Tag Archives: Suzanne Lummis

Books

Happy 100th Birthday, Edward Field, Stand Up Poet Par Excellence

June 7th, 2025

Today is Edward Field’s 100th birthday.

Mr. Field is one of only two surviving poets who appeared in Donald Allen’s anthology, The New American Poetry, in 1960 Gary Snyder, who is a half-dozen years younger, is the other survivor.

Edward Field was born in Brooklyn and grew up in Lynbrook in Long Island. At the age of 20, he was a crew member on a bomber plane that crashed on the way back from a mission over Europe. A film was made based on the poem he wrote about the experience of surviving that crash.

He has had a dozen books of poetry published, including Stand Up, Friend, with Me, the title of which inspired the name of a school of poetry largely associated with Los Angeles in general, and Long Beach, California, in particular. Poets such as Gerald Locklin, Charles Harper Webb, Suzanne Lummis, Laurel Ann Bogen, and Jack Grapes all contributed to its emergence as a significant component of West Coast poetry.

Field also has edited several anthologies, including two editions of A GEOGRAPHY OF POETS, which was the first mass-published paperback anthology to give poets in Los Angeles, such as Eloise Klein Healy, any significant recognition.

With gratitude for all you have done for poets, Edward Field, HAPPY BIRTHDAY!!

As a way of sending you a birthday card in this blog post, I have obtained permission to reprint a poem by Gerald Locklin that is dedicated to him. It appears on page 152 of the recently published book, REQUIEM FOR THE TOAD: Selected Poems, edited by Clint Margrave (New York Quarterly Press).

“where we are” (for edward field)

i envy those
who live in two places:
new work, say, and london
wales and spain;
l.a. and paris
hawaii and wwitzerland
there is always the anticipation
of the change, the chance that what is wrong
is the result of where you are. i have
always loved both the freshness of
arriving and the relief of leaving. with
two homes every move would be homecoming.
I am not even considering the weather, hot
or cold, dry or wet: I am talking about hope.

&&&&&&

“MINOR ACCIDENT OF WAR”

New animated film honors Edward Field, WWII veteran and a hero on several fronts

Books

Linda Albertano (1952-2022) and Jean-Luc Godard

Poet, actress, and performance poet Linda Albertano died today. For well over 40 years, she worked the stages of Los Angeles as an exemplary spoken word artist whose recitals left audiences buoyant about their immediate prospects, no matter how grim they might have felt walking into the theater.

I first heard her perform at the Powerhouse Theater as part of a set of presentations connected with the Olympic Arts Festival. IN the years afterwards, she was a central member of NEARLY FATAL WOMEN, a troupe of women who performed their poetry with subtle layers of theatrical cadences. The other members of the ensemble included Suzanne Lummis and Laurel Ann Bogen.

Today, Jean-Luc Godard also died, and the director of such classics as “Breathless” and “Contempt” (my personal favorite) certainly deserves to have his lifetime of work acknowledged for its extraordinary impact.

But grief is ultimately about proximity.

And Linda Albertano, it the is image of the final time I saw you performing at Beyond Baroque that flickers on the screen of memory right now. Granted, your fortitude in reading at the L.A. public library just a couple week ago, as weak as you were, also plays alongside in a double screen, but you were someone that Godard should have made a film in which you were given the most memorable scene, which no doubt might have been startlingly brief. A tiny moment of time was all it ever took for someone to remember you the rest of their lives.

Tuesday, Sept. 13, 2022

NEARLY FATALWOMEN — featuring Linda Albertano

(thank you, Phil Taggart, who says. he recorded this in Oxnard around 20 years ago)

Phil Taggart
www.PhilTaggartPoet.com

Ventura County Poetry Project
www.vcpoetryproject.org

more poetry here… over 1000 videos
AskewPoetryJournal youtube page
www.youtube.com/user/AskewPoetryJournal

Books

Interlitq: the California Poets Issue (Part 1)

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:

http://interlitq.org/blog/2019/12/21/david-garyans-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”

Books

The Poets Gather for LOST AND LOCAL

December 22, 2019

A thirty-hour stretch of rain in Long Beach will commence in about two hours, but my grades for the semester got turned in earlier today, and the leftover kale salad from last night’s dinner with Laurel Ann Bogen in Brentwood proved to be the perfect complement for the rest of our dinner. Did you say, “dinner in Brentwood, Bill?” Well, that is more than a little bit out of my usual price range for eating out, but a single $15 raffle ticket I purchased at the Beyond Baroque awards gala several weeks ago proved to be just the ticket: I won a $100 gift card at a restaurant called Bottlefish, on San Vicente Blvd. Linda and I decided to treat Laurel Ann to a holiday dinner out, and the food was absolutely superb. If anyone wants to splurge for a special occasion, I would urge you to consider this restaurant. We ate early, so the restaurant was still at a slow enough pace that we had a chance to talk with the chef, who is from Israel. Apparently, this is the start of a chain of restaurants with a low-key approach to top-notch dining.

The best news of the evening was that Laurel’s cat, Chumley, is on the rebound. Someone mentioned to her that very old cats, especially as arthritis makes it difficult to bend their joints, lose weight not because of a decrease in appetite, but because it is simply too painful to bend down to the bowl and eat. “Put your cat’s bowl on a little stand. That way the way is almost eating at mouth-level.” Laurel tried it, and Chumley has put on two pounds in a couple of weeks, and is a much happier cat. Age 23 and still going strong with Laurel’s love!

Beyond Baroque’s 51st year concluded with a celebration of the publication of Carol Ellis’s LOST AND LOCAL in the Pacific Poetry Series. Before Carol read from her book, poets, editors, and impresarios gather for a group photograph.

IMG_0158

(copyright, Linda Fry, 2019)

(Left to right, front row: Richard Modiano; Carol Ellis; Suzanne Lummis; (Second row) Bill Mohr; Gloria Vando; top row: Quentin Ring; Liz Camfiord).

Books

Carol Ellis reads from LOST AND LOCAL at Beyond Baroque

Beyond Baroque was founded by George Drury Smith a half-century ago as a publishing project. When the initial issue of its magazine faltered, the building that housed the printing equipment also became a refuge for a poetry workshop and other improvised cultural events. The magazine regrouped, and eventually achieved a substantial circulation in a newsprint version. In the mid-1970s, stand-alone collections of poetry were published by poets such as Maxine Chernoff and K. Curtis Lyle, as well as Eloise Klein Healy, who would go on to become L.A.’s first poet laureate. In the century’s final decade, under Fred Dewey’s direction, a series of books appeared by poets such as Eve Wood. Earlier this decade, Los Angeles poet Henry Morro inaugurated a new series of Beyond Baroque books, directed by a collective committee, under the imprint of the Pacific Poetry Series.

The most recent selection is Carol Ellis’s LOST AND LOCAL, which will be officially published with a debut reading on Saturday, December 14th at Beyond Baroque, at 8 p.m. Ellis received a Ph.D. in English from the University of Iowa with a dissertation on James Wright. She subsequently taught at several colleges in California, and now lives in Portland, Oregon. Her writing has appeared in ZYZZYVA, Comstock Review, The Cincinnati Review, Saranac Review, and Cider Press Review; her chapbooks are HELLO (Two Plum Press, 2018), and I Want a Job (Finishing Line Press, 2014). I wrote a review of the latter title, which appeared in

Suzanne Lummis, one of the major editorial advocates of Southern California and West Coast poetry as well as a nationally recognized poet, just sent me the book’s back cover material, which I reprint with her permission.

CAROL ELLIS — LOST AND LOCAL

“Leaving the theater I stand outside in a dark of black lipstick the world wears when everyone leaves.”

Language like this–savory, sensuous, and ripe with the unexpected–is among Carol Ellis’ strengths, along with an intelligence that converts the ordinary into the wild and strange. They pour from her, these poems, not in the form of stories, narrative, but in a profusion of responses to the world, the seen, the experienced and the imagined.

“Thunder. The dogs bark. The gods are angry say those who believe in gods. The gods are always angry or out in the back alley by the dumpster smoking cigarettes.”

Reader, think of Carol Ellis’ poems this way: it’s like stepping into the realm of dreams, but dreams wittier and more sumptuous than those that favor most of us each night.

*. *. *. *. * *

Carol Ellis’ Lost and Local possesses a lyrical acuity that is absolving and redemptive. She sees experience as a channel to catharsis. In poem after poem there’s a memorable humanity, a capacious, intelligent concentration immersed in the essential qualities of daily living. How rare it is to read a poet so exceedingly self-aware. These poems record those moments when we catch a glimpse of a world from which all the usual epithets have been stripped away. – David Biespiel

“Glowing with fervent sagacity, Carol Ellis’s LOST AND LOCAL reclaims the buoyant continuity of daily life as one of the prime affirmations enshrined in poignant poetic endeavors. The graceful rhythms of her prose poems, in particular, quietly extract a knowledge of the local’s meridians as all that seeks solace in our memories and encounters. LOST AND LOCAL is the rare book in which the cartography of the poems will inspire readers to find enough seclusion to read out loud to themselves, for what better way is there to absorb the amplitude of Ellis’s recitation — as intimate as it is shy, and eager to impart its watchwords.” — Bill Mohr

FROM MY BLOG, OVER THREE YEARS AGO:

Thursday, September 15, 2016: I WANT A JOB – Carol Ellis (Finishing Line Press, 2014)

“Post-Flaneur Poet”: “I Want a Job” by Carol Ellis

Back when I was just getting this blog underway, in the late spring of 2013, I wrote a brief comment on Oriana Ivy’s prize-winning chapbook, April Snow (Thursday, June 20). Finishing Line Press did a very handsome job on the printing of Ms. Ivy’s collection, and I have over a half-dozen other chapbooks from the same press with production values at least within the same range as April Snow. One has to wonder what happened to their sense of pride in the dismal job done on Carol Ellis’s very fine collection, I WANT A JOB. The printing looks no better than photocopying done on a machine that is running low on toner, and the small type only increases the text’s smudgy quality. Ellis deserved a far more substantial effort put into the publication of her writing.

Ellis, who now lives in Portland, Oregon, was born in Detroit and educated at the University of Iowa. After getting a Ph.D., with a dissertation on James Wright, she has (in her own words) “been around the academic block.” In punching the adjunct second-hand clock, with all of its constrictions on one’s own time to write, she somehow has enabled her imagination to sustain itself; the variety of tones in the poems and prose poems in her first book suggests that this collection barely serves as a representative presentation of that self-determination.

Chapbooks tend to be fallible collections; they all too often present a false sense of familiarity with the featured poet. In Ellis’s collection, one has a sense of three or four poems missing between each individual selection. I have never read a full-length manuscript by Ellis, so I confess that this is sheer guesswork, but rarely have encountered a first chapbook of poems that hinted at a substantial reservoir of other work awaiting revelation. As for the form of that undisclosed work, it is an equal guess as to how much of it might be prose poetry. Of the 25 poems in I WANT A JOB, 15 are prose poems, but Ellis is at ease in both arrangements, so the 60-40 proportion remains at the level of conjectural contingency. One could argue that the collection opens and closes with a prose poem; that simply reflects mathematical odds.

The poems in the second half of I WANT A JOB are especially noteworthy, and one in particular glows like a lyric translated from some obscure language into yet another language, before finding its unexpectedly perfected by this manumission from a long meditation. “First It Was Hot and Then It Was Dark” is not at all a typical poem, and part of its aura of tender supplication derives from the candid depiction of existential solitude in many of the accompanying poems. “Hot/Dark,” however, can more than stand on its own merits; it shimmers with tones of both restraint and an overflowing suffusion of the completely incomplete.

All this time trying hard to be alive,
the earth famously gone. Nothing to think
because one was thinking.
First it was hot and then it was dark.
She took off her sweater, turned on a light,
thought past the point of thinking.
Was there ever such a world repeated,
the entire place entirely too interesting
and entirely too forgotten?

This is one of those occasions in reading a collection of poems where one can do little else but put the book down, walk away, and challenge oneself to answer that question. A good place to begin would be to work on translating it into another language, for surely such a distillation of human consciousness can only be fully apprehended if reflected in the mirror of another concise diction and syntax.

Most likely, in fact, readers will find themselves putting this book aside after reading two or three pieces and giving themselves a chance to absorb sudden little bursts of sideways illumination. Ellis’s poetry is different enough from the fashion show of American poetry that it will take several readings to begin absorbing its whispered defiance of a lifetime of erasure. Ellis quotes James Tate’s poem, “Consumed”: “you are the stranger who gets stranger by the hour” in a poem entitled “Leaving Portland.” Ellis savors this transmogrification as a chance to help the reader apprehend the undercurrents of daily life, of how the visits to a plant nursery (“Getting Around Women”) or library (“The Book of Dad”) or bookstore (“Divinia Comedia”) or farmer’s market (“Repetition”) contain the rebuke of forestalled epiphanies. Her strategy is not that of a flaneur, however, for she is only too aware of how others thoughtlessly diminish one’s efforts to nourish the compassion of simple dignity (“Whore, Driving”).

In not flinching when confronted with this depleting pattern, this poet exhibits more courage than she will ever be given credit for. She’s not the only one, of course, of whom this can be said, but she is one of the few poets who understands the full measure of the imbalance.
“my future appears in leaves – the goodbye that does not think – the end of thinking – so I try to think more now – in the short space remaining – in the space allowed – but rather think about the sun and how right now it has the frightening power of a god – never underestimate a god – pray for mercy – gather nerve as one gathers flowers – the chuckling frogs – tucked into steep sides and the hard ache of a tall bird coming to find them.”
(”Frog Chuckle”)

Poetry Poetry Readings Small Press Publishing

A Pair of Readings in Santa Monica and Long Beach

Sunday, June 18, 2017

Peace Press - 1

(Photograph by Dinah Berland)

Traffic on the 405 freeway yesterday was every bit as bad as one might dread. One of the major problems of living and working in Long Beach is that I am often a three hour round trip away from attending any reading, and the task of driving to and from a reading I am part of is hardly less dispiriting. The reading itself at the Peace Press exhibition at Arena One Gallery in Santa Monica was a genuine pleasure, however.

Dinah Berland, the curator of the reading, had proposed to have the poets read in reverse alphabetical order, but Julia Stein was unable to make the event, so I led off the reading with a couple of poems that I don’t read that often: “The Big World and the Small World” (from Penetralia, 1984), and “Terrorism: The View from Century City,” which was published in the L.A. Weekly in the late 1980s when Deborah Drooz was the poetry editor. Her acceptance of that poem remains one of the more gratifying moments in my writing life. I also read “Complexities,” which had been featured on the Santa Monica bus system in the late 1980s for their poetry on the buses program, and “Slow Shoes,” which was published in Thoughtful Outlaw. Memoirist Deborah Lott followed me with a profoundly moving account of being at the Ambassador Hotel the night that Bobby Kennedy was assassinated. Michael C. Ford, whose book of poems The World Is a Suburb of Los Angeles, stands out as one of the ten best books of poems I published through Momentum Press, read as mellifluously as ever. His voice never seems to age or in any way lose its ability to pivot on the precisely illuminating syllable. Dinah Berland, the organizer of the reading, read ekphrastic poems that were not as explicitly political as the writing of the first three readers, but which pointed to the essential presence of the stranger’s gaze as the fundamental acceptance that makes politics possible. The surprise of the afternoon was Rhiannon McGaven’s presentation. The vocalization of her poems illuminated the room with their undulating cadences. Not to be mistaken for a slam poet, McGaven’s poems feature a mature diction for someone so young, and it is most likely the case that her poems will swirl with grace on the page, too. It would seem that she has been on tour quite a bit, but this was my first hearing of her writing, and I look forward to reading her debut volume of poems.

Arena One - 1A

Arena One - 2A

(From left to right: Bob Zaugh, Rhiannon McGaven, Doborah Lott, Bill Mohr, Dinah Berland, Michael C. Ford)

(Photographs by Linda Fry)

Bob Zaugh, as one of the founding spokespeople and prime instigators of Peace Press as a social, cultural, and literary force in Los Angeles, opened and closed the reading with brief remarks, and he received much deserved applause for all of his commitment to making this entire exhibit as well as reading possible. The most heartfelt applause in the course of the afternoon was most certainly for Gary Tyler, whose release two months ago from Angola prison, after over 40 years incarceration for a murder that he did not commit, was facilitated by Peace Press. Gary spoke to a small group of the audience in the dispersed conversations after the poetry reading, and his calm eloquence was a privilege to witness. He will be speaking at length at Arena One on July 1st, the final day of the exhibit.

Managing to get back through even more daunting traffic on the way back to Long Beach, it turned out that we were not late to the late afternoon/early evening reading at Gatsby Books, where Suzanne Lummis, Elena Karina Byrne, Richard Garcia, Charles Harper Webb, and Cynthia A. Briano read their poems. The four best poems were Lummis’s “The Lost Poem,” which was incredibly hilarious, Byrne’s “Richard Tuttle Behind Richard Tuttle,” the title piece of Richard Garcia’s latest collection of prose poems, Porridge, and a poem by Briano whose title I can’t remember but which I did mention to her afterwards as a poem with a gorgeous logic to its images. Briano’s soprano voice gave her poems a vigorous lilt, but there was a deeper register to the poems that made me wish that they could be recorded both now and at some future point decades from now when age has deepened her register. If one could mix those tapes, one would have a duet worth listening to repeatedly. One of the poems that Webb read seemed to be a revision of an e-mail scam satire that I remember hearing in 2010 at the Avenue 50 gallery. It was funny then, and even funnier now, and should help his forthcoming book of poems rebound from the slough of Brain Camp.

Quartet - Gatsby - 1

(from left to right: Sean Richard Moor, Suzanne Lummis, Charles Harper Webb, Cynthia A. Briano, Richard Garcia, Elena Karina Byrne, and Bill Mohr)

Quartet Gatsby - 2

(Photographs at Gatsby by Linda Fry)

Ground Level Conditions Poetry

The Southern California Poetry Festival

Saturday, September 10, 2016

THE SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA POETRY FESTIVAL — Long Beach Renews Its Compact with Poetry

I have lived and worked in Long Beach, California the past ten years, and while there are a few local reading series, such as the one at Gatsby Books and another recent start-up by liz gonzalez, I usually have to head north to Beyond Baroque or the Armand Hammer to attend a reading. Due to my workload at CSU Long Beach, however, and the age of the vehicle I drive, I have a limited amount of time I can spend on the road. Fortunately, in recent years, I have been able to use my position as a member of the English Department at CSU Long Beach to bring over a dozen poets to campus, and I am grateful for the generosity of these poets in accepting a very minimal honorarium.

This weekend, though, the Southern California Poetry Festival is taking place in Long Beach, and I hear that the event is sold out for both days. I myself wish that I could have attended at least one or two of the events, but putting in a request for a ticket has been at the bottom of my “to do” list. With the exception of a lovely, but all too brief visit with Larry and Nancy Goldstein, and the dozen or so hours given to self-contemplation during the UCLA Oral History interviews conducted by Jane Collings, this past summer was devoted to improving the living situation of my 94-year-old mother. The past eight weeks have been especially consumed with that task, and there is no indication of a let-up in the challenges posed by her deterioration. My mother may well recuperate and regain her footing to enjoy the upcoming birth of her first great-grandchild, but I suspect the hard work of being among the very old is even more daunting than she anticipated.

My sister, Joni, flew to the United States from her home in Israel about a month ago to lend considerable assistance, and this was her second trip here to help out since the late spring. Of our mother’s half-dozen offspring, we are the pair most currently involved as advocates of her care, as well as the ones most directly giving her solace and nurture. If my blog has lagged at times over the past three years, it is not just the need to give my students the attention they deserve that has caused my absence from posting. My mother has been steadily declining since about 2008, but she has stubbornly resisted acknowledging the encroaching fallibility of old age. She only gave up her driver’s license shortly after turning 90. She had driven over 70 years without ever getting in a single automobile accident, not even one caused by the egregious neglect of another driver. I have to give her high marks for quitting while she had a perfect record in that regard.

The closest I will get to the Southern California Poetry Festival, therefore, will be having Laurel Ann Bogen stay over tonight with Linda and me in Long Beach. Laurel arrived earlier this afternoon and has gone off to a movie with Linda to give me some time to read and prepare for classes. I just finished Faulkner’s “Spotted Horses,” which I will teach on Monday with the same pleasure with which I read it once again.

I especially regret not being able to hear Jax NTP read this weekend. Jax is a graduate of the CSULB MFA program and I have been delighted to see that she has continued to write and to start getting her work published in magazines such as Larry Smith’s on-line edition of Caliban magazine. I also would have enjoyed hearing the panel discussion on the Poetics of Southern California, featuring Marilyn Chin, Suzanne Lummis. Luis J. Rodriguez, and Ralph Angel, and moderated by David Ulin. In addition to Laurel Ann Bogen, other poets who will be reading this weekend include Gail Wronsky, Robin Coste Lewis, Mike Sonksen, Douglas Kearney, Griselda Suarez, Amy Uyematsu, Paisley Rekdal, Billy Burgos, Charles Harper Webb, Nicelle Davis, Frank X. Gaspar, Brendan Constantine, Sarah Vap, Judy Kronenfeld, and Amy Gerstler. The only scheduled poet who I have heard read before and whose work is not particularly interesting is Henri Cole. Any festival that can have such a high ratio of interesting, vital poets is a major success. I hope all who attend enjoy the weekend as much as I would have, should I have been free.

Books Performance Poetry

Bob Flanagan – On the 20th anniversary of his death

Photo (c) by Rod Bradley
Photo (c) by Rod Bradley

THE KID IS THE ULTIMATE MAN: Bob Flanagan (1952-1996) and Sheree Rose

Today is the 20th anniversary of the death of Bob Flanagan, although this post happening to appear today is the result of pure accident. The photograph of Flanagan accompanying this post is from a set taken by Rod Bradley at a publication event for issue number 11 of Bachy magazine at Papa Bach Bookstore in the mid-1970s; I spotted the CD Bradley had given me with the photographs at my office last week and took another peek at them over the holiday weekend, at which point I decided to start work on a long overdue tribute to Bob Flanagan and his artistic collaborator, Sheree Rose. When I looked up Bob’s dates to get an exact bearing on his chronology, I found the anniversary of his death to be rapidly approaching, so I redoubled my efforts. It should be noted, by the way, that the title of this post is a reference to the words on the cover of a book in the lower left hand corner of the photograph.

Flanagan began reading his poems around Southern California beginning in the mid-1970s, when he was still in his early 20s. In point of fact, I attended a festival of poets that included Flanagan in what had to have been his first reading in any venue that got public attention whatsoever. The “festival” took place in an unfinished, multi-story office building somewhere near downtown Los Angeles. I suppose it would be possible to dig through my archives and find the name of the hapless organizer and the exact address, but this was not an event that merits much more citation than Flanagan’s appearance, which stood out because of the contrast between his earnestness and the abundance of clichés in his poems. Flanagan was not born with a natural flair for vivid imagery. I distinctly remember listening to him read at that festival and thinking to myself that he had as little talent as any young poet I had ever heard. The old truism that talent is mostly hard work is certainly demonstrated in Flanagan’s case, for it was due to his determination to become a good writer that he matured into one of my favorite poets. In addition to his willingness to work very hard at becoming a better writer, he also had the advantage of being a member of the Beyond Baroque workshop, where poets such as Jim Krusoe and Jack Grapes continued his education in poetry outside of the academy.

I published some of his poetry in Momentum magazine and was impressed enough by his first book, “The Kid Is the Man” (Bombshelter Press, 1978) to write a review of it. It was the first formal public notice that Flanagan’s writing received. “The Kid Is the Man” contained all of the poems that Flanagan had made famous within several coteries at work in Los Angeles back then. “Love Is Still Possible” and “The Bukowski Poem” remain two of the earliest instances of poems that deserve to be in the Hall of Fame for the Stand Up school, a point to which I will return in a moment. Nor did Flanagan cease to write poetry even as he increasingly began to focus on music, theater, and performance art as outlets for his creative impishness and considerable wit, not to mention his legendary masochism. When it came time to choose his poems for Poetry Loves Poetry (1985), the work was all from the period after his first book was published and included another stand-up classic, “Fear of Poetry.” He went on to publish several collections, including “The Slave Sonnets” and a superb collaboration with David Trinidad, “A Taste of Honey.”

Given all of this poetry by Flanagan and the degree of his visible presence through frequent readings in Los Angeles, it is astonishing to realize that he is absent from all three editions of “Stand Up Poetry,” the first of which appeared in 1990 as a project co-edited by Charles Harper Webb and Suzanne Lummis. I suppose one has to take on faith the sincerity of the editors when one reads in the first slim volume (84 pages) that the 22 poets appearing in the book are merely representative of the Stand Up poetry movement and are not intended to be seen as the essential members of its first wave. However, Flanagan does not appear in either of the subsequent volumes, either. In fact, Flanagan is also absent from “Grand Passion,” which was also co-edited by Webb and Lummis, and which appeared in 1994, while Flanagan was still alive.

I find Flanagan’s absence from this evolving series of anthologies to be nothing short of astonishing, especially since Flanagan had a generous selection of poems in my anthology, “Poetry Loves Poetry,” which appeared in 1985 and which contained the poems of Webb and Lummis, too. In other words, his work was right there in front of them. Now it’s true that by 1990 Flanagan was primarily known as a performance artist, but he was still active as a poet. In fact, Flanagan was one of the primary poets who ran the Beyond Baroque poetry workshop between 1985 and 1995. Despite the way that his notoriety as a “Super-Masochist” began to overshadow his poetry, I certainly regarded Flanagan as worthy of consideration as a working poet in the early 1990s; and when I asked him to be a guest on my poetry video show, “Put Your Ears On,” he did not hesitate to accept. It turned out to be one of my most successful shows. We had a monitor on stage with a video of David Trinidad reading his lines from A Taste of Honey that alternated with Bob reading his lines live in the studio. His wit was on full display: when I asked him if he ever considered moving to NYC, where he had been born, he responded that he “preferred his creature comforts, and New York is mostly creatures.”

In addition, his poems in “Poetry Loves Poetry” were among the very best one in that anthology. “Fear of Poetry” remains a classic example of a metapoem that should be studied by every young poet. It should also be mentioned that Flanagan’s prominence within the poetry community in the mid-1980s because his lover and artistic collaborator Sheree Rose was a very fine photographer. When I decided that full-page photographs of the poets should be included in “Poetry Loves Poetry,” it was Sheree Rose who drew the assignment of persuading several dozen poets to relax enough to let their private masks become somewhat visible in a public portrait. She did a superb job and I hope some day that Beyond Baroque can have a retrospective of her work.

Finally, to square the paradoxical circle of his absence, I would also note that Flanagan studied at California State University, Long Beach, where Gerald Locklin taught for 40 years. Locklin and his colleague Charles Stetler are the poets known for using the title of Edward Field’s book, Stand Up, Friend, with Me, as the basis for a moniker to describe a kind of poetry that became increasingly popular in Southern California in the years after the Beat scenes in Los Angeles and San Francisco began a period of diminishing returns. Both Locklin and Stetler are in the first volume of Stand Up Poetry, along with another CSULB professor, Eliot Fried, whose poetry I had also published in the first issue of Bachy magazine in 1972.

The line-up of poets in the first volume of “Stand Up Poetry” (Red Wind Books, 1990) is very impressive: Laurel Ann Bogen, Charles Bukowski, Billy Collins, Wanda Coleman, Edward Field, Michael C. Ford, Elliot Fried, Manazar Gamboa, Jack Grapes, Eloise Klein Healy, Ron Koertge, Steve Kowit, Jim Krusoe, Gerald Locklin, Suzanne Lummis, Bill Mohr, Charles Stetler, Austin Straus, Charles Webb, and Ray Zepeda. There are also two poets named Ian Gregson and Viola Weinberg. That the poems of Bob Flanagan and Scott Wannberg should have been there in place of Gregson’s and Weinberg’s is obvious now.

The importance of Bob Flanagan’s writing and art and of his collaborations with Sheree Rose recently was recently confirmed by the acquisition of his archives by the University of Southern California. You can access information about that archive at:
http://one.usc.edu/bob-flanagan-and-sheree-rose-collection/

On the 20th anniversary of his death, I would urge those who are looking for material to analyze through the lens of disability theory or queer theory to consider visiting that archive and to get to work. In doing so, it would also be worth remembering that Flanagan is an exemplary Stand Up poet and one of the primary members of the original core group. Those of us who were here in the early and mid-1970s know the accuracy of that statement, even if editors who didn’t arrive in Los Angeles until the late 1970s prefer a version that might reflect a fear of being tainted by Flanagan’s transgressive art. In equally emphasizing his stature as a Stand Up poet, critics might also consider how his writing fits within the Confessional school of poetry, which is all too often viewed as a movement with no important contributors after 1980. How about someone taking on an article with a stark contrast: Sharon Olds versus Bob Flanagan. Now that would generate an incandescence worthy of the audacious risks that Flanagan took and lived to tell about, far longer – decades longer – than anyone ever suspected he would, even those of who feel very lucky to have heard him read his poetry or to offer up his body to the demons of pain. Suffering is not redemption, but it is hard to know what is worthy redeeming if one does not suffer to test those boundaries. Flanagan’s art and poetry offer us a chance to redraw our boundaries and set off anew.

Books Poetry Translation

David Ulin and “Wide Awake”

January 1, 2016 — Top Ten Picks of David Ulin; The Monolingualism of American Literature

LA Times Book Critic David Ulin has edited several anthologies himself, a fact that deserves underlining when he includes Suzanne Lummis’s Wide Awake: Poets of Los Angeles and Beyond as one of his ten favorite books published in 2015. One doesn’t have to have edited an anthology of poets to gauge the value of such an effort, but it certainly tends to make one a more judicious reader of anthologies. Lummis, too, is a veteran of this kind of editorial project; she co-edited an earlier anthology with almost the same subtitle back in the early 1990s. The high marks that Ulin gives Lummis’s latest anthology are much appreciated in the Los Angeles poetry community, if only because L.A. poets have not always had a smooth ride in the L.A. Times. In particular, one can recollect that Robert Kirsch once anointed my first anthology, The Streets Inside: Ten Los Angeles Poets (Momentum Press, 1978) as an indication of a “golden age” of Los Angeles poetry. Unfortunately, not everybody who worked at the LA Times Book Review agreed with Kirsch’s assessment, and poets were regarded as cultural orphans of their own success. I’ll put it simply: it’s nice to be appreciated again. Ulin implicitly suggests the exponential growth of the diverse scenes here by pointing out that Wide Awake is “magnificent” both in quantity (it contains “the work of more than 100 poets”) and quality (it “reveal(s) the depths and power of the city’s poetic sensibility”). That David Ulin appreciates the efforts of the diverse communities of poets in this city enough to award Lummis’s anthology a top ten pick is very gratifying, and I hope Suzanne Lummis is savoring the acknowledgement.

The last paragraph in Carolyn Kellogg’s end-of-the-year commentary in the LA Times is also worth further consideration. In referring to the choice of a Russian writer for the Nobel Prize in Literature this year, Kellogg cites an article that appeared back in 2008 in which a member of the Nobel selection committee commented that American writing is “too insular.” The charge is true, I’m afraid, though the full quotation I’ve been able to dig up is even more revealing:

“The U.S. is too isolated, too insular. They don’t translate enough and don’t really participate in the big dialogue of literature,” (Horace) Engdahl said. “That ignorance is restraining.”

The real gripe that the Swedish academy has with American writing lies in the evidence of its insularity: “They don’t translate enough.” This could be translated, so to speak, as “You don’t care about us; so why should we care about you?” Fair enough, and it brought to mind how I recently found that my most widely distributed posting in this blog for the entire year of 2015 was “Against the Monolingual Torture of Writers,” which was originally posted back in early September. For some reason, it took off in December, and had over 300 pageviews, with 161 human visits, of which 149 were new visitors to my blog. My post was firmly on the side of the Swedish academy, and perhaps it caught the attention of someone in Europe who was surprised to find an American writer at odds with his peers.

Fortunately for me, my blog is not dependent on American book publishers for advertising in order to keep itself going. If it were, I could see retribution heading my way lickety-split. Believe me, I’ve seen it happen. The announcement earlier today of the death of Natalie Cole recoiled with references to “Unforgettable,” a song that her father had made famous and which the daughter reprised by having a version in which her voice was blended in a duet with his. Back when the father-daughter version was soaring up the charts, the newspaper I was working at as a typesetter started running cartoons with a slightly satirical edge to them about the music industry. The publisher must have thought it would make his paper “different” from the other trade papers. What he didn’t count on was that you can only get away with making fun of something that everybody shares a dislike of (i.e., politicians). The music industry takes itself very seriously, and when the front page ran a cartoon of Natalie Cole saying to a skeleton figure of her father, “Hey, Dad, you’re stepping on my lines,” (or something similarly sarcastic), the music label that released Cole’s remake let my paper know that it wasn’t just cancelling advertising of that particular song in the next issue or the issue after: all advertising by that label was forthwith cancelled. Or at least that’s the version that I heard in the hallway. I do remember some rather tense editorial and salespeople faces walking past me for a week or so until the crisis was resolved. The first thing to go, of course, was the contract with the cartoonist, nor was a replacement sought.

So, yes, once again, it would make American literature more interesting if the writers here asked themselves at some point if what they are writing would at all interest someone who can only read Spanish or Chinese. Are you saying something profound enough or insightfully witty enough to merit the travail required to translate it? I do appreciate how hard it is to attain that level of writing. My first book of poems in another language has only been published after over 40 years of writing. Surely, though, those poets who have won so many more awards that I have during that time have some explanation for why their work does not seem to make a transition beyond the wall of American monolingualism.

Books Poetry

Wide Awake: Two-thirds of the Poets of Los Angeles

Saturday, April 25, 2015

WideAwake_FRONT

A reading to celebrate the publication of Wide Awake: The Poets of Los Angeles and Beyond will be held at Beyond Baroque on Saturday, May 9th, at 4:00. According to an e-mail I received this afternoon from Suzanne Lummis, about half of the poets in the book will be there to read one poem each. My MFA students are giving a reading in Long Beach that same afternoon, and I have decided to give the best overall class of students I have ever worked with their well-deserved final round of pedagogical applause. From that day forward, those students will be my peers, and not my subordinates; they have earned the recognition that only my presence that day can bestow. I am certain that the gathering at Beyond Baroque on May 9th will be a boisterous occasion, and I would love to celebrate the latest iteration of L.A.’s most visible poets. I regret especially that I will not be there to hear Liz Gonzalez read her poems. I am fortunate at my age to have a job, however, and doubly fortunate to have such good students. I have cast my lot in Long Beach.

Suzanne Lummis has done a solid job in assembling a representative selection of L.A. poets for her most recent anthology, and the book deserves to have a substantial audience. On the whole, though, the book seems to homogenize the various scenes in Los Angeles, so that one has little sense of how disparate the poetics of many poets in this city have been during the past three decades, let alone the past half-century. There have been at least a dozen anthologies of Los Angeles poets since 1960, beginning with “Poetry Los Angeles” (which is not to be confused with Laurence Goldstein’s marvelous study of poems about Los Angeles, published by the University of Michigan Press in 2014). Not one of these anthologies has followed the lead of Donald Allen’s or Ron Silliman’s anthologies and included some critical commentary by the poets that articulates their specific poetics. The need at this point is for a book that has fewer poets and more reflection in prose on the poems.

In truth, I have yet to have a chance to give Wide Awake a close reading, but even at first glance the book is rather startling in how it constitutes a census of the decimation of the L.A. poetry scenes since 1985 (only a handful of the poets in Wide Awake were active in Los Angeles a decade earlier). As good an anthology as Wide Awake is likely to turn out to be, it is a touch disheartening to realize how many poets have either left the scene, died, or remain unaccounted for as still being present and active as poets in Los Angeles. In writing the first review of Wide Awake, David Ulin has made the proper choice in focusing on the poets who are included in Lummis’s anthology rather than dwelling on the absent figures. Even so, it is perhaps indicative of this aporia that the second sentence of David Ulin’s commentary on Wide Awake cites four poets who made an initial impact on his literary knowledge of Los Angeles, and the only one of these four who is in Wide Awake is dead. (“I got to know Los Angeles through its poetry. Even before I lived here, I experienced a different, human, side of the city through the works of Wanda Coleman, Michelle T. Clinton, Amy Gerstler, David Trinidad.”) Olin’s article can be found at the following link:

http://www.latimes.com/books/jacketcopy/la-et-jc-in-wide-awake-suzanne-lummis-gathers-the-poets-of-los-angeles-20150421-story.html

At the risk of being seen as a dour, nostalgic grouch, I have decided that too many poets are absent from Wide Awake not to let the absentees (or their surviving friends and family) know that they deserve to be in some future anthology of Los Angeles poetry, one that will give a comprehensive picture of the 200 best poets to work here since the end of World War II. To lead off, I mention Alvaro Cardona-Hine and Jack Hirschman, both of whom were in both anthologies of L.A. poets worked on by Paul Vangelisti in the early 1970s. Along with Clayton Eshleman, John Harris, Victor Valle, and Joseph Hansen, Cardona-Hine and Hirschman represent strains of poetry that have made Los Angeles a particularly complicated arena for the contemporary practice of an ancient art given renewed reverence by its most renitent adherents. Let the roll-call commence, and let it be emphasized that this is not some definitive list. I have not listed, for instance, any young poets who have studied with me at CSU Long Beach and who have begun publishing their work.

Living L.A. poets absent from Wide Awake:

Frank T. Rios; Martha Ronk; Marisela Norte;

Yvonne de la Vega; Roger Taus; Daniel Tiffany;

Fred Voss; Joan Jobe Smith; Brian Kim Stefans;

Will Alexander; Anthony Seidman; Aleida Rodriguez;

Martha Ronk; Juan Delgado; Ramon Garcia;

Douglas Messerli; Jack Grapes; Mindy Nettifee;

Julia Stein; Nancy Shiffrin; Anthony McCann;

Harold Abramowitz; Matthew Timmons;

David Shook; Barbara Maloutas;

Todd Baron; Blair H. Allen;

John Doe; Exene Cervenka;

Dave Alvin; Amy Gerstler;

Tim Reynolds.

 

 

L.A. poets who left town between 1980 and 2010 and are not in Wide Awake:

Brooks Roddan; Richard Garcia;

Doren Robbins; Standard Schaeffer;

Dennis Cooper; David Trinidad;

Michelle T. Clinton; Kate Braverman;

Michael Lally; Ian Krieger.

 

Poets in “Poetry Loves Poetry” (1985) or Grand Passion (1995)

who switched to other genres / other occupations

Jim Krusoe; David James; Max Benavidez; Peter Cashorali

 

L.A. POETS WHO DIED BETWEEN 1970 and 2015

John Thomas; Philomene Long;

Ann Stanford; Joan LaBombard;

FranceYe (Frances Dean Smith); Charles Bukowski;

Leland Hickman; Bob Flanagan;

Stuart Perkoff; William Pillin;

Bruce Boyd; Grover Jacoby, Jr.;

Lawrence Spingarn; Charles Gullans;

Robert Peters; Peter Schneidre;

Dick Barnes; Robert Crosson;

Scott Wannberg; Charles Bivins;

Mel Weisburd; Manazar Gamboa;

Bert Myers; Marine Robert Warden;

Susannah Foster; Ed Smith;

Curtis Zahn; John Brander;

Carol Lem; Maria Fattorini;

Robert Greenfield; Tony Scibella.