Monday, July 24, 2017
Four years after the Valentine’s Day reading at Beyond Baroque, the Fifth Street Theater hosted a poetry festival that paired poets who wrote in English and poets living in Los Angeles who wrote in another language. It was the first event I know of in this area that gave immigrant poetry an equal share of prominence in a reading series. This would seem to be the kind of thing that was recently cited by the new poet laureate of Los Angeles as her primary interest. In setting up programming, she may want to look at this early example, which was curated by Paul Vangelisti. I have reproduced the programming as listed on the original program, but have also broken the lists into clusters of poets as they would have been seen at that point.
Paul Vangelisti (co-editor; co=publisher: Invisible City/ Red Hill Press)
Martha Lifson (Martha Ronk)
John Thomas (deceased)
Robert Crosson (deceased)
Robert Peters (deceased)
Dennis Cooper (editor and publisher: Little Caesar Press; now lives elsewhere)
Ron Koertge
Bill Mohr (Momentum Press)
James Krusoe
Harry Northup
Holly Prado
Leland Hickman (deceased) (1934 – 1991)
Wanda Coleman (deceased)
Peter Levitt (now lives elsewhere)
Of the poets writing in other languages, here are links to the writing of the four best-known of them:
Chungmi Kim – Korean
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/chungmi-kim
http://www.beltwaypoetry.com/poetry/poets/names/kim-chungmi/
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/52903/my-sin
http://washingtonart.com/beltway/kim.html
Richard Exner – German (1929-2008)
http://www.independent.com/news/2008/dec/24/richard-exner-1929—2008/
Alurista – Spanish/English (born: Alberto Baltazar Urista Heredia, 1947)
http://www.inmotionmagazine.com/alur3.html
Gina Valdes – Spanish / Nahuatl (born 1943)
https://www.asu.edu/brp/backlist/poetry/GVal1p.html
https://www.sandiegoreader.com/news/2010/may/05/poetry-english-con-salsa/
Banaj Basu – Bengali
Nguyensa – Vietnamese
Cao Dong Knanh — Vietnamese
Saebang Lee — Korean
P.D. Sharma – Creolese-English
New Caribbean Man: Poems 1972 -1976 (Carib House, 1981)
Yuri Lechtholz – Russian
Kev Mak — Russian
About Bill Mohr