Tag Archives: Paul Vangelisti

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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Books Poetry

“The Golden Age of Los Angeles Poetry” — Robert Kirsch on “THE STREETS INSIDE: Ten Los Angeles Poets”

April 20, 2016 – 11:36 am

TheStreetsInside

THE GOLDEN AGE OF LOS ANGELES POETY: The Streets Inside (1978)

The Streets Inside: Ten Los Angeles Poets (Santa Monica, CA: Momentum Press, 1978) was the first of three anthologies I either edited or co-edited in the past 40 years. While it was not the first book to group Los Angeles poets as a distinct ensemble in American poetry, The Streets Inside was, however, the first anthology of Los Angeles poets of any significant length. Earlier, very short projects of this sort included a collection called Poetry Los Angeles in 1958 that was scarcely bigger than an issue of a little magazine. A trio of Los Angeles poets, James Boyer May, Thomas McGrath, and Peter Yates, were the editors of that first Los Angeles anthology. According to World Cat, Poetry Los Angeles clocks in at 68 (unnumbered) pages. It is an interesting collection, however, if only because it reveals the fractures that existed in Los Angeles in the late 1950s. None of the poets in Venice West (such as Stuart Perkoff and Bruce Boyd) are included in Poetry Los Angeles.

Fourteen years later, Paul Vangelisti, Charles Bukoswki and Neeli Cherkovski partially rectified the omission of the Venice West poets from Poetry Los Angeles by including both Perkoff and John Thomas, who by that point had not only been part of the Venice West scene, but had also lived in San Francisco and then returned to Los Angeles. Although Anthology of L.A. Poets ended on the shelves of 90 libraries around the world, it didn’t attract much critical attention in Los Angeles, let alone elsewhere. In terms of local attention, I wrote one of the first reviews and published it in the second issue of Bachy magazine (July, 1973), and I recollect that a reporter named Jim Stingley wrote a series of articles for the Los Angeles Times in the spring of 1974 about “The Rise of L.A. Underground Poets” that cited that anthology. Unfortunately, Bukowski, Cherkovski, and Vangelisti’s anthology was not that much bigger than the volume published in 1958.

Over 250 pages of poetry in length, The Streets Inside implicitly made a claim about the significance of the “underground” poetry scenes in Los Angeles. In point of fact, my book featured fewer poets than Anthology of Los Angeles Poets, and therefore was a less representative sampling of the scene. In retrospect, it was an enormous error. to limit the anthology to ten poets. Perhaps I kept the number down because I was still editing Momentum magazine and I didn’t want the anthology to seem like a special issue of the magazine. The decision to have between 15 and 25 pages of work by each poet was one of the ways that I hoped to make the anthology distinct from the magazine.

It should also be noted that my desire to promote the poetry of Lee Hickman led to this large portfolio of each poet’s work. Without consciously copying Donald Allen’s New American Poetry, I placed the oldest poet first. Lee Hickman led off the book with five discrete poems from the manuscript I eventually published in 1980, Tiresias I:9:B Great Slave Lake Suite. Since Lee’s five long poems snagged 25 pages total, I could hardly have much smaller selections of poems by the other poets without distorting the sense of equivalency that was one of the central aspects of its self-identity.

Having Lee as the first of ten poets, however, helped solve the question of the rest of the order, for I wanted the poet who followed Lee to have a much quieter voice; few voices were speaking in the intricate yet subdued manner that had been achieved at that point by Jim Krusoe, whose second full-length book Small Pianos I published almost simultaneously with The Streets Inside. On a formal level, Jim’s writing also established just how unpredictable the Los Angeles scene could be in terms of a reader’s expectations. If opening The Streets Inside with Hickman’s highly oxygenated lyricism would startle many readers, then it should also be noted how truly unusual it was for an anthology forty years ago to follow up that bravura performance with poets who emphasized the prose poem. There is hardly any other anthology in the 1970s in which a significant number of the poets are represented by a substantial amount of prose poetry. In the selections of writing of Krusoe, Holly Prado, Deena Metzger, and Peter Levitt, the prose poem is an accepted variant of poetry. Of the first eight poets in the book, in fact, only Leland Hickman and Kate Ellen Braverman do not have any prose poetry.

A half-dozen anthologies of Los Angeles poets have appeared since The Streets Inside was published out of my bedroom apartment in Ocean Park, California (512 Hill St., Apt. 4). Many of them have received substantial praise from numerous reviewers and critics, but all of these subsequent anthologies are ultimately responses to the crucial “group show” of The Streets Inside. Robert Kirsch’s praise for this collection remains a clarion call to all subsequent projects involving Los Angeles poets.

“If Los Angeles were San Francisco, where these things are more readily recognized, what is happening in poetry here would long since have been hailed as a golden age. … This handsome and exciting anthology …… is a book worth pursing, even if difficult to find in your bookshop. If necessary, just send for it.” –
Robert Kirsch, Los Angeles Times, April 27, 1979

It should be noted that Kirsch was kind enough to put my mailing address in his review. The address was slightly inaccurate, but since I had lived there for a half-dozen years, the postman (an Atlanta Braves fan, as I recollect) unfailingly brought the letters requesting copies of the anthology straight to my mailbox. I therefore got some direct sense of how many people were reading Kirsch’s review and responding to it. I sold a couple dozen copies directly through mail orders and it sold very well at Papa Bach, Chatterton’s and several other independent stores.

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Books Poetry

Cross-Strokes: Different Cities, Same Folks

June 21, 2013 – 11:14 pm

FRIDAY, June 21, 2013

Cross-Strokes: Different Cities, Same Folks

About three years Paul Vangelisti asked if I would be interested in co-editing, with Neeli Cherkovski, an anthology of poets who have lived in both Los Angeles and San Francisco. Both Neeli and I had already edited or co-edited anthologies of Los Angeles poets and Neeli has written several books on poets associated with either Los Angeles or San Francisco. We hadn’t seen each other in years, but a quick telephone conversation established that we would be very comfortable working together on the book, for which I suggested the provisional title of CROSS-STROKES. We had a fair number of conversations on the telephone during the first several months as well as an extended meeting at a coffee house in San Francisco over a year ago and managed to get a manuscript into rough shape by mid-2012. Unfortunately, the project has languished the past nine months. The delay in finalizing the manuscript is primarily due to my employment at a “teaching-intensive” state college. I was delighted to be in touch with Neeli again this morning, however, and to be reviewing representative poems by some of the poets we’ll be including.

When Paul first approached me about this book, I had just finished a 120,000 word draft of HOLDOUTS: The Los Angeles Poetry Renaissance 1948-1992 and was beginning the process of deleting one out of every four pages. Since Paul had published a section of the manuscript in NEW REVIEW OF LITERATURE, he was familiar with several of my arguments, including the notion that the divisive sibling rivalry between San Francisco and Los Angeles is more of a journalistic mirage than most folks familiar with West Coast literature are willing to concede. It makes for lively dinner table talk, but almost never does such a conversation address the question of what it means that all of the following poets have been active as poets in both Northern and Southern California:

Bruce Boyd

Tim Donnelly

Sharon Doubiago

Richard Garcia

Jack Hirschman

Lenore Kandel

Stephen Kessler

Lewis MacAdams

Phoebe MacAdams

Nate Mackey

William Margolis

David Meltzer

John Montgomery

Harold Norse

Kevin Opstedal

Stuart Z. Perkoff

Tim Reynolds

Kenneth Rexroth

Doren Robbins

Joe Safdie

Aram Saroyan

Standard Schaefer

John Thomas

Paul Vangelisti

Maw Shein Win

 

The migration of poets between both cities, in fact, defies the usual expectations. The ratio of poets to total population is much higher in San Francisco, which would tend to suggest that poets prefer Northern California. However, a surprising number of poets who started in Los Angeles, and then spent time up north, have ended up returning to Southern California. Here’s the breakdown of a few of the poets we’re hoping to include in our book and their movement between Los Angeles and San Francisco.

STARTED IN NORTHERN CALIFORNIA AND ENDED UP IN LOS ANGELES:

Bruce Boyd, William Margolis, Lewis MacAdams, Phoebe MacAdams, Richard Garcia, Aram Saroyan, and Tim Reynolds

 

STARTED IN LOS ANGELES, WENT TO NORTHERN CALIFORNIA AND RETURNED TO LOS ANGELES/SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA:

John Thomas, Stuart Z. Perkoff, Joe Safdie, Scott Wannberg

 

STARTED IN LOS ANGELES AND ENDED UP IN NORTHERN CALIFORNIA:

Jack Hirschman, Stephen Kessler, Lenore Kandel, Nate Mackey, Harold Norse, Doren Robbins, David Meltzer

Both Neeli and I hope that the book helps breaks down some of the provincial assumptions that adhere to the notion of regional poetry when it is applied to the West Coast. In a certain way, though, the instigating filter of dual residence for this anthology is just an excuse for us to put together an anthology of poets that Ron Silliman has termed “neglecterinos.” Ask yourself: When was the last time you saw an anthology with a half-dozen of the above poets in it? How many anthologies do you own with even three of the above poets in it? Except for anthologies edited by poets living in Los Angeles at the time their projects were published, The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry is the only volume published after Don Allen’s that comes to mind. Allen’s book included Boyd, Perkoff and Meltzer.

Neeli and I are looking forward to sorting through the manuscripts we’ve been collecting and finishing our work by the end of the summer. With luck, Otis Books/Seismicity Editions will have the volume in print by next Spring.

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