Suitcase”
“Winter Friend, the Pine”
“To Tell the Truth”

PAUL VANGELISTI
“Almost Dancing”
From “Liquid Prisoner” (VII)

CHARLES HARPER WEBB
“Good with Balloons”
”Old Love Letters Becme Space Junk”
“When He Grows Up”
“Polar Air Invades LA – The Six O’Clock News”
“Blurb”

BRUCE WILLARD
“Flight Song”
“Coming and Going”
“Unhinged”

GAIL WRONSKY
“The difference between a jaded vision and an honest one is a nightmare”
“Myself am Hell”
“The Non-Self”

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Paul Vangelisti’s Tribute to Holly Prado (December 7, 2019)

December 11, 2019 – 7:06 am

Wednesday, December 10th, 2019

Paul Vangelisti attended two memorials this past weekend. On Saturday, December 7th, a tribute and memorial for the artist and teacher Don Suggs was held on the campus of UCLA. Having collaborated with Suggs and Martha Ronk on several books, as well as co-editing various magazine projects with him, Paul first spoke at his gathering, attended by well over 400 people; he then drove to Beyond Baroque, where he guided the memorial for Holly Prado back to the early 1970s.

*. *. *. *. *

HOLLY’S MEMORIAL

I’m not very fond of memorials but Holly’s passing not only left me desolate, it was an indelible loss. If I can put it somewhat coldly, above all else Holly’s career was, no, is a touchstone for what it means to be an artist in Los Angeles, not the kindest and most welcoming place for anything outside of Hollywood’s Dream Factory. A place where, in Gore Vidal’s words, we “do well what should not be done at all.” And stepping even further back from this moment, I can’t help but consider today’s date, December 7. Pearl Harbor Day. That day in 1941 when the country changed, the West Coast came into prominence as the new focus of the American century and the American empire. The day my father, who’d just enlisted months before, was stationed near San Francisco, where he would, in a few years, meet my mother who’d immigrated there from Italy not long before.
Maybe memory, however byzantine and merciful, might be useful. I first met Holly in 1971 at the workshop Alvaro Cardona-Hine taught out of his house in North Hollywood. Alvaro had taken over from Gene Frumkin some years earlier, when Frumkin moved to New Mexico. Frumkin originally was part of a group, going back to fifties, that met at Tom McGrath’s place in Frogtown. Present at Alvaro’s that night were Barbara Hughes, Ameen Alwan, Rosella Pace, Sid Gershgoren and, of course, Holly, probably the youngest of the poets there. I was visiting to solicit work for a forthcoming Los Angeles anthology that Charles Bukowski, Neeli Cherkovski and I were editing,
One Saturday afternoon, we three met at Bukowski’s apartment to start puttting the anthology together. Bukowski had collected work by poets he knew and I did the same. We exchanged piles of manuscripts and sat in Bukowski’s small living room drinking beer and reading. It soon became obvious from the sighs and groans coming from Hank that he wasn’t at all pleased. Nor was I entirely happy with what I was reading, much too narrative and prosaic for my taste. Neeli fidgeted and I pretended to read carefully (both of us then in our mid-twenties), waiting for Bukowski to take the lead. When he finished, Bukowski stood up and took a few steps to the kitchen table where his typewriter sat, and dumped the entire bundle of poems into the wastebasket under the table. I took the bundle he had given me and did likewise. Bukowski then announced that we had made real progress and ought to get down to some serious drinking. Almost two hours and a couple of six-packs later, Bukowski went to the wastebasket and pulled out the manuscripts, and we began one by one discussing the poets and their poems.
Published by our respective presses, Laugh Literary and Man the Humping Guns and the Red Hill Press, the Anthology of L.A. Poets came out in 1972, the first book of its kind on the scene. Bukowski had brought the following to the venture: Gerda Penfold, Charles Stetler, Linda King, Gerald Locklin, Steve Richmond, Ron Koertge, John Thomas and himself and Neeli. I advocated William Pillin, Jack Hirschman, Robert Peters, Tony Russo, Stuart Perkoff, myself and three of the poets from Alvaro’s workshop, Ameen Alwan, Rosella Pace and Holly. The page right after Bukowski’s group of poems and just before Bob Peters’s – I can’t for the life of me recall how we decided on the order – ran two poems of Holly’s. First, “the garden”:

rilke has said that
each man will take with him
from the earth
one word that he loves most

I have been thinking all evening
just in case
and can’t go beyond
lizard

And then came this piece, “the forest covered with the moon,” still one of my favorite poems of Holly’s:

rocks at the edge of the fire
warm enough for my feet
you choose the right piece of wood
every time

the trout from the hidden stream
had a stripe of gold on his belly
we loved him
ate him without feeling sorry

it will rain all night
but we don’t know that yet.

— Paul Vangelisti

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Magra Radio Presents: “The Aging Comedian as Letter N”

June 30, 2019 – 8:36 pm

June 30, 2019

The indefatigable poet-editor-translator-publisher Paul Vangelisti worked at radio station KPFK in the 1970s as a cultural intercessor, and among his many projects were a series of radio dramas as well as large-scale readings, including one of Pound’s “The Cantos.” I believe that the Archive for New Poetry at the Geisel Library of the University of California, San Diego, has digitized many of these recordings.

Last fall, Paul read a two-part monologue I was working on, and decided that he would record me reading it for his current radio station, Magra Radio (on-line). At first Paul was inclined to recruit an actor to record it, but as we worked on the “script,” and his ever alert ear enabled me to trim about 400 words from the final version, we decided that I would be the performer. It was a single take, in his office, on an autumn afternoon.

https://www.magrabooks.com/radio/2019/3/31/episode-6-the-comedian-by-bill-mohr

It’s a fictional “Bill” who is invoked as a narrator in this piece, and all the characters burgeon out of the implausibility of its rancorous humor. As context, it might be best to first view the reading I gave of a piece called “Substitute Teacher,” which was recorded at Century Cable in the 1990s, followed by the prose piece “Death’s Real Job,” which appears in my most recent collection, The Headwaters of Nirvana. For those who are familiar with my writing at the beginning of the last decade, a small part of “The Aging Comedian” will seem familiar, and indeed one of the jokes told in my short article, “The Gossip of Ideology: Sexual Jokes and the Tumescence of Power,” reappears in the broadcast monologue.

http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0311/2-mohr-gossip-of-ideology.php

In advance, a brief warning: listeners might be surprised at the transgressive quality of some of “The Aging Comedian as Letter N.” The motive should be obvious — the current preference by right-wing ideologues for an increasingly vigilant repression of anything that might inspire a liberating impulse. This flash flood of tyrannical debris from Cold War culture, however, was not the only factor in tempting me to conjure a domain of provocative imagery far in excess of my usual satirical delineations. It also aspires to critique the capacity of youth culture to jettison those in previous decades who altered the rules for the reproduction of social life. If the social reproduction of life is a farce of absurd contingency only made more excruciating by the shortcomings of gratifying reciprocity, then the comedy of the reproduction of social life is one of the few salves for those wounds. I have only listened to the recording once, after it was posted on-line, and I confess I was a bit taken aback by the degree to which “rankness is savored,” but not as a sensualist.

It is the case that if you don’t know the punch line to Lenny Bruce’s performance piece (with bongos, I believe), then it is time to renew your acquaintance with a figure whose mythology of self deserves more attention that it has been getting of late. There’s not much likelihood his brief inclusion in a recent on-line comedy series produced by Netflix led to a sudden increase in sales of his books.

I do wish to emphasize how this particular project I did with Paul Vangelisti fits into the catalogue of his current enterprise, Magra Books. While the radio broadcast side also includes archival work (“Breathing Space,” which derives from recordings in the late 1970s), the chapbook series deserves equal attention. Especially pertinent to the piece I recorded is Douglas Messerli’s On Marriage: The Imagination of Being, “an extended reflection upon that other person …. ‘who forces you into perceiving yourself as someone other than your own imagination of being’.”

Finally, although there is an echo of Stevens’ long poem in the title, one should not look for too many allusive convergences. At most, the narrator primarily has the following lines in common with Crispin:

Preferring text to gloss, he humbly served
Grotesque apprenticeship to chance event,
A clown, perhaps, but an aspiring clown.

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Past Lives: Poet, Editor, Publisher, Continuation School Teacher, and the Beat

March 11, 2018 – 10:02 am

Sunday, March 11, 2018

Although I am working on new poems and thinking about which of my past academic talks I should begin revising in hopes of publication, the challenge of setting aside time to make those endeavors my sole concern remains as complicated as ever. A year and a half ago, one of the members of Beyond Baroque’s Board of Trustees asked me to join the Board, a move that I can hardly afford to undertake on a financial level, let alone how much time that requires. Even during times when the GDP of the United States indicates the system’s general economic stability, non-profit arts organizations must negotiate and bargain with a culture that did not particularly want them to last more than a decade or two. To attain the half-century mark is no small achievement, but Beyond Baroque is hardly assured of a sufficient budget for its future programming.

This weekend has been one of the highlights of the spring season. Funded completely out of his own pocket, S.A. Griffin has organized a celebration of the Beat movement, which concludes tomorrow evening with a musical performance by David Amram. Yesterday afternoon, I gave a talk on Venice West, and then moderated a panel at which two of the original members of that community recalled their experiences in considerable detail. Frank T. Rios Joseph Patton, and Gayle Davis talked with each other in an honest manner about the glorious sense of freedom that Venice West exuded along with the eventual confinements of drug addiction. Paton acknowledged that Rios has pulled him out of addiction. Rios, in turn, credited the Poem with saving his life.

Fortunately, UCLA had sent out a camera and a one-man crew to record this conversation, so future scholars of Venice West will understand how much visual art mattered to this scene. It was a pleasure to hear the work of Don Martin and Saul White cited so frequently. I am not certain when the tape will be available for viewing, but I hope that someday it can be posted on-line so that scholars and students have easy access to it.

Oddly enough, Venice West often gets summed up by a quick reference to a handful of poets, and yet the conversation yesterday barely got around to discussing John Thomas, and William Margolis was not mentioned at all. Margolis, who was a close friend of Bob Kaufman’s when he lived in San Francisco, is hardly neglected this weekend, though. He is the subject of a documentary film by Don Rothenberg that will be shown today from 3:30 to 4:00 p.m. There will also be a discussion of the Beat and Buddhism with Marc Olmsted, who was also read with Steve Silberman and Tate Swindell in a segment on Gay Beat writing (4:30 – 6 p.m.).

Considering how skittish L.A. residents can be about a rain storm finally showing up after months of a renewed drought, the audiences have been surprisingly large enough to make this festival of the Beat a satisfying occasion and more than worth S.A. Griffin’s extended efforts in putting it all together. Paul Vangelisti, for instance, was supposed to be part of the panel on Venice West, but a dead battery kept him tethered at home. He told me, however, that 30 people had shown up for his reading with Neeli Cherkovski.
About three dozen poets will have read their poetry or talked about the Beat and the Neo-beat by the time David Amram gives a musical performance tomorrow night (Monday, at 9:30 p.m. I truly wish that I had enough time to have been at all the events of this festival. I regret especially not being able to attend the opening ceremonies featuring Frank T. Rios and George Herms, as well as the “Women of the Beat Generation Reading.” I would have loved to have heard Yama Lake, Larry Lake’s son, read, too, as well Marc Olmsted. In addition, Michael C. Ford and Will Alexander were giving talks.

One of the highlights of this festival, however, was probably the “Punk & Beat reading” by Linda J. ALbertano, Iris Berry, Jack Brewer, Michael Lane Bruner, S.A. Griffin, Doug Knott, and A. Razor. All I can say is that I want an extended encore presentation at a time that allows me to absorb the full ramifications of these lifetimes of contumacious poetics.

It was perhaps appropriate that I began the day by meeting with Pedro Paulo Araujo, who is working on a short animated film based on the final two stanzas of Leland Hickman’s poem, “The Hidden.” That poem was one of ten “Elements” that was published in Hickman’s Great Slave Lake Suite in 1980. I met with Pedro at 10:00 a.m. at Portfolio Coffeehouse in Long Beach to discuss Hickman’s poetry in general and that poem in particular. I gave him a copy of “Lee Sr. Falls to the Floor,” which Lee had written in the mid-1960s, as a means of providing some background for Lee’s life-long wrestling with the sudden death of his father. Pedro became interested in Lee’s poetry because his film company is working on digitizing the audio tapes of readings at Beyond Baroque. One recent tape he worked on was a reading Lee gave with Barrett Watten in 1984, on one of the coldest nights that anyone in Venice could recall. The audience was very small – maybe about eight people – and almost all of us at one point or another had to get up and walk around the read area of the folding chairs in order to warm up. We were bundled up in sweaters and jackets, but it wasn’t enough. Still, it was one of the best readings I ever attended.

Before heading off to my meeting with Pedro, I took a quick look at the first set of galleys for my forthcoming book from What Books. The typeface seems on the comfortable and familiar side, and perhaps that will work out for the best. The poems, which appear in both English and Spanish, are varied enough in their shapeliness that a more unusual typeface might prove distracting. I’ve waited a long time for this book and can’t wait to send my closest friends a copy.

Finally, I want to mention how much I appreciated seeing Carolyn Rios at yesterday’s event at Beyond Baroque. I worked with Carolyn’s students at Venice Continuation High School for several years (1989-1996). Most of the time I was an artist-in-residence funded by the Cultural Affairs Department of the City of Los Angeles. The CPITS (California Poets in the Schools) program had largely lost its impetus, at least in Southern California, by the mid-1980s, and I had turn to other sources for support in order to teach poetry to young people. Although I worked at other continuation high schools, too, Venice Continuation High holds a special place in my heart. I guess I have indeed aged, though. Carolyn at first did not recognize me, even though we were in Beyond Baroque’s lobby for several minutes before we happened to start talking to each other. On the other hand, until she took off her beret, I did not recognize her, either. Once memory had adjusted to present perception, though, we both felt as young as ever.

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The Exquisite Prolongation of Immediacy: The Translation of Life and Poetry by Paul Vangelisti

September 24, 2017 – 10:29 am

Sunday, September 24, 2017

This evening I will be at the Beyond Baroque Awards dinner, which is being held once again at the Church in Ocean Park (235 Hill Street, Santa Monica, CA 90406). I have been asked to make the presentation speech for the George Drury Smith Award, which will go to Paul Vangelisti this year. Prior winners include Eloise Klein Healy, Wanda Coleman, David St. John, Holly Prado, and myself.

For those who cannot attend, here is what I plan to say.

The Exquisite Prolongation of Immediacy: The Translation of Life and Poetry by Paul Vangelisti

In one of my blog posts about a year and a half ago, I cited John Holten to the effect that “a good form of torture for any serious writer would be to deny them reading anything other than works produced in their own language or country.” If anyone could be said to have led the resistance to monolingual tyranny in Los Angeles the past half-century, it would have to be Paul Vangelisti, whose devotion to the art of translation goes far beyond any mere literary metamorphosis. Indeed, his writing is nothing short of an inspiring reminder of the daily necessity of accounting for each day of this quirky journey, and of how that accounting demands nothing less than the imperative: “You must translate your life.”

In translating his life, Paul is the single most ambidextrous person I have ever encountered. His accomplishments are manifold, and while they are too numerous to sum up easily, Paul would be the first to delineate how much others have assisted him over the years. The virtues of collaboration are much like those of translation: audacity, candor, commitment; and Paul has enabled those with whom he has worked to strengthen those virtues in their own lives. If Paul has inspired so many people with whom he has collaborated, it is largely because simply to be in his presence distills and effaces one’s own uncertainties and self-doubts, and enables one to renew that personal covenant with the imagination that insists on having a immediate connection with social reality.

Notwithstanding the scope of his generative collaborations, it remains Paul who has been the cynosure of the effort to make Los Angeles a place worthy of being at least a provincial capital in the world republic of letters. If Pascale Casanova’s description of literary enfranchisement meant that a truly representative body of arbitration within the realm of the imagination could actually function, then there would be little doubt that the person we should elect as our senator should be Paul Vangelisti.

He has earned this stature with a multi-decade production of superb poetry, but with a personal masthead of magazines, books, and anthologies featuring the work of other poets, especially within the maverick avant-garde. Yet no matter how much he accomplishes, he remains rigorously engaged with the increment yet to come. I have recently talked with Paul about the need for an anthology that presents the canon of West Coast poets. Every anthology on my bookshelves at best includes a smattering of West Coast poets, and it is time for California, Oregon, and Washington, along with Baja California and Vancouver, Canada, to assert itself as an autonomous site of poetics. Paul’s reaction to my suggestion was an emphatic “Let’s do it,” but of course in certain ways he has already done it, for that anthology will largely draw on those who have appeared in the dozens of issues of magazines that he has edited or co-edited or published, magazines such Invisible City, New Review of Literature, Ribot, and OR, as well as on the books of poetry published by his subversive enterprises, Red Hill Press and Seismicity Editions. The anthologies he himself has worked on, beginning in the early 1970s, will be the kernel of this future volume’s vision.

I should mention that I am the stand-in tonight for the person who would traditionally give this awards speech, but last year’s award winner, Holly Prado cannot be here in person tonight, due to the unfortunate fire that recently scorched the apartment she shared with her husband, the poet and actor Harry Northup. I happy to report that their recovery from this incident is going well, in large part because we as a community came together in their support. When it became apparent Holly would not be able to make this event, I suggested Dennis Phillips be asked to have this honor of presenting the award to Paul, since Dennis after all served as President of Beyond Baroque in the mid-1980s and would be the perfect intermediary at this gathering. In taking on this assignment, I knew one thing from the start, and that was I was going to quote Dennis Phillips as a way of featuring their deep bond. I have one ready-made advantage in doing this, for Dennis was the driving force behind a book, Nausikaa’s Isle, that was published two years ago to honor Paul on his 70th birthday. In the preface to that book, Dennis observed that “As a poet, a translator, an editor, a publisher, an educator, and for all the right reasons, an administrator, Paul Vangelisti has created a force of gravity felt by his readers, several international generations of poets, and his students, that brings to mind the similar influence of Pound.” In completely agreeing with Dennis, I would especially note this important understanding of the nature of that “force of gravity”: it is the quintessential trialectic gift exchange of space and time that generates history with more than literary meaning. Indeed, it is, as Dennis observes, “how deeply integrated in his work – and I mean all his work – are the poetic and the political.”

All of this magnitude has not gone unrecognized. In addition to NEA grants for both his own poetry and to assist his translation projects – and it should be noted that very few poets are at a level of this double achievement — he has also received numerous awards for his translations, including Italy’s Flaiano Prize and the PEN USA Prize for Translation in 2006. In 2010, the Academy of American Poets gave the Raiziss/de Palchi Book Prize. Paul is most certainly not without honors, accolades and awards as a writer and a translator, but there have been too few occasions in Los Angeles for Paul to receive a full measure of our appreciation for his enormous contribution to our cultural maturation. We are about to mark the 50th anniversary of Beyond Baroque, and two years after that celebration, it would only be appropriate for Beyond Baroque to hold a celebration of a half-century of editorial and publishing endeavors by Paul Vangelisti that have enabled so many poets and writers to attain an international audience. In the meantime, however, let this award serve as an initial installation. Paul has frequently configured his experience in Los Angeles as one of exile, and while I do not wish to contravene that assessment, I hope that for one night – tonight – he can briefly imagine himself at home, as we award him the 2017 George Drury Smith Award. Please join me in welcoming Paul Vangelisti to the stage for the bestowal of this award.

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Bells and Pomegranates — Poems in Croatian

May 3, 2017 – 9:19 am

In the Fall, 2003, Paul Vangelisti invited me to co-teach a graduate seminar at Otis College of Art and Design in a rotation that would also include Norman Klein and himself. I was in the final year of finishing my dissertation, and was a bit nervous about taking on a graduate school assignment at such an early stage in my academic career, but Paul – ever the elder brother – reassured me that it would go well, and indeed it did. Eventually I would return to Otis later in that decade to teach another graduate seminar, but all on my own.

For the first, co-taught seminar, I drove up from San Diego to Otis every third week and met with a large group of students, which included an intriguing pair of writers from Croatia, Natalija Grgorinić and Ognjen Rađen. They were already at that point committed to writing as a single person, and they were among the best students – if not the very best – in that seminar. I subsequently heard from Paul that they moved to the Midwest after finishing Otis and attended Case Western University, but lost track of them until recently, when I received an e-mail inviting me to visit their arts residency program in Croatia and to send them some poems for a magazine they were starting with a writer and translator from Canada, Daniel Allan Cox. The magazine is called Zvona I Nari (Bells and Pomegranates). I sent them several new poems, and they are now posted in a bi-lingual format at: https://www.zvonainari.hr/single-post/2017/04/26/Stepping-Aside-Bill-Mohr

It is an honor and a pleasure to have Natalija and Ognjen convey my poems into their language, and Linda and I hope to visit Croatia this year and have a chance to hear them read these translations out loud, as well as to catch up with what they are working on as a writer “themself.”

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Poetry

Mike Sonksen’s review of “CROSS-STROKES”

January 21, 2017 – 7:54 am

Saturday, January 21, 2017

Lana Turner, issue number 9
“A Reunion Party of Sorts,” by Mike Sonksen – January 16, 2017

Lana Turner Journal has just published Mike Sonksen’s comprehensive review of Cross-Strokes: Poetry between Los Angeles and San Francisco, the anthology which Neeli Cherkovski and I devoted half a decade to co-editing. Sonksen meticulously acknowledges every contributor to the anthology and provides representative sample of their poems. In a way that I am sure he is not aware of, he has followed the instructions on the permissions form that we had to negotiate with New Directions. No poet was to get a larger billing in any advertisement we would take out. This is to say that we were not allowed to promote the book by putting Kenneth Rexroth’s and Nate Mackey’s names in big type and Kevin Opstedal and Sharon Doubiago in small type. Not that Neeli and I would have ever done otherwise!

The next reviewer should have a much easier task, should she or he be willing to “collaborate” with Mike the Poet, as Sonksen is also known as. This is to say that a follow-up review might well benefit from focusing on a comparison of Cross-Strokes with other “regional” anthologies, including those that do not acknowledge themselves as such. It always amuses me to see anthologies that assume they present a national survey of American poetry, but have far less than ten percent of their contributors based in California.

Here is the link to Mike Sonksen’s review:
http://www.lanaturnerjournal.com/blog/a-reunion-party-of-poets

One very gratifying aspect of the roster of poets Cherkovski and I were able to assemble was their compatibility. If one were to try to put together a chronological anthology, the task might prove to be overwhelming. Consider trying to assemble a volume of poets born in the 1940s, a project that would probably fracture almost at the onset as poets or their executors point-blank rebuffed being associated by juxtaposition with figures inimical to their hopes for the art. Such an anthology, however, is probably needed if one is to understand how “post-modernism” pushed away from the massive influence of Donald Allen’s anthology, The New American Poetry. Maybe the most important part of this potential anthology would be not the poems, but essays at the end in which the poets address their “generation(s)” within that decade’s outset. The time to begin requesting these essays is the next four years, while the surviving remnant of American poets born in the 1940s will still be fairly substantial. This will not hold up indefinitely; after all, we were forced to pause and consider the inexorable attrition of our ranks this past year with the deaths of two poets, Ted Greenwald and Ray DiPalma, who first appeared together in an anthology back in 1985. In many ways, that year marked a turning point in American poetry. Three major anthologies appeared in 1985: In the American Tree, edited by Ron Silliman; “Poetry Loves Poetry,” edited by Bill Mohr; and The Morrow Anthology of Younger American Poets, edited by David Bottoms and David Smith. The Morrow Anthology represented the first indication of the rapid growth of MFA programs in the United States since 1980, while Silliman’s and my anthologies presented a case for writing that centered itself on other questions of poetry’s social value other than academic legitimacy.

I did not ever meet Ray DiPalma, though I certainly remember the first anthology in which I saw his work: Quickly Aging Here, edited by Geoff Hewitt. DiPalma appeared frequently in Invisible City magazine, edited by Paul Vangelisti and John McBride, and continued to be published by Vangelisti throughout the rest of his life. One of DiPalma’s other long-time supporters and allies was Michael Lally, who has posted his recollections on his blog, “Lally’s Alley.” According to Lally, there will be a memorial for DiPalma on Wednesday, February 15, at the School of Visual Arts Gallery from 6 – 8 p.m. (601 West 26th Street).
http://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2016/12/ray-dipalma-rip-by-michael-lally.html

I heard Ted Greenwald read several times over the decades. The first time was at a bookstore called Intellectuals & Liars, which was located near the corner of 11th Street and Wilshire Boulevard in Santa Monica. It was an odd pairing: he read with Kate Braverman, who left the reading grumbling about Greenwald’s lack of personal narrative. Although I had published Kate’s first book, Milk Run, a couple of years earlier and was very pleased that she went to become a successful novelist, I was more impressed and intrigued that night with Greenwald’s work, and I was excited when he read in Los Angeles again, at Beyond Baroque, shortly after Dennis Cooper took over the reading series. It was a quarter century before I saw read again, at St. Mark’s with Lyn Hejinian. He was as on key as ever, and his “voice” (which almost always seems like an illusory concept to me) was as pitch-perfect to his vision as it had been when I first heard it.

That I am hardly alone in my profound admiration for Greenwald’s poetry was reflected in the line-up of poets who spoke at his memorial service at St. Mark’s Poetry Project back on September 16, which included Alan Bernheimer, Charles Bernstein, Alan Davies, John Godfrey, Erica Hunt, Michael Lally, Ron Padgett, Kit Robinson, Patricia Spears Jones, Stacy Szymaszek, Chris Tysh, Lewis Warsh, Barrett Watten, and Terence Winch

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Collage Poetry

Joseph Hansen and the Early Days of Beyond Baroque

August 12, 2016 – 6:49 am

Friday, August 12, 2016

Addendum to HOLDOUTS: The Los Angeles Poetry Renaissance 1948-1992

A couple weekends ago, I drove down to UC Irvine to meet with Dina Moinzedeh, a graduate student from France who is on the verge of completing a dissertation on Charles Bukowski. She asked me to take a look at the first chapter, and I spent over two and a half hours talking with her about it. In the draft I read, I noted that she cited my Holdouts a fair number of times, primarily to provide a literary context for Bukowski’s writing. If Holdouts devoted very little time to Bukowski’s writing, it was in part because I didn’t want newcomers to the history of communities of poets in Los Angeles to get a distorted understanding of the scenes by a disproportionate emphasis on his poems. It would have been more than appropriate, of course, to have included a 20 page overview of his poetry, since he is one of the major figures to come out of this particular region, and his international renown is continuing to expand, and I will have to write such an article in the near future in order to redress this omission. If I am overdue in writing on any writer, it is to my shame that I have put off this article so long. My focus, though, in Holdouts was on the contribution that Bukowski made as editor of a literary magazine and co-editor of Anthology of L.A. Poets (Red Hill Press, 1972).

One obstacle to including such a section on Bukowski’s poetry in Holdouts was that my original manuscript logged in at somewhere around 120,000 words, and the University of Iowa Press insisted on cutting it to 90,000 words, which effectively meant that every fourth page had to be deleted. (With a straight face, they added: “Keep the good stuff.”) Given that Holdouts was already too long, according to Iowa, one can understand how trying to squeeze in additional commentary on Bukowski was next to impossible. The compression of the penultimate draft of Holdouts required that an immense amount of relevant detail and evidence be eliminated; it should surprise no one when I mention that Paul Vangelisti recently said that my dissertation is better than the book. I’ll leave that to others to argue about, but the fact remains that not only did the book not incorporate key moments in the history of these communities, but my dissertation didn’t include them either.

To give one instance of neglected material, it is the case that I do refer to Joseph Hansen’s articles about the Bridge and the early days of the Beyond Baroque workshop, but it’s a pity that neither the book nor the dissertation provided a big enough stage to cite the following:

“The Workshop had a crowd of taxi-drivers at that time – Ed Entin, Phil Taylor, Dennis Holt, as well as Barry (Simons). …. It was Dennis who arranged for us to read at Cal State Northridge after Venice Thirteen was published. The buildings seemed to me raw, and the sunlit library where we read had hundreds of books on the shelves that look untouched by human hands. The place was full. our outspoken language didn’t seem to offend anyone. Luis Campos, a delicately made man with a shy smile and a Spanish accent, drew laughs with his mordant view of plastic America, its fast food chains and hair spray commercials. So did John Harris’s “Deuteronomy Edition,” hacked from assorted sources – newspaper want ads, cooking columns, society pages, astrological forecasts, weather reports – and read by the entire crew. Luis’ tape recorder had awaken us to the possibilities in multi-voice poems.” (Bachy, issue number 10, page 139)

A group reading of a collage poem was just one small, but brightly colored rhomboid in the mosaic of community maturation for the poets of Los Angeles at that time, but it wasn’t an isolated instance. Rather, it was part of the trajectory that would lead to an entire day and evening given to the composition and reading of poems written by groups of us at Beyond Baroque in the mid-1970s. Jim Krusoe once said to me that one of his biggest regrets about those years is that he didn’t gather all the pages we wrote that day and keep them together in a folder. It certainly wasn’t the case that we didn’t like what we wrote. The collaborative event was a jovial occasion, but we regarded the day as being the equivalent of a jam session of musicians, and in our exuberance forgot what we were conscious of all along: something special was happening in Venice and Hollywood and many points in between, as well as to the north and south of this axis; and it deserved preservation. One can only sigh in wistful speculation. Few enough photographs exist of that time, and but even more tinged with regret is the fact that the amount of writing lost along the way is an aporia that will haunt the legend of those days each time the surviving archives are looked into by the scholars to come.

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