Koan Kinship — Bill Mohr's Blog

TUESDAY, JUNE 23, 2026

This morning, I saw a news headline in my email in-box that referred to a gunman having killed some people at a library in Chico, California. My first thought was that it was probably a domestic dispute. Don’t ask me why I thought that. When the unfamiliar interrupts one’s attention to the mundane tasks of early morning, one posits that which seems immediately possible as an explanation.

Instead, it is reported that the gunamn had no known connection to the two people who were killed. News reports further claim that an 18-year-old, who allegedly had aspirations to kill many people, has been taken into custody as the suspect who committed the murders.

If these reports are accurate, it suggests hat two adults woke up yesterday morning and had not the slightest notion that they would be gunned down by a total stranger for no other reason than they were an available target on the gunman’s path to infamy. How is this not, yet once again, an instance of an unfathomable sickness in our society?

“Thought and prayers….” will predictably be recited.

“Is there a hole for me to get sick in?” sang Bob Dylan.

******

Over 30 years ago, I wrote a monologue entitled “Whose Gun,” which Jordan Jones published in an issue of BAKUNIN magazine. I reprint it now with the fraught knowledge that someone who reads it might themselves someday become a victim of the easy access, in this country, that mentally ill people have to guns. Foreknowledge is inherently granted to the literate. Foreboding contingencies, yes; but queasy anticipation is not the same as the abrupt trajectory of personal catastrophe.

I hope that all who read “Whose Gun” are spared the fate of those who were in Chico’s library, though who knows? Perhaps I, too, am sauntering toward that desolate crossroads. Why me? Why would I deserve this fate? Why should those who were murdered in a library in Chico deserve to die in that manner? The can be no sufficient memorial for this “shadowed ground.”

“Justice” is a farce of a stage play, directed by a callous manic-depressive.

WHOSE GUN

You don’t want to shoot me.

You don’t want to shoot me.

You want to shoot the man who pretended to be your father.

You want to shoot the man who pretended to be your father.

It’s not dying I’m afraid of

But the pain of the facelessness of it —

Your facelessness.

Your face is not one to ask questions.

You’re too numb to ask questions.

You’ve stupefied yourself.

You want me to pretend.

You imagine death simply is not —

Simply not —

The not that blends sweat and fear

Into spit on the ground —

Skin hooked into the part that can’t be buried.

You want to kill the part of me that can’t be buried.

You want to kill the part of me that can’t be buried.

If you could kill just that

You would be happier.

But you can’t.

No matter how often you shoot

That part won’t die.

I won’t live to see it live.

I won’t live to see it live.

It’s not me that living.

It’s not me that’s living.

That your face should be the last one I see.

That is the crime that can’t be forgiven.

That’s what makes you evil.

I hated flying in airplanes

Because I didn’t want to die next to people I never knew.

The plane slamming into the mountain’s side —

Each bullet the pilot

Knowing the engine’s on fire.

My stove. I don’t like to cook

But I’ll miss my stove.

It’s a messy stove. The dishes

Aren’t done. Sometimes I’ll come home and eat

Spaghetti sauce I made the day before

And I’ll eat it cold, forkful after forkful,

Not even warming it up.

My friends might think I’ll miss

My records or my books or my dog

Leash and its long black coil

Of leather, but I’ll miss my stove.

Imagine shooting a stove.

But you, with your fucking gun

Don’t know the difference between heating a sauce

Or boiling an egg.

A stove has a face that I’ll never forget.

The face of onions.

Brown onions.

I gave them onion names.

Uncle Double Onion. A strong one.

Strassel onion — the sound of an onion growing.

Now the onion grows with green peppers,

Mushrooms, garlic and tomato sauce.

Its name grows like a vine with gourds,

yellow, brown and orange.

You don’t want to shoot my stove.

Who else do you want to shoot?

My stove accepted me.

You don’t want to shoot me.

You don’t want to shoot

Anybody but the ones you need to shoot.

They aren’t here

And they deserve to be shot.

If you can judge me,

I can judge them.

I stopped at this store:

Green beans, cranberry sauce, cat food.

You walked up, took my wallet

And car keys. How long do you want

Me to plead? I am more than my stove.

I hardly ever think of my stove.

It’s there. In my kitchen.

If my stove were next to the front door

Or my bed, I might think of it more often.

What does your gun have to do with my stove?
I cook one thing at a time.

You fire one bullet at a time.

My legs look good.

I like their muscles.

Not many people have seen my legs.

You can’t kill me by shooting me in the legs.

You could, but it would be difficult.

It would be easier to shoot me in the face.

The forehead. The eyes.

The side of my head.

Or in my chest.

If only I could imagine your face

As well as I can see my stove!

But your face is not a face

That should be remembered.

It should be forgotten

Like a night when one has gone to sleep hungry.

You’re not hungry. You’re angry.

You have stopped your anger with sleep

More often than gone hungry.

Whose gun?

Whose moment of insatiable defiance?

When you could have shot me

And said, much later, he deserved to die.

You want to shoot so many others.

You want to shoot all these others

Except they aren’t here.

You want to shoot all these others,

So you don’t have any choice —

You shoot me or you shoot them.

You don’t have any other choice.

You don’t want to shoot me

But you need to shoot them.

You don’t have any other choice.

Saturday, June 13, 2026

It’s mid-June in Long Beach, California, and I have finally caught up with enough personal tasks that went undone in the past semester to be able to devote some time to my blog. About a month ago I happened to see Alex Umlas at a poetry reading featuring Alexis Fancher at DiPiazza’s and she mentioned that she hadn’t seen any new posts in a while. It always surprises me a bit when someone mentions that they actually read my blog. I don’t have any sense that what I broadcast is taken note of by anything other than screen crawling bots in China. On the off chance that someone other than a computer-generated entity might chance upon this blog, however, I am back on the poetry patrol.

Linda and I were at DiPiazza’s again this past Wednesday to hear Michael C. Ford read his poetry in Long Beach for the first time since we read together at Dizzy’s record store on E. Seventh. Before he read one of his mid-set poems, Michael gave us a glimpse of his first weeks on the planet as 1939 segued into 1940. When his youthful fondness for jazz music only increased as he reached adolescence, Michael’s mother commented one day that it was to be expected. “I asked your grandmother, when you were three weeks old, what kind of music we might play you for a lullaby, and she said, “Well, I was at a downtown department store on Saturday and I bought Artie Shaw’s “Moonglow,” so let’s try this.”

The other poet who read with Michael was Liz Marlow, whose first book The Ground Never Lets Go was recently published by Eric Morago’s Moon Tide Press. The book focuses on acts of resistance that took place during the Holocaust; afterward, I asked her if she knew of Gail Newman’s very fine collection, Blood Memory. Not only was acquainted with Gail and her poetry, Liz also knew my poet friend Lynn McGee. Both Lynn and she shared the distinction of having won a Slapering Hol chapbook contest. Given her subject, I mentioned that she should become familiar with a still too little known poem: “Feasts of Death, Feasts of Love,’ by Stuart Z. Perkoff, Over sixty years after its first publication, “FDFL” inexplicably remains obscure. As I pointed out in my book HOLDOUTS in 2011, even scholars who think they have comprehensively covered Holocaust poetry omit this poem, even though it appeared in the most important anthology of American poetry after World War II. Such is the fate of work written by a poet based in Los Angeles, rather than San Francisco or New York…..

Another gratifying recent reading was Harry E. Northup’s featured presentation of poems from his most recent collection, TO ASK FOR LOVE. Harry’s voice retains the timbre that made him a compelling presence on the cinematic screen during his decades as a professional actor in films such as “Over the Edge” and “The Silence of the Lambs.” The Cahuenga cohort of poets who read before Harry were very fine, too. I was especially pleased to hear Harry read the poem he composed about the John Ford chapel at MPTF in Woodland Hills, and which first appeared in my blog. At the request of the chaplain, the poem is also now framed on the wall of the chapel.

During the spring I gave a fair amount of what little time I had left over from teaching to reading three sets of proofs for my forthcoming book, REMIGES: THREE EXTENDED POEMS (1980-2025). I do want to thank Karen Kevorkian for her assiduous copyediting, which helped me scour these texts for the slightest stumble. I was abashed at how much needed attention, which perhaps was to be expected, given that I had long given up hoping that these three poems would ever be published, and I had stopped polishing them a very long time ago. Many thanks, therefore, to What Books in advance for taking a chance on a manuscript that so many other presses had rejected. My thanks go out to the editors of magazines that supported individual segments of these long poems: Paul Vangelisti, Greg Boyd, and Jocelyn Fisher, Lawrence R. Smith.

One poet editor who recently wrote me and requested poems for a magazine is Juan Delgado, who taught for many years at California State University, San Bernardino. Juan said that he has been the guest editor for spring issue of the monthly magazine, Cholla Needles, which comes out of Yucca Valley. Issue no. 115 has just been published, featuring work by David Garyan and George Hammons as well as myself. The magazine appears to limit itself to print editions that are primarily available on Amazon and at the California Welcome Center in Yucca Valley. While I’m not familiar with most of the contributors to this magazine, several issues that I checked at random do include poets whose work I have been aligned with at various points in the past half-century. For instance, No. 91 features A.D. Winans; Issue 97 includes work by John Brandi and Renee Gregorio; issue 100 has work by Tobi Alfier, the late John Brantingham, Miriam Sagan and Juan Delgado; No. 101 includes Donna Hilbert and Ellen Maybe; No. 112 has Penelope Moffet.

The poems I sent Juan Delgado and that were published in issue 115 are:

“The Anthropocene” (a cento)

“Paper, Scissors, Rock: Water, Fire, Pot”

“Tiptoe”

“Wall”

“Pencil Sketches”

“The Unknown Unknows”

“Pater Noster / Mater Nostrils”

“My Obsession”

Anyone who would like to read this set of poems is welcome to write me at William.BillMohr@gmail.com and I will send this set right along. I want to thank the Rapp Poetry Saloon, curated by Elena Secota, for giving me a chance last year to read all these poem in public for the first time, in the company of fellow readers Amy Gerstler and Guy Zimmerman. It was a memorable thrill to read with them. I was especially pleased that Beth Ruscio was in the audience to hear all of us.

The one lapse in this issue of CHOLLA NEEDLES is that there is no bio note of any kind for the editor, whose one page introduction is among the most precise yet compressed account of the contents of a particular issue of a magazine that I have ever read. There is, of course, a contributor’s page. As a way of making up for this omission, I would like to reprint the bio note from the selection of Juan’s poems that appears in an online anthology edited by David Garyan.

https://davidgaryan.wixsite.com/ladige/post/juan-delgado-california-poets-part-8-five-poems

Juan Delgado is Professor Emeritus in the English Department at California State University, San Bernardino, where, in addition to his professorial duties, he chaired the English and Communication Studies Departments and served as the university’s interim provost. His collections of poetry include Green Web (1994), published by the University of Georgia Press and selected by poet Dara Weir for the Contemporary Poetry Prize; El Campo (1998), a collaboration with the Chicano painter Simon Silva and published by Capra Press; and Rush of Hands (2003), published by the University of Arizona Press. His most recent book, Vital Signs (2013),was a collaboration with photographer Thomas McGovern and won the Before Columbus Foundation’s American Book Award. One can find a sample of his poetry and a critical essay on his last book at the Poetry Foundation: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/juan-delgado. In recent years, he has presented his photopoetics and signage throughout southern California in museum exhibitions such as Más Allá del los Fencesat the Peppers Gallery in Redlands, 2017. Manos, Espaldas y Blossoms, a collaborative art project with Thomas McGovern featured their artwork and poetry in the groves of the California Citrus State Historical Park, 2018. Sign Language, a mixed media exhibition at the CSUN Art Galleries, featured the collaborative work of McGovern and Delgado, and the artwork of Amando Lerma and Carlos Ramirez, aka “The Date Farmers.” In 2023, he won the California Established Artist Award for his Concrete Poetry.

The primary editor for Cholla Needles is r soos, who was the editor of the monthly literary magazine Seven Stars from 1973-1998. He launched Cholla Needles in 2017.

In order to support this publication, Harley Lond worked at an auto parts store. On the cover of issue no. 7 of INTERMEDIA, he played the role auto maintenance mentor to those who wanted to learn the basics of automobile upkeep.

Wednesday, March 11, 2026

(copyright Anna Banana) — “THE NEW DADA BROTHERS” — (Harley Lond, left; Bill Gaglione, right)

Haircut and Concept: Anna Banana

THIS IMAGE IS TAKEN FROM THE FRONT OF THE POSTCARD THAT HARLEY LOND SENT TO LINDA AND ME TWO YEARS AGO FOLLOWING HIS VISIT TO OUR HOME IN LONG BEACH.

Harley W. Lond, one of the major tutelary spirits in the arts magazine renaissance of the 1970s, died early this morning in Lancaster, California, age 80, at home, in the care of his family, according to his daughter, Liz. As founding publisher and editor of INTERMEDIA magazine, in Los Angeles, in the early 1970s, Lond provided both the cross-referencing and the artistic context for artists working in disparate but aligned genres to engage with and nurture each other’s projects and to invigorate the nascent DIY poetics of independent, non-corporate controlled culture.  Gwen Allen’s book from MIT Press, in 2011, included a summary of the impact that the seven issues of INTERMEDIA had on West Coast subcultures.

Lond was born on February 5, 1946, in Los Angeles and attended public schools, graduating with a B.A. in journalism from California State University, Los Angeles. After a road trip with a friend in which both celebrated the improvisational possibilities that were theirs for the asking, he settled back in Los Angeles and by 1973 was involved with the Burbage Theater Company in its new home at the Century City Playhouse on Pico Boulevard. Lond launched a film program and a jazz series to complement the theater’s productions of plays such as “The Devils” and “Robert Patrick’s Cheap Theatrics.”

The bourgeoning art scene and literature scene roused him to begin a magazine that would serve as a rebarbative “clearing house” for those who were seeking kindred spirits to collaborate with. Joining forces with the actors in the Burbage Theater Ensemble, which included a young poet named Bill Mohr, to establish a non-profit arts organization, the Century City Educational Arts Project,  Lond published the first issue of INTERMEDIA in 1974. The CCEAP gained a foothold in San Francisco when Lond moved there in the mid-1970s, and continued his experiment in intermingling the work of poets such as Exene Cervenka with manifesto-like assessments of experimental art.

In the early 1980s, he returned to Los Angeles and settled into a career of editing publications associated with the culture industry, including Boxoffice and The Hollywood Reporter.

He is survived by writer and critic Marilyn Moss and their daughter Liz, as well as several grandchildren: Dahlia, age 11; Sawyer, age 8; and Foster, age 4.

On a personal note, I want to say that I have lost a friend every ten months or so, with a steady regularity that has chipped away at the innermost core of my equilibrium. Up until now, though, I have not lost someone I have known for more than 50 years.

Harley was like a brother to me, and when we met and hugged each other, it was as siblings who knew and respected what each of us had attempted to achieve.

I hope to honor him sufficiently in a memoir I am working on.

Until then, farewell, my dear, dear friend. Rest in imaginative peace.

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

From: Artists’ Magazines: An Alternative Space for Art
Gwen Allen
The MIT Press; 1 edition (March 4, 2011)

Intermedia

Los Angeles and San Francisco, 1974–1979 (1–7). Editor: Harley Lond.

Intermedia, “an Interdisciplinary Journal of the Arts, Resources & Communications, by and for the Communicator/Artist,” was started by Harley Lond as a kind of yellow pages for artists, writers, and musicians in the Los Angeles area and beyond. Lond wrote in the first issue:

The vacuum in which artists have struggled for years is now being filled by a host of political and economic organizations striving to create a stronger representationand voice for artists everywhere. There is almost a grassroots movement amongst artist to take control over their destinies in the econo/political facets of capitalist society. … One of the goals of Intermedia is to link the new art movement with these other alternative movements—to create a unified alternative force of artists, writers, workers, and radicals. … We want  Intermedia to be by and for artists, to be a forum for artists’ concerns and needs, to be a mode of interdisciplinary communications between the artist and the alternative learning people, radicals, communicators, and especially a mode of communication between artists of different media.

Inspired by Dick Higgins’s Something Else Press, Lond borrowed the magazine’s title from Higgins’s “Statement on Intermedia” (he got the artist’s permission first). Lond, who started the magazine with his savings and donations from family and friends, did all of the layout and typesetting himself, financing the magazine largely through small grants. After moving to San Francisco in 1977, he worked at the counter of an auto supply store, saving money, and then periodically taking time off to publish the magazine. The first three issues were 8½-by-11-inch magazines that included artists’ contributions and writings plus a listing of art services, organizations, small presses, and free artists’ classifieds. The magazine expanded as Lond began to realize the magazine’s potential as an artistic medium: issue 4 was a “Special Literary Issue,” printed as a tabloid newspaper (48 newsprint pages) of experimental art and literature; issue 5 was a tabloid compendium of 17-by-22-inch posters by artists; and issue 6 was a box containing artist-designed postcards, broadsides, folders, and posters. Among its contributors were Martha Rosler, Clemente Padin, Richard Kostelanetz, Opal Nations, Dick Higgins, Anna Banana, and Lew Thomas.

From:

Experiments in Print: A Survey of Los Angeles Artists’ Magazines from 1955 to 1986 (Feb. 6, 2012,  East of Borneo, published by the School of Art at the California Institute of the Arts)

by Gwen L. Allen

… However, the attempt to forge a regional identity became more self-conscious and pronounced in the artists’ magazines of the 1970s and ‘80s. Los Angeles was an especially fertile region for artists’ magazines at this time, giving rise to publications, including the L.A. Artists’ Publication, LAICA Journal, Intermedia, Straight Turkey, The Dumb Ox, Choke, Criss Cross Double Cross, Chrysalis, The Performance Art Journal, and Spectacle. These magazines played a vital role in the experimental practices that defined Los Angeles art during this period, nurturing a local artistic community by fostering dialogue both within and beyond it.

Intermedia exemplifies how artists’ magazines participated in the ideological and practical goals of alternative space, by fostering solidarity and information sharing among artists and other kinds of cultural workers, and supporting artists’ moral and legal rights. Billed as “an Interdisciplinary Journal of the Arts, Resources & Communications, by and for the Communicator/Artist,” the magazine was published and edited by Harley Lond, who conceived of it as a kind of Yellow Pages for artists, writers, and musicians in the Los Angeles area and beyond. Intermedia included a listing of art services, organizations, small presses, and free artists’ classifieds. As suggested by its title, the magazine also supported conceptual and intermedia practices, which it showcased in different formats, ranging from an 8½-by-11-inch magazine to a tabloid newspaper; a compendium of posters; and a box containing unbound artist-designed postcards, broadsides, folders, and posters. Among its contributors were Martha Rosler, Clemente Padin, Richard Kostelanetz, Opal Nations, Dick Higgins, Anna Banana, and Lew Thomas.

And also see What We Need Are These Early Experimental Art Magazines From the West at the Poetry Foundation’s website.

Erik Mortenson, the editor of “ALLEN GINSBERG IN CONTEXT,” recently shared the precise date of a book of essays on the work and life of Allen Ginsberg, one of the most provocative, controversial, and influential American poets of the 20th century. I first saw Ginsberg read when he was on a West Coast tour in the spring of 1968. Glover Davis and John Theobald were the primary specialists on the faculty at that time. Although Theobald was British, he had emigrated to the United States as a young man and taught on the East Coast for a decade, during which he became friends with Robert Frost and Ezra Pound. He was on the verge of retirement when I took a survey of poetry course with him; the syllabus did not include Ginsberg. Davis, on the other hand, assigned Donald Allen’s anthology as part of our reading as well as a New Directions paperback of William Carlos Williams’s Selected Poems. Several hundred students attended Ginsberg’s reading, in which he read “Wales Visitation” with a zestful lilt. The poem would not appear in print (in the New Yorker magazine) until mid-May, so everyone in the audience was experiencing the poem without any previous exposure to it. Remarkably, even Theobald was impressed. In the first class after Ginsberg’s reading, he made a point of praising that poem, though I have my doubts that he knew the poem’s inspiration was accelerated by ingesting LSD.

Getting close to 60 years after hearing Ginsberg read for the first time, I am honored and delighted to be among the contributors selected by Erik Mortenson for ALLEN GINSBERG IN CONTEXT, which will be published by Cambridge University Press on April 23. Other contributors who also wrote chapters for this volume include Stephen Gould Axelrod, Steven Belleto, Rona Cran, Terence Diggory, Stephen Fredman, Kurt Hemmer, Barry Miles, Stephen Paul Miller, Daniel Morris, Peggy Pacini, Jonah Raskin, Anne Lovering Rounds, Steven Taylor, John Whalen-Bridge, David S. Ills, and Antonin Zita.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/allen-ginsberg-in-context/FE298C2B4984970822945A5DCF9EAE16

Ed Foster: The Poetics Laureate of Talisman House

February 22, 2026

As far as I can tell, Ed Foster’s literary archive, encompassing his writing as a poet as well as all of his editorial projects, remains on the market and has not yet settled into the special collections of a university library. I suppose eventually his papers will find a secure residence for scholars to make us of, but until they are available, the nuances of Foster’s contributions to avant-garde poetry over the past half-century will remain unaccounted for in any literary history of contemporary poetry. In the meantime, we do have several interviews with Foster available on-line to help tether the oncoming avant-garde in poetry with the culminating provocations of the writers that Foster published through Talisman, his publishing project.

The list of poets Foster devoted attention to is among the most diverse avant-garde ensembles featured by any post-World War II independent publisher: Leslie Scalapino; Paul Vangelisti; Susan M. Schultz; Samuel Menarche; Michael Heller; Dennis Phillips; Timothy Liu; William Bronk; Burt Kimmelman; Elinor Nauen; Alice Notley; Ron Padgett; Stephen Paul Miller; Dodie Bellany; Gerrit Lansing; Leonard Schwartz; and Gustaf Sobin.

Along with James Sherry of Roof Books and Douglas Messerli of Sun & Moon Press, Foster embodied a selflessness as a cultural worker that is all the more remarkable in the larger context of institutionalized aggrandizement represented by the self-promotional efficiency of enterprises such as AWP. Neither Sherry, Messerli, nor Foster appear in A POETICS OF THE PRESS: Interviews with Poets, Printers, & Publishers, edited by Kyle Schlesinger, which was published five years ago, but that should not be taken as an indication of any neglect by Schlesinger, whose protagonists include Keith and Rosemary Waldrop, Lyn Hejinian, Johanna Drukcer, and Charles Alexander. If anything, I would encourage everyone to read Schlesinger’s book (published by Cuneiform Press and Ugly Duckling Press) before clicking on these links to interviews with Foster.

INTERVIEWS AND REVIEWS: ED FOSTER

http://www.tygersofwrath.com/EdwardHalseyFosterInterview.htm

Interviewer: Rob Couteau

https://yaleunion.org/secret/Howe-Talisman-interview.pdf

For background information on the books published by Ed Foster through TALISMAN:

https://talismanbooks.org/Edward-Foster

For a list of the contents of Ed Foster’s archive, see:

https://granarybooks.cdn.bibliopolis.com/images/upload/talisman-prospectus-gb.pdf

For a review of Ed Foster’s NEW AND SELECTED POEMS:

https://archive-vol-ii.weebly.com/ed-foster.html#:~:text=His%20terse%20language%20and%20short,most%20felicitous%20in%20short%20poems.

Ed Foster Interview

http://www.tygersofwrath.com/EdwardHalseyFosterInterview.htm

Let’s imagine William Carlos Williams’s “Poem” running backwards, as in a film that reverses itself:

Into the pit of

the empty

flowerpot

the cat first

dipped

carefully

the right

forefoot then the

hind

as it climbed

over the top of

the jamcloset

****

When “Poem” is inverted with a slight amendment to facilitate the syntax, the word “top” emphatically pulls the camera’s concluding shot. The trajectory becomes an ascent: the escape from the “pit” of the empty flowerpot conjoins with a sense of triumph at the summit of the poem. Not only is it a much less subtle poem when it’s inverted, but it also leaves one wondering about what the effect would be if the entire “jam closet” stanza were cut from the poem.

I, of course, prefer WCW’s version of the poem, though I must say that what took me years to notice and write about in an article for the William Carlos Williams’s Review — that the key word in the poem is “pit” — would probably have gotten more attention from previous commentators if it had been in the poem’s first line.

Michael Silverblatt: The Quintessential, Omnivorous Reader and Compassionate Interviewer

February 15, 2026

The LA Times has posted an obituary for Michael Silverblatt, the legendary interviewer of authors on the Santa Monica-based radio station KCRW. The article stated that Michael died yesterday, at age 73.

Born in Brooklyn, and educated at the State University of New York, Buffalo, he arrived in Los Angeles around 1977. I first met him when he was living in Santa Monica in an apartment just north of Wilshire Blvd., and about halfway between Intellectuals & Liars Bookstore and the Palisades Park. Michael frequented that store and its reading series throughout the summer and fall of 1978, during which time I was running the reading series and putting together an anthology of Los Angeles poets entitled THE STREETS INSIDE. I held a New Year’s Eve party to celebrate the book’s publication at my apartment in Ocean Park and invited Michael to it, at which point he had his first extended conversation with Jim Krusoe. Michael began visiting Jim’s apartment, which was barely more than a hundred yards from my place, on a regular basis, and quickly found himself to be a rising star in a literary firmament that was by that time attracting the attention of a younger generation of poets such as Dennis Cooper and Amy Gerstler, who were gravitating to Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Center, in Venice.

Michael, however, was forced to recognize eventually that his most passionate identity — that of an extraordinarily close reader of novels and poems — was the way that he would best be able to make a memorable contribution to the Republic of Literature. “Bookworm” was his destiny, and only his friends from those early years truly comprehended the arduous journey he undertook to bring it about. No tenured professor ever endured an equivalent regimen of graduate students and unpaid adjunct work as daunting as that which Michael submitted himself to. The admiration writers felt for him was earned at an enormous price, but the secret triumph was how Michael always shifted that admiration elsewhere by implicitly urging listeners to attend to larger cultural issues. If he made a penetralia out of overlooked details in a writer’s work, he did so not to show off his remarkable acuity as a reader, but to encourage others to dig even deeper into themselves to discover how a book might restore a semblance of legitimate order to the disorder of contemporary life.

If the end is in one’s beginning, it is perhaps appropriate that the last time I saw him was at Beyond Baroque, speaking with great fondness for his memories of those early years, as he addressed a gathering in honor of the late poet and novelist Kate Braverman that had been organized by novelist Janet Fitch.

R.I.P., Michael. I still remember you at the party on Hill Street, New Year’s Eve, looking like someone for whom the new year meant that you had finally begun to find your niche.

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2026-02-15/michael-silverblatt-dead-kcrw-bookworm-host-73?sfmc_id=6532a4c325b3640666c6aaca&utm_id=44142765&skey_id=37c43a5c3a11da12bdc55f9c622d0baf0ec7493490d9327a7099d22dd53e6a5e&utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=ALERT-Email-List-Michael%20Silverblatt%2C%20%27genius%27%20host%20of%20KCRW%20literary%20show%20%27Bookworm%2C%27%20dies%20at%2073-20260215&utm_term=Alert%20-%20News%20and%20Entertainment

I would then recommend you turn to KCRW’s special show on Michael’s tenure as their resident professional reader.

https://www.kcrw.com/shows/bookworm/stories/remebering-kcrws-bookworm-michael-silverblatt

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bookworm_(radio_show)

UPDATE: A week after his death, The NY Times has also posted an obituary. Given that New York City is the home base for the mainstream commercial book industry, and that Michael’s astute advocacy of novelists and poets also immensely benefitted their publishers, it is only fitting that Michael receive the honor of an obituary in the New York Times. As testified to by my account of his arrival in Los Angeles, Sam Roberts got the date wrong by which time Michael first settled in Los Angeles. Nevertheless, I thank him for mentioning other details that have been left out of other obituaries, such as his disenchantment with both academic life at Johns Hopkins as well as the haughty choke-chain of editorial exclusiveness in the New York publishing scene. If Los Angeles is a haven for those for whom self-invention is a necessity, then L.A. indeed redeemed its literary soul by giving Michael a chance to lift all of our spirits, whether the reader was in Duluth, Minnesota; Jackson Hole, Wyoming; or Albuquerque, New Mexico.

(Updated February 21, 2026)

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/20/books/michael-silverblatt-dead.html

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