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Jeff Beck and Charles Simic, R.I.P.

January 15, 2023 – 5:45 am

Sunday, January 15, 2023

Jeff Beck and Charles Simic, R.I.P.

I never met Charles Simic, but apparently he somehow had a copy of a magazine I edited back in the 1970s in his hands long enough to sign his name in the proximity of a review I wrote of his first three books. As I glance at the review, in issue number four of MOMENTUM, I am rather embarrassed to be so rudimentary in my comments, but by 1975 I had almost completely lost the ability to write essays.

https://www.abebooks.com/signed-first-edition/MOMENTUM-4-Mohr-William-Charles-Simic/30561531520/bd

MOMENTUM 4
Mohr, William (ed.); Charles Simic (signed by)
Published by Momentum Press Spring 1975, Los Angeles, 1975
CONDITION: VERY GOOD SOFT COVER
Yellow printed wrappers; 8vo. 58 pp. Charles Simic has signed this copy where the editor Mohr has very favorably reviewed Simic’s first three books. Wanda Coleman and James Grabill are among the contributors. A bit spine toned, dusty, otherwise shows little use and about very good. Seller Inventory # 14666

I wish I had done a better job, of course, especially given that I admired his work quite a bit back then. In fact, I remember that he was one of the few poets that made me feel actual excitement when I heard that a new book of his poems was now in a bookstore. It was akin to hearing that a new album by one of one’s favorite bands was in the stores. I haven’t felt that way about any poet for several decades. Is there any poet whose work I am impatient to read? I’m curious about quite a few poets and what they might be up to, but impatient? Well, I suppose Kit Robinson is a poet whose next book can’t get to my home library fast enough. Tom Lux, if he were still alive, is one of those poets. Alicia Ostriker. Sarah Maclay. Marilyn Nelson. Ellen Bass. Will Alexander. It’s not a long list, though at the very top is PAUL VANGELISTI. In my next post, I will talk about his new collection, which arrived just after the New Year.

In the meantime, I’ve been saddened to learn of the death of a guitarist who made “things as they are” distressed enough to begin urgently mutating into hemispheres of intriguingly hypnotic, patterned chaos. Jon Pareles wrote a prose poem of an obituary for Beck and it deserves your attention. The youngest members of the Beatles and the Stones were a year older than Beck, but by 1966 the textures of sounds he was punctuating with gliding reverberations made listeners able to appreciate “Tomorrow Never Knows” and “Paint It Black” all the more: it was a moment in music history when sheer willingness to improvise met guileless inspiration.

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

Simic’s death brought him to the foreground in several newspapers, too. The New York Times mentioned his childhood experiences of World War II, but missed a chance to give readers an expanded view of what Simic was was enduring. Richard Hugo has a great poem called “Letter to Charles Simic from Boulder,” and I doubt you can fully appreciate Simic’s poems unless you also read this poem by Hugo.

My poet friend Larry Goldstein has a writing prompt in which the rules include providing an account of meeting a famous person only once. Brooks Roddan, another of my poet friends, has written a poem about Simic, which he has given me permission to publish in my blog.

*. *. *. *. *

Charles Simic, 1938-2023, Teacher at the State University

He smoked Salem’s, one after another
as if he couldn’t wait to become
his obituary
because he knew as a poet
he would find
much humor there.

I applied for his class, briefly.
When I handed him some poems
he liked me and disliked them,
taking a puff and then another puff of his Salem
which he possessed with the two fingers
of a lover.

He said very quietly that I wasn’t quite ready for his class
but to come back and see him
next quarter.
So I did, but he already wasn’t there,
he’d gone to Chicago or New York
in search of his poems and Joseph Cornell.

The squires of academia, a place which must have felt so comforting
and pleasant to him, a place where he could
put up his feet and read and write,
a kind of sofa,
were dazzled by his metaphors,
which came courtesy of Stalin and Hitler.

Charles Simic and I lost touch by the time
I was accepted into his poetry class.
He was long gone, and a poet named
Arthur Gregor had taken his place.
I met Mr. Gregor once and he gave me his book
which had a first line, ‘Humming, humming and an empty bed.’

— Brooks Roddan

*. *. *

As for Jeff Beck, his guitar feedback ecstatically hums its oozing mantra of metamorphosis: “Over, Under, Sidways, Down.”

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Books

Beyond Baroque (Venice) and the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s (NYC): at the Far Turn of “Lineages”

January 11, 2023 – 9:33 am

Both Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Center in Venice, California and the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church in New York City are well past their 50th anniversary celebrations at this point. In fact, it won’t be long before the Poetry Project will begin thinking of ways to mark its 60th anniversary. No doubt the New Year’s Day marathon reading that is held in the sanctuary of the church will give both its audience and participants a chance to reflect on the ways that the Poetry Project reflects the local scenes that constitute “the radical margin, the flagrant underground—a true gathering of the many counter-cultural lineages” associated with the Poetry Project. (The quotation is from the promotional material of the Poetry Project.)

I watched a fair portion of this year’s reading, and I did so last year, too. I can’t say that I heard much work that had much chance of being influential outside of its own purlieu. I did attend that reading in NYC when I was living in Long Island, and I enjoyed it enough back then to make me wish that Beyond Baroque would do something similar. However, I don’t see wha would be gained by making that effort. Beyond Baroque held an end of the year fund-raiser, and Quentin Ring recently reported that Beyond Baroque exceeded its goal of $40,000 by over thirty percent.

Mr. Ring also announced that a new series of interdisciplinary presentations is starting up at Beyond Baroque: “The Haircut.” There weren’t many details given except that it will include writers whose collaborative projects include poetry, film, music, and performance. The very recent death of Doug Knott (on December 23, 2022) becomes all the more sad when one considers that he would have been someone whose work would have been part of that series. So, too, would have Linda Albertano’s, who died just a few months ago.

The “lineages” of Beyond Baroque and the Poetry Project have a fairly large overlap if one were to create a Venn diagram of cultural work. The challenge for those who are interested in non-academic poets is to stay alert to the expanding overlap between “alternative” cultural centers who share the problem of surviving without an endowment to bolster their efforts through lean times. How many people at the Poetry Project and Beyond Baroque are equally familiar with the work of Doug Knott, Linda Albertano, AND Lewis Warsh.

Warsh is one of the crucial poets in the “lineages” of post-World War II American poetry, and yet I find few poets in the L.A. area who seem familiar with his work at all. Poet, editor, publisher, teacher: his contribution was extraordinary, and he deserves to be as remembered on the West Coast as I would like to think he would be at the Poetry Project. I have my doubts, though, how often the young poets at the Poetry Project are encouraged to read Warsh.

Barbara Henning Remembers Lewis Warsh
https://www.poetryproject.org/library/poems-texts/in-memoriam-lewis-warsh/on-lewis-barbara-henning

Unlike Beyond Baroque, the Poetry Project is quite limited in when it is able to present its programming at St. Mark’s. Beyond Baroque controls its performance space and art gallery seven days a week, 52 weeks of the year. The Poetry Project, on the other hand, has limited access to the space at St. Mark’s. I remember when I moved to Long Island midway through the first decade of this century and attended the Poetry Project, I was a bit shocked to realize that they had no weekend events at that time. Mondays and Wednesday evenings! That was it!

Since then, the reading series has shifted to three days a week, though two of the days are “biweekly”: “the weekly Wednesday Night Reading Series features nationally/internationally recognized poets as well as those of local renown. The biweekly Monday Night Reading Series serves as a forum for emerging poets as well as the open-mic readings. The biweekly Friday Night Reading Series provides space for poets and artists whose work is multidisciplinary.”

The “Curatorial Statement” for the Fall, 2022 programming at the Poetry Project is a fairly interesting statement, and I would recommend it for your perusal. The emphasis on “touch” is ultimately an anti-Platonic poetics, of course, and the curatorial statement stops short of addressing how that emphasis would affect poetry ability to sustain “knowledge.” It is only a “statement,” however, and not a manifesto, and in fact the statement is far more eloquent than most such gestures, especially given that its social context is self-described as a “courageous circus and madcap effort” in its New Year’s Day reading promotion.

https://www.poetryproject.org/fall-2022-curatorial-statement

Beyond Baroque should continue to savor its good fortune in having a founder such as George Drury Smith, as well as a plethora of advocates and reading series curators and workshop leaders over the years such as James Krusoe, Alexandra Garrett, John Harris, Joseph Hansen, Jack Skelley, Jocelyn Fisher, Jack Grapes, Bob Flanagan, Dennis Cooper, Dennis Phillips, Benjamin Weissman, Tosh German, Fred Dewey, Richard Modiano, Quentin Ring, Laurel Ann Bogen, and Doug Knott (who served as.a Trustee and President of its Board of Trustees).

The Beyond Baroque reading series schedule for the next two months can be found at:

https://www.beyondbaroque.org

Poetry Reading: Nathan McClain, Angela Peñaredondo, & Marci Vogel
Friday, January 13,
8:00 PM PDT
In person at Beyond Baroque and live on Youtube

Poetry Reading: Sandra Simonds, Rodrigo Toscano, Prageeta Sharma, & Harmony Holiday
Sunday, January 15,
8:00 PM PDT
In person at Beyond Baroque and live on Youtube
An in-person poetry reading at Beyond Baroque with authors Sandra Simonds, Rodrigo Toscano, Prageeta Sharma, & Harmony Holiday

Three Years Later: Tweets From Hell by Suzanne Lummis
Friday, January 20,
8:00 PM PDT
In person at Beyond Baroque and live on Youtube
In 2020, Suzanne Lummis presented to a large, enthusiastic Beyond Baroque audience the entirety of her COLA (City of Los Angeles) project, 71 transmissions of no more than 280 characters each that she received from the future, and a famous figure confined in a realm of the afterlife. Tweets from Hell. In a renewed installment on January 20, 2023, Suzanne will be presenting a limited number of Tweets from Hell made available in the form of a 19th-century political pamphlet designed by Liz Camfiord.

L.A. Book Launch: The Forbidden Lunchbox by Richard Modiano
Saturday, January 21,
2:00 PM PDT
Beyond Baroque is honored to welcome back Executive Director Emeritus, Richard Modiano, in celebration of Forbidden Lunchbox, a new collection of poetry published by Punk Hostage Press. The author will be joined by poets Iris Berry, Michael C. Ford, S.A. Griffin, & K.R. Morrison.

Divine Blue Light: Will Alexander & Kamau Daáood in Conversation
Saturday, January 21,
7:00 PM PDT
Beyond Baroque’s poet-in-residence Will Alexander presents his new poetry collection, Divine Blue Light (For John Coltrane) Pocket Poets Series No. 63–published by City Lights. To celebrate this publication, he will be joined in conversation by another of Los Angeles’ iconic literary legends: Kamau Daáood, poet, activist, and co-founder of The World Stage Performance Gallery.

A Poetry Reading with Eloise Klein Healy & Ron Koertge
Ron Koertge is Pasadena’s current poet laureate and Eloise Klein Healy was the first poet laureate of Los Angeles (in 2012).
Friday, January 27,
8:00 PM PDT

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Books

“And break out the plaster for the traction cast….”

January 4, 2023 – 8:18 am

January 4, 2023


(The poet Tim Reynolds “superimposed” himself on a photograph of a certain Wall Street character. This item was generated by Tim Reynolds and shared with me by him many years ago. It’s well nigh time it surfaced.)

Decades ago, the L.A. Times had a very savvy group of writers at work: Robert Kirsch reviewed the books; Jim Murray wisecracked about sports events with metaphorical ingenuity; and Joseph Conrad was a master of political cartoons. These three made it worthwhile to subscribe to the paper.

If I knew someone who could draw like Conrad, I would hire them on the spot for a cartoon in which an elephant is in double-wide bed in a hospital emergency room. The elephant has a hind leg up in a halter which is hanging from a wench chain attached to the inner edge of a Capitol-like dome. The leg is obviously wrenched and splayed. A nurse to the side with a Donkey emblem on her uniform says, “Break out the plaster for the traction cast.”

Just in case you’re wondering what the obstructionists in the GOP want, here are some of the highlights: dismantling the IRS and jettisoning the income tex in favor of a consumer tax (gee, guess who that would benefit the most?) and a federal balanced budget (guess how much the Pentagon’s budget would be reduced under that scheme?).

Jokes aside, it is staggering to see a political party that supported an insurrection against America’s democracy now find itself incapable of agreeing on who should be speaker of the house.

In point of fact, the Constitution of the United States does not say that the Speaker of the House has to be a member of the House of Representatives or ever have served in any political office whatsoever. Furthermore, it doesn’t say anything about where the Speaker of the House must have been born in order to serve, although the line of succession to the Presidency would be affected by the Speaker’s place of birth.

It’s possible, therefore, that John Boehner or Paul Ryan could serve as Speaker of the House as a compromise candidate. The former is 73 years old, while the latter is in his early 50s. Now there’s an outcome that has almost no chance of happening, and yet one is hard pressed to figure out what other options are available.

In the meantime, McCarthy’s home state is facing a storm that promises to disrupt air traffic. The atmospheric river that is the source of the storm has yet to be according a proper noun. The seriousness of the storm can be gauged by the email I received from United Airlines yesterday evening around 6 p.m.

“Important information about your trip
Severe storms across the San Francisco Bay Area have the potential to cause disruptions to our operation, including flight delays or cancellations. As of now, there are no changes to your itinerary. We will notify you if this occurs.”

And, pray tell, exactly WHEN will that notification arrive? If one needs to be at the airport two hours before boarding time in order to get through security, how soon will passengers know about their flight status, given that they will need to allot at least an hour, if not two, to drive to the airport through traffic in rain?

Governor Newsom has declared a state of emergency, but LAX is undaunted by the unfriendly skies. Full speed ahead.

Weather forecasters are producing that this winter must end up resembling the one in 1997-1998, “a season that ended with 17 deaths and more than half a billion dollars in damage in California.”

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2023-01-04/storm-train-aimed-at-northern-california-could-rival-el-nino-winter-of-97-98

The problem with this comparison is that the southern most portion of Southern California got hardly any rain at all in the winter of 97-98. In fact, the autumn of 1997 was brutally warm throughout Southern California. I was in San Diego at that time, and I remember wondering if the sun had actually gotten hotter. It was very warm straight through the end of November, with Thanksgiving day being no exception. Yes, L.A. had a exceptionally wet February, but I don’t remember the majority of those storms making their way down to Imperial Beach with any significant amount of precipitation.

This winter has been unusual so far in having the entire coast of California getting well doused. Let’s hope ti continues at a steady pace.

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Books

Society for the Naming of Atmospheric Rivers

January 2, 2023 – 9:32 pm

January 2, 2023
“Forecasters are focused on an atmospheric river that’s expected to bring heavy rain and strong winds Wednesday and Thursday.”

Among my resolutions for the new year, the most peculiar is a desire for all of us on the West Coast to get our act together and stop letting the East Coast have all the “branding” fun.

Hurricanes get proper names, don’t they?

Why should atmospheric rivers be given any less dignity and recognition?

I hereby bestow on the West Coast atmospheric river of December, 2022 and January, 2023 the formal name of Adrianne.

I expect all future broadcasts to honor this designation.

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Books

Happy New Year! — (Where have you gone, Rose Bowl game, on 1/1/…. ?)

December 31, 2022 – 8:48 pm

January 1, 2023

I remember watching football games with my father on New Year’s Day back in the late 1950s when there were only a total of eight bowl games, and only half of them were played on January 1st: the Cotton; the Orange; Rose; and the Sugar Bowl. The names of the Bowl games were like a kind of bucolic mantra in those chin-to-chin days of the Cold War. (The other four games were the Tangerine Bowl; the Bluegrass; the Sun; and the Gator bowl.)

After moving to Los Angeles, there were a half-dozen occasions when I could have attended the Rose Bowl in person and watched my alma mater, UCLA, take on the Big Ten champion. I was always too busy, however, with various artistic projects to give priority to watching an athletic contest that had very little allure other than as some kind of perverse nostalgia.

Nevertheless, when January 1st arrives, I still yearn to see a TV screen fill with images of young men reiterating the elegiac benediction of James Wright’s poems about Martin’s Ferry, Ohio. It’s hard to explain this craving, which unlike my desire for nicotine (which only took two years to flush out of my system) somehow still quietly seethes in my social imaginary.

This year, though, because New Years Day is on a Sunday, there is no Rose Parade on Jan. 1st nor a football game in the Rose Bowl. They might as well cancel the whole thing, as far as I’m concerned, and just chalk it up to the bad karma of the pandemic and radical political turmoil. Our attention, after all, should be focused on the second anniversary of an insurrection that came all too close to pulling off its audacious goal of cancelling the legitimate election of Joseph Biden as president of the United States. January 6gh, 2021 was the ultimate bowl game of American democracy. The field goal that preserved our flawed but still somewhat viable political system was kicked at the last moment, even as the other team jumped off-sides.

It was amazing to watch a ball hang in the air that long, before it veered through the goal posts, far enough for the winning score even as gun shots went off at the very entrance to the stadium.

I still haven’t fully exhaled.

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Books

Poetry Project 2023 New Year’s Day Reading: Complete Schedule

December 30, 2022 – 10:19 am

The Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church in NYC has announced its lineup for the 49th nnual New Year’s Day reading. It will be presented in two five-hour increments. I am including an hour by hour sequence further along, but that will be preceded by an alphabetical list of the poets in each segment:

In particular, in each part, I am looking forward to hearing the following poets:

Part One (2:00–7:00PM): Edmund Berrigan; CAConrad; Stephanie La Cava; ; Jordan Davis; Ed Friedman; Peter Gizzi; John Godfrey; David Henderson; Patricia Spears Jones; erica kaufman; ; Brendan Lorber; Greg Masters; ; Eileen Myles with Ryan Sawyer; Minnie Bruce Pratt, Stacy Szymaszek; Lynne Tillman; Edwin Torres, & Don Yorty

Note: (Dinner Break — 7:00 p.m. – 8:00 p.m.)

Part Two (8:00PM–1:00AM): ; Jim Behrle; Anselm Berrigan; Erica Hunt; Wayne Koestenbaum; Rachel Levitsky; Tony Towle; Cecilia Vicuña; Anne Waldman with James Brandon Lewis; ; Nicole Wallace.

For those living in the vicinity of New York City, be aware that there is a limit of 300 tickets for sale to attend each part, which is separately ticketed. Tickets are $25 per section in advance, $30 at the door

LIVESTRAMING TICKETS
The entirety of the NYD Marathon will also be livestreamed. If you can’t join in person or prefer to tune in virtually you can do so by registering here:

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/livestream-the-poetry-projects-49th-annual-new-years-day-marathon-tickets-484438918847?mc_cid=d7572af32d&mc_eid=56740cfab0

Part One (2:00–7:00PM):

Kimberly Alidio; Basie Allen; Nuar Alsadir; Genji Amino; Stine An; Jonathan Aprea; Jaye Bartell; Jennifer Belle; Edmund Berrigan; Max Blagg; Ernie Brooks, Pete Galub, Jeannine Otis, Steve Shelley, & Peter Zummo; CAConrad; Stephanie La Cava; Che Chen & Talice Lee; Abigail Child; Jordan Davis; DAYS; Garrett Devoe; Douglas Dunn with Steven Taylor; Marcella Durand; Tess Dworman; Ayano Elson; Kayla Ephros; Jared Daniel Fagen; Alan Felsenthal; Jameson Fitzpatrick; Foamola; Ed Friedman; Cliff Fyman; Peter Gizzi; John Godfrey; Suzanne Goldenberg; David Henderson; Lucy Ives; Emily Johnson; Patricia Spears Jones; Becca Kauffman; erica kaufman; Joseph Keckler; Shiv Kotecha; Benjamin Krusling; No Land with Luke Stewart; Brendan Lorber; Wendy Lotterman; Shanzhai Lyric; Filip Marinovich; Greg Masters; Airea D. Matthews; andriniki mattis; Iris McCloughan; Maggie Millner; Peter Mills Weiss & Julia Mounsey; Yesenia Montilla; Eileen Myles with Ryan Sawyer; Laura Ortman & Katherine Liberovskaya; Phoebe Osborne; Sarah Nicole Prickett; Diana Rickard; Jasmine Sanders; Samita Sinha; Jayson P. Smith; Stacy Szymaszek; Lynne Tillman; Edwin Torres; Aldrin Valdez; Anh Vo; Morgan Võ; Chavisa Woods; & Don Yorty

Part Two (8:00PM–1:00AM):

Andrea Abi-Karam; Rachel Allen; Penny Arcade; hannah baer; Ivanna Baranova; Jess Barbagallo; Joan La Barbara; James Barickman; S. Erin Batiste; Jim Behrle; Anselm Berrigan; Allison Brainard; Anna Cataldo; Wo Chan; Yoshiko Chuma; Christeene; Lonely Christopher; Anthony Roth Costanzo with Bryan Wagorn; Kyle Dacuyan;Mike DeCapite; Cyrus Dunham; Ry Dunn; Mel Elberg; Will Farris; Carolyn Ferrucci; Jennifer Firestone; Kay Gabriel; Nick Hallett; Laura Henriksen; Erica Hunt; Juliana Huxtable; Charlene Incarnate; Stephen Ira; Paolo Javier; Kamikaze Jones with Liam O’Brien; Vincent Katz; Wayne Koestenbaum; Yvonne LeBien; Rachel Levitsky; Kyle Carrero Lopez; Tracey McTague; Roberto Montes; Dave Morse; Aida Muratoglu; Edgar Oliver; Funto Omojola; sadé powell; E.R. Pulgar; Macy Rodman; Lucy Sante; Nathaniel Siegel; imogen xtian smith; Andrew Smyth; Pamela Sneed; Rosie Stockton; Sara Jane Stoner; Rebecca Teich; Tony Towle; Cecilia Vicuña; Anne Waldman with James Brandon Lewis; Harron Walker; Nicole Wallace; Ronaldo V. Wilson; Ariel Yelen; & Mohammed Zenia

HOUR BY HOUR BREAKDOWN

POETRY PROJECT NEW YEARS READING

New Year’s Day – January 1, 2023

2:00 – 7:00 p.m.

The Poetry Project is very pleased to announce the lineup for the opening hour of the New Year’s Day Marathon. We’ll kick off the day from 2:00–3:00PM with readings and performances from Stine An, Che Chen & Talice Lee, DAYS, Ayano Elson, Jared Daniel Fagen, Jameson Fitzpatrick, Cliff Fyman, Brendan Lorber, Filip Marinovich, andriniki mattis, Yesenia Montilla, Aldrin Valdez, Morgan Võ, & Don Yorty. Hosted by Edmund Berrigan.

With readings and performances from Nuar Alsadir; Jennifer Belle; Max Blagg; Ernie Brooks, Jeannine Otis, Steve Shelley, & Peter Zummo; Abigail Child; Jordan Davis; Kayla Ephros; Ed Friedman; Peter Gizzi; Patricia Spears Jones; No Land; Greg Masters; Maggie Millner; & Phoebe Osborne. Hosted by Ira Silverberg.

With readings and performances from Basie Allen, Jonathan Aprea, Jaye Bartell, CAConrad, Douglas Dunn with Steven Taylor, Tess Dworman, Foamola, John Godfrey, Becca Kauffman, Shanzhai Lyric, Minnie Bruce Pratt, Stacy Szymaszek, Edwin Torres, & Anh Vo. Hosted by Jayson P. Smith.

Featuring readings and performances from Kimberly Alidio, Edmund Berrigan, Garrett Devoe, Marcella Durand, Suzanne Goldenberg, David Henderson, Emily Johnson, Airea D. Matthews, Iris McCloughan, Laura Ortman & Katherine Liberovskaya, Diana Rickard, Samita Sinha, Jayson P. Smith, & Lynne Tillman. Hosted by Patricia Spears Jones.

Featuring readings and performances from Genji Amino, Alan Felsenthal, Lucy Ives, erica kaufman, Joseph Keckler, Shiv Kotecha, Benjamin Krusling, Stephanie La Cava, Wendy Lotterman, Eileen Myles with Ryan Sawyer, Peter Mills Weiss & Julia Mounsey, Sarah Nicole Prickett, Tracy Rosenthal, Jasmine Sanders, & Chavisa Woods. Hosted by David Velasco.

7:00 p.m. – 8 p.m. – DINNER BREAK

8:00 – 1:00. P.m.

Featuring readings and performances from Lonely Christopher; Yoshiko Chuma; Anthony Roth Costanzo; Jennifer Firestone; Nick Hallett; Erica Hunt; Wayne Koestenbaum; Tracey McTague; sadé powell; imogen xtian smith; Andrew Smyth; Pamela Sneed; & Ronaldo V. Wilson. Hosted by Edgar Oliver.
Featuring readings and performances from Penny Arcade; Anselm Berrigan; Mike DeCapite; Paolo Javier; Vincent Katz; Joan La Barbara; Rachel Levitsky; Edgar Oliver; Lucy Sante; Nathaniel Siegel; Tony Towle; Cecilia Vicuña; & Anne Waldman with James Brandon Lewis. Hosted by Kyle Dacuyan.
Featuring readings and performances from Jess Barbagallo, S. Erin Batiste, Allison Brainard, Kyle Carrero Lopez, Carolyn Ferrucci, Juliana Huxtable, Dave Morse, Funto Omojola, E.R. Pulgar, Rosie Stockton, Sara Jane Stoner, Harron Walker, & Ariel Yelen. Hosted by Will Farris.

Featuring readings and performances from Andrea Abi-Karam; hannah baer; Wo Chan; Christeene; Cyrus Dunham; Ry Dunn; Charlene Incarnate; Stephen Ira; Kamikaze Jones with Liam O’Brien; Yvonne LeBien; Macy Rodman; Rebecca Teich; & Mohammed Zenia. Hosted by Kay Gabriel.

Featuring readings and performances from Rachel Allen; Ivanna Baranova; James Barickman; Jim Behrle; Anna Cataldo; Kyle Dacuyan; Mel Elberg; Will Farris; Kay Gabriel; Laura Henriksen; Roberto Montes; Aida Muratoglu; & Nicole Wallace. Hosted by Ry Dunn & Becca Teich.

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Resurfaced Prongs

December 30, 2022 – 6:51 am

Friday, January 30, 2022

The elevator at the storage unit where I have kept my archive for several years was broken the other day, and supervisor had to open up the staircase. Fortunately, I am on the second floor, but others would have had to mount a considerable distance to get to their units. I have picked out a few other photographs taken in the past year to accompany this daunting climb.

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The Black Crowned Night Heron of the Archive and the Memoir

December 29, 2022 – 6:53 am

December 29, 2022

This past year I worked on an article on William Carlos Williams’s influence on West Coast poets that will appear in the next issue of the William Carlos Williams Review. I am hoping to meet the editor of this special feature issue of the WCW Review, Mark Long, at the MLA convention in San Francisco next week. Long first approached me about the article a year and a half ago, and I demurred, feeling that I wasn’t sure I had enough to say that hadn’t already been commented upon. However, by chance, I had served as an outside reviewer for a book on Harold Norse, and I also had some knowledge of a magazine in Los Angeles that Williams had been in touch with in the late 1940s. It turned out that I had enough to say to make it worth the effort, and I do want to thank Mark Long for his encouragement and knowledge of the subject during the months in which I devoted myself to this topic.

I have also finally begun to get my own literary archive down to the Archive for New Poetry at Geisel Library at the University of California, San Diego. In 1996, ANP acquired the archive of Momentum Press, which was a finished part of my life, but my own literary undertakings were very much a work=in-progress. Now, the William Mohr Papers are formally underway; I have delivered almost three dozen boxes and overside items to ANP in the past five months, and I plan on taking another dozen boxes down in mid-January 2023. The items include correspondence, holographs, full-length manuscripts, journals, photographs, rare books and magazines, and reading flyers. One of my favorite reading flyers is this one:

Given the company I keep in the quartet of photographs on the flyer, one would little suspect that it was a low point in my life. I was working 30 hours a week as a typesetter for RADIO & RECORDS, an industry newspaper in Century City. I was barely making enough money to pay rent, buy food and pay back taxes on the job I had had before as an incredibly underpaid artist in residence for the California Arts Council. I had edited and published POETRY LOVES POETRY the year before, however, and had managed to get considerable attention for the five dozen poets I had included. I still regret, however, the absence of several poets in that volume, in particular Scott Wannberg, Manazar Gamboa, and Linda Albertano.

The next ten years I worked as a typesetter would be very difficult ones. On one hand, I would get letters of rejection from the NEA with incredibly sarcastic comments on the poems I submitted for a creative writing fellowship. On the other hand, an editor would write me from a magazine such as Sonora Review and comment in a post-script to an acceptance letter, “I don’t understand why you’re not internationally famous.”

I appreciated the compliment very much, but let’s face it: as much as I had aspired to be a local version of Ferlinghetti or Pound, I was hardly even at the rank that Paul Vangelisti’s achievements had attained. Nevertheless, as I have worked on the portion of my archive concerned with the 1970s, I have thought about the people I knew and the choices I made and I have been working on an archive of those tender, bewildering, and rambunctious years.

Recently, I saw a bird for the first time, and I think of this chance encounter as a symbol of reconciling the relationships I had all those years ago with a warmth and affection I have not always granted myself or others.

May your new year be equally endowed.

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Doug Knott — Poet, Actor, Producer — R.I.P.

December 24, 2022 – 9:09 am

December 24, 2022

The recent passing of Linda Albertano was a dispiriting moment in the Los Angeles art and poetry world; and the end of the year has brought news of yet another grievous loss. Doug Knott, one of the best poet-actors I have ever encountered, died last night. My understanding is that his wife, Janet, and S.A. Griffin, a long-time collaborator with Doug in the poetry performance group, CARMA BUMS, were at the hospital in his final hours.

I’ve been to many plays over the years and one of the most memorable was a one-man show by Doug Knott, “The Last of the Knott.” It was done in a small theater in Santa Monica and deserved a much larger venue. I am very happy in retrospect that I wrote about it in my blog so that Doug how much I enjoyed it.

As befits a poet who became an important contributor to the development of performance poetry in Los Angeles, Doug had an odd personal trajectory. He started out as a lawyer inn the so-called counter-culture after getting his law degree from Harvard in 1970. In the early 1980s, however, he moved to Los Angeles and started producing poetry readings and other alternative diversions at outlets such as the Lhasa Club. He joined up with Scott Wannberg and S.A. Griffin to become a founding member of the Lost Tribe and Carma Bums and went on a national tour with them.

Many of the comments about Doug have mentioned his book SMALL DOGS BARK CARTOONS and that he had several chapbooks. One of those chapbooks was published by Pat Cohee as part of the Laguna Poets Series. HOLDING PATTERN, which was number 122 in that series, features a photograph of Doug’s mother in a Piper Cub airplane. I would like to quote what Pat Cohee wrote on the back cover: “Each and every poem in this book is pure magic. Doug finds the perfect, uncanny metaphor to evoke the feelings and intuitions which inhabit his “holding pattern.” I challenge any poet to write as well.”

For those who are unfamiliar with Doug’s poems, you can find them in two anthologies: THE OUTLASW BIBLE OF AMERICAN POETRY and GRAND PASSION: THE POETS OF LOS ANGELES AND BEYOND. For an example of his work in video poetry, simply type WINGS THAT WHICH TAKES FLIGHT into your browser.

Thanks to a message from Phil Taggart, I can also share with you two links:

An interview with David Starkey
Creative Community 2.0 – Doug Knott

Doug Knott at the EP Foster Library on March 1, 2018
www.youtube.com/watch?v=3bLL7R4MSqY

On a personal note, my wife Linda just came in and showed me a photograph of our wedding in which a large number of poets gathered at the end of the day to pose with us as an ensemble. Holly Prado, Harry Northup, Brooks and Lea Ann Roddan, Phoebe MacAdams, John Thomas and Philomene Long, and Laurel Ann Bogen and her dear friend, Doug Knott.

The last time that many of us

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Books

Part Five of the Interlitq Anthology of California Poets

December 21, 2022 – 8:08 pm

David Garyan, a poet born, raised, and educated in Los Angeles, has been living in Italy for the past several years and doing more to promote international recognition of West Coast poetry than anyone since Paul Vangelisti and John McBride did INVISIBLE CITY magazine and Red Hill Press in the 1970s. Among other projects, Along with publisher Peter Robertson, Garyan has been editing a multi-part anthology of California poets, the fifth increment of which has just been published in INTERLITQ (International Literary Quarterly).

http://www.interlitq.org/californiafeature5/index.php

The following poets are featured in this latest assemblage: Millicent Borges Accardi, Kim Addonizio, Marjorie R. Becker, Jacqueline Berger, John Brandi, James Cagney, Carol Moldaw, Kosrof Chantikian, Brendan Constantine, James Cushing, Kim Dower, David Garyan, Valentina Gnup, Troy Jollimore, Judy Juanita, Paul Lieber, Rick Lupert, Glenna Luschei, Sarah Maclay, Jim Natal, Judith Pacht, Connie Post, Jeremy Radin, Luis J. Rodriguez, Gary Soto, Cole Swensen, Arthur Sze, Charles Upton, and Scott Wannberg (In Memoriam).

I know the work of about two-thirds of these poets. What makes their adjacency in collection particularly interesting is that it generates an interesting theoretical “game”: which poets would you pair up in a reading series? If I get enough suggestions for a ten week reading series, two poets per week, I will run the imaginary schedules along with my own pairing up. Send your reading rotations to William.BillMohr@gmail.com (William DOT Bill Mohr….)

I hope all is going well for all of my readers. If any of you believe in the power of sending Healing thoughts out into the universe, our fellow poet Doug Knott could certainly use that energy right now. Hang in there, Doug. We need you here in Los Angeles!

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