Category Archives: Poetry

Painting and Sculpture Poetry

Jorge Humberto Chavez – Avenue 50 Gallery

September 1, 2015 – 7:29 am

 

 

From left to right: Juan Jose Radians, Bill Mohr, Antonio Malpica. Photograph by Rocio Arrellano. (c) 2015. All rights reserved. Used by permission.
From left to right: Juan Jose Radinas, Bill Mohr, Antonio Malpica. Photograph by Rocio Arellano. (c) 2015. All rights reserved. Used by permission.

I’ve been back from Mexico almost as long as I was there, and have been slow to get back to blogging. In part, it’s due to the start of school. I got through customs at LAX at 10:00 p.m. on Sunday, August 23. I met my first class at CSULB at 11:00 a.m. the next morning. All is going well at school so far; and the anthology I’m co-editing with Neeli Cherkovski is coming down the home stretch. As has been the case with the entire project, I’m in the driver’s seat, but Rebecca Chamlee (the book’s designer) is doing an excellent job at helping me negotiate the final stages of production.

The poetry tour of Mexico was a wonderful morale-booster. I read my poetry at venues in Mexico City, Cuernavaca, and San Luis Potosi, and had a chance to talk with poets from Spain, Ecuador, Israel and Brazil. I also had dinner with my translators, Jose Rico and Robin Myers. Jose was extraordinarily generous with his time: he met me at the airport when I arrived and accompanied me to catch my return flight, too. Our bus ride to Cuernavaca included a session of swapping jokes that left both of us struggling to muffle our laughter so as not to disturb the other passengers. We were sitting at the very rear of the bus, but I am fairly certain that the driver must at times have wondered about what was happening at the other end.

One of the best parts of the trip was the final evening of the festival at San Luis Potosi. Three beloved actors read short selections of our poetry or fiction to a standing-room only audience, which applauded each of us generously. I felt very fortunate to have my work read in an instant anthology alongside the work of Gloria Gervitz, Juan Jose Radinas, Antonio Malpica, Denise Desaultes, Luis Alberto Arellano, Rocio Arellano, Paulo Ferraz, Anat Zacharia, Jose Rico, and Maria Angeles Perez Lopez.

This coming Saturday, April 5th, Los Angeles will have a chance to hear the poetry of the main organizer of festival at San Luis Potosi, Jorge Humberto Chavez, at Avenue 50 Gallery. I will be reading briefly at his reading along with David Shook and Anthony Seidman. In addition, Carol Colin will still have her paintings up.

In recent weeks, Los Angeles has lost two important and inspiring artists. Lynn Manning, a vigorous poet and indefatigable cultural worker, died around the time that I left for Mexico, and Noah Davis, a marvelous painter and visual arts activist, died just a few days ago. I met Lynn only a few times over the years, and was always impressed with his poetic commitment; I devoutly hope that he is included in the anthology that Luis J. Rodriguez is putting together. I never met Mr. Davis, though, and feel a pang at his passing. There are people who would seem to be cut off early on and have left much undone, but about whom that is mere illusion. In point of fact, they did exactly what they were meant to accomplish. Noah Davis lifted off from this planet, though, with his vision still unfolding, and he deserves to have the implications of his projects kept in mind by his peers for the next several decades.

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Performance Poetry

Program for the 11th International Literary Festival in San Luis Potosi

August 7, 2015 – 12:28 pm

Programa de mano Letras 2015 alta res

I have just received the official program for the literary festival in San Luis Potosi two weeks from now and wish to pass it on to anyone curious about the vitality of Mexican literature in 2015. I am honored to be included in the discussion and look forward to meeting poets whose work I will study in the years to come. I especially want to thank Jorge Humberto Chavez for the invitation to read at San Luis Potosi. He will be reading in Los Angeles on September 5th.

Recently, I have been preparing for my trip by reading Mexican Poetry Today: 20/20 Voices a bilingual anthology, edited by Brandel France de Bravo (Shearsman Books, 2010). One gets a sense of how much poetry is flourishing in Mexico from the lack of overlap between this anthology and the poets who are reading at the SLP Festival. A quick comparison of the program and of the anthology yielded only one poet (Luis Aguilar) who was both in the anthology and reading at SLP.

 

 

 

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Books Poetry

From Monterey to Mexico

August 3, 2015 – 7:10 pm

The first set of galleys for Cross-Strokes has arrived from Rebecca Chamlee, the book designer for the final volume of what has proved to be a trilogy of anthologies. When I first got involved with publishing books back in the mid-1970s, I didn’t have a clue as to what I was getting involved with. I just knew that I wanted to get the work of some older poets I admired into print. By 1977, it was clear to me that the slim, but substantial anthology edited by Charles Bokowski, Paul Vangelisti, and Neeli Cherkovski back in 1972 needed a follow-up, and I put together a book I entitled The Streets Inside. I made a number of mistakes in editing the book, not the least of which is that I tried to give each of the ten poets the same number of pages. The decision to give Leland Hickman the lead-off position in the volume with a total of 25 pages left me in an awkward position. I certainly felt that several other poets I wanted in the anthology were no less deserving of an equally large sample of their work, and so it wasn’t long before the book had filled up its allotted size. The focus was on poets I had published in Momentum magazine, and I ended up leaving out poets I should have included. I especially regret not including Manazar Gamboa, Ron Koertge, Wanda Coleman, John Thomas, and Paul Vangelisti. I should have limited the page number for each poet to 15 pages maximum, though ten would have been even better. The Streets Inside: 15 Los Angeles Poets would have made for a more comprehensive look at a scene that was already so vital that Robert Kirsch claimed my book portended “a golden age of Los Angeles poetry.” If I had included Charles Bukowski, Jack Grapes, Bert Meyers, John Harris, Joseph Hansen, Alvaro Cardona-Hine, and Aleida Rodriguez, and upped the ante close to two dozen poets, Kirsch’s assessment would have been exponentially underwritten.

Perhaps it is the fate of editors of anthologies to struggle with regret. My second anthology, “Poetry Loves Poetry” (1985) left out Scott Wannberg, and I rebuke myself to this day for that error. In Cross-Strokes, I have already launched my self-recriminations for failing to take note of Juan Felipe Herrera’s eligibility for this book. At least, though, the book is approaching the finish line, and there is considerable gratification at being able to include poets I’ve never had a chance to include in an anthology before, such as Richard Garcia. If you have not yet read any of his books, then you have a chance to surprise yourself with metaphors that goes beyond the ordinary logic of poetic playfulness.

This is a very busy time: not only did I just return from two exhausting weeks of work at CSU Monterey Bay, but I must also get my talk written for the “Modernities” conference in Dijon, France in late November. Next week I leave for Mexico to give three readings there as part of the celebration of the publication of Pruebas Ocultas. My students at CSU Monterey Bay gave me a beautiful journal and a lovely ink pen to write with at the end of their reading on Friday, July 24th. I don’t know that I’ll be able to write much in this blog while I’m in Mexico, and I hope to fill this journal with entries about my journey there. In the meantime, I have already begun having to attend several committee meetings for the upcoming year at CSULB, including a Dean’s Review Committee and a job search committee.

On a personal level, I have found myself beginning to mediate more and even on occasion to pray. Let me be clear on one point: I have no desire to belong to a church. Too much evil has been done in the name of religion for me to accept being immured in the kind of communal identification. One challenge in praying is to disengage with any notion that prayers have a cause-and-effect efficacy, though they do seem to have a value that goes far beyond what I would attach to other speech acts as performative gestures. My act of praying, for instance, has altered my nominative perception of myself and enabled me to envision deeper relationships with others who share this kinship. As I told a friend the other day, why do we not have a word for one who prays? A prayer is what a person says who is praying. But what is the name of a person who utters a prayer? I wonder if in fact Stuart Perkoff is pointing at that odd ambiguity in the first line of an unfinished sonnet: “The morning utters stillness like a prayer.” Maybe he means not only the words said, but also the one who utters the prayer. The morning utters stillness as if it were one who says a prayer.

 

 

 

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Poetry

Edwin Morgan: From Glasgow to Saturn

July 30, 2015 – 8:30 pm

One of the things I love the most about attending the MLA is the Scottish Book Exhibit, where Gwen and Duncan give away (yes, give away) books by Scottish writers. One of the poets I discovered several years ago as a result of their generosity is Edwin Morgan, whose Collected Poems deserves the attention of every person seriously interested in twentieth century poetry. He is one of the most radically variegated poets of the past century, and fearless in doing so. In North America, he seems to have paid the price for such renitence; I have hardly ever met anyone in the United States who seems familiar with his work. (Robert Morgan would most likely be the poet identified if one happened to mention only the last name in the U.S.) On the other hand, I doubt there are many readers in the United States capable of equally enjoying Gnomes (1968) and The Horseman’s Word (1970), alongside a poem such as “An Alphabet of Goddesses.” For those still passionate enough to wield their curiosity about poets no one else in their purlieu talks about, however, Edwin Morgan would be a good poet to start your next cycle of reading with. He’ll test your tensility as few American poets can.

I hope I haven’t made it sound as if no one anywhere cares about his work, for how could a poet have a biography in print and be regarded as neglected? Thanks once again to Gwen and Duncan I have a copy of James McGonigal’s Beyond the Last Dragon: A Life of Edwin Morgan on one shelf of a small bookcase in my workroom. For those who trust biographers, McGonigal says on page 277 that From Glasgow to Saturn is the collection of his poems best known by readers in England, and that book would be a solid choice as an introductory volume to readers in this country, too. It was published by Carcanet Press in 1973, and one can pick up a used copy fairly cheaply. Most people, no doubt, would prefer to start by typing “Edwin Morgan” and that title in their browser. However that search might turn out, at the very least all poets who teach — even occasionally — should be making use of Morgan’s “A View of Things,” a poem with an extraordinary capacity to be adapted by anyone between the ages of eight and 103. I’ll leave you to discover it for yourself, but if you don’t bother, then don’t make a point of mentioning your deliberate neglect the next time we meet. I won’t necessarily be polite in ending the conversation.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Poetry

Ghazals – Cultural Weekly and KYSO Flash

July 29, 2015 – 7:59 am

Midway through my first week up at CSU Monterey Bay, Alexis Fancher wrote to say that the three ghazals from my work-in-progress, “The Jugular Notch of Sunset Boulevard,” which she had selected for her poetry column in Cultural Weekly, were now on-line:

http://www.culturalweekly.com/bill-mohr-ghazals/#

Five days afterwards, Clare MacQueen circulated a very favorable review of the most recent issue of her exceptionally fine magazine, KYSO Flash by Michael Pritchett.

http://www.thereviewreview.net/reviews/new-online-mag-showcases-wealth-flash-fiction-forms

“For variety of form, KYSO is plainly hard to match. …. There are even ghazals here by Bill Mohr that stand out by being funny and almost obscene.  “Vicarious Census Count” deals with sex toys from a male point of view, what it’s like to be “the envoi of a dildo.” – Michael Pritchett

 

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Ground Level Conditions Poetry

Eject Monterey; Insert Blanc

July 28, 2015 – 3:48 pm

Tuesday, July 28, 2015: The Return from CSU Monterey Bay; Insert Blanc’s KICKSTARTER campaign

I arrived home in mid-morning from two weeks at CSU Monterey Bay. The students were outstanding; their extraordinary group reading last Friday afternoon was fortunately recorded by Rod Bradley, as well as the staff at the theater who work with the CSU Summer Arts program, and I believe that the latter recording will eventually be posted on their web site. I posted a thank you to all the guest artists on my Facebook page, but I don’t think I can say it often enough. Ellen Bass, Marilyn Nelson, Juan Felipe Herrera, Douglas Kearney and Cecilia Woloch provided the 20 students who attended this class with a once-in-a-lifetime crash course in writing poetry. I only caught fragments of various presentations and readings, but my samplings confirmed what the students who committed themselves to this gathering repeatedly said with fervor: how did I get so lucky as to trust my hunches and go to a gathering that had no reputation other than what the poets individually brought.

Putting the class together and bringing it to fruition was a 15 month project, and I have to confess that it’s unlikely I’ll do it again, at least at the Monterey Bay site. I’m eligible to be the course coordinator again in 2017, but I’ll be turning 70 that year, and I have too many projects that still remain only half-finished; I need to give whatever time I have left to those projects. There is a possibility that I might put together a class with Cecilia Woloch that would take place in Paris, but only something on an international scale would tempt me to make the kind of effort that a summer arts course requires. It was more than worth doing, but I am truly exhausted. Nor am I the only one who found herself or himself pushed to the limits. While doing laundry late Friday night for the first time in two weeks, I began talking with one of the other course coordinators, who was getting her clothes out of the dryer. “I hit a wall yesterday,” she said. “I don’t think I could have gone one more day.” She was half my age, so I hardly feel abashed at admitting how tired I feel.

Both Cecilia Woloch and I had the good fortune to read short sets of poems on an evening of poetry with Marilyn Nelson, who knocked the crowd out with her masterpiece, “A Wreath for Emmett Till.” Cecilia and I were sitting in the wings of the stage as Marilyn read, and we could feel a palpable surge of renewed grief and sorrow for the tragedy of that young man’s murder. The fact that a slogan such as “Black Lives Matter” is still necessary to keep in emphatic circulation unlined Marilyn Nelson’s reading. The next night, Juan Felipe Herrera followed up with an equally stirring reading, and he read an imperative poem that addressed the recent slaughter in South Carolina. Ellen Bass and Douglas Kearney also gave readings to the students.

On a personal level, I felt fortunate to be able to share with the students the arrival of my book, Pruebas Ocultas, from Mexico. I went to my mailbox at the Department of English at CSULB and found a small package of copies of my book the day before I left for Monterey. It was a pleasure to read from the book to the students in the classroom, and to make that moment my first occasion of sharing my work in translation. Once again, I wish to thank Robin Myers and Jose Rico for believing in my poems and bringing me to Mexico in May, 2014, so that Bonobos Editores could learn of my writing.

During my all-out involvement in “The Poet’s Metamorphosis,” I didn’t have time to post on my blog, and one notice came to my attention during the past two weeks that I regret not having the time to post earlier. Insert Blanc Press is holding a Kickstarter campaign, and I would encourage everyone who cares about poetry outside of the academic provinces to contribute to their fund. Matthew Timmons sent me a link. Please join me in affirming a project that is every bit as important as Lee Hickman’s Temblor magazine in keeping the volcano of imagination active. Let the magma flow in turbulent skeins. Let the distant glow come closer, and then brighten, fade, and brighten again.

Insert Blanc’s kickstarter short link: http://kck.st/1LEKwtz

 

 

 

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Poetry Teaching

James Tate (1943-2015)

July 11, 2015 – 10:43 am

“The Stranger Getting Stranger By the Hour”

For the past twenty years, I have made an annual trek to Idyllwild, California to teacher fiction writing to teenagers at a summer arts camp. I decided the summer before last that I like round numbers more than ever, and so I let Steve Fraider know that 2014 would be my last time on the mountain as a summer teacher at Idyllwild Arts. One of the wonderful memories of being up there was watching Cecilia Woloch start up the Idyllwild Poetry Festival and keep it running so well year after year. Her skill at doing so played a large part in my decision to ask her to be my primary guest artist at “The Poet’s Metamorphosis” in Monterey Bay, which starts this coming Monday.

In the midst of final packing for the trip north, I heard from Brendan Constantine that James Tate has died. Although he was steadily prolific throughout his life, it is his early work that will continue to astonish readers. His first book, The Lost Pilot, has a handful of enduring poems, but on the whole is uneven. Given that he was in his very early 20s when he wrote these poems, it is hardly surprising that not every poem has gone through enough drafts. The next two widely available full-length collections, however, The Oblivion Ha-Ha and Absences, remain among the handful of books that are essential reading in their entirety. It’s not that Absences is perfect; that’s not the point of his poetics. His poems want to wake us up from our waking consciousness, that level of daily negotiation that leaves us frustrated with its explanations of reality. The “ordinary horseshit” of ideology gets washed away when we turn to his best poems and gives ourselves to his prancing logic.

In some ways, I believe that if Tate had been gifted with a more devious intellect, he might well have had the following career. Having reached the limits of his early affinities, in 1974 he renounces all his early work and devotes himself to the nascent Language movement. I wonder what would have happened, if that alternative life had somehow come to pass? Would the Language writers have truly welcomed him? I doubt it. There’s an edge of transgressive clowning — in the most sincere sense of the word — that would cause his work to remain suspect in their company. A paradox involving a vortex of welcome and farewell spins through Tate’s work with the grace of friendly solitude, and he refused to consider any other path. Tate was never in any danger of succumbing to the temptation of any poetics but his own quirkiness. As the years have gone by, and his poems missed more often than not, I began to wish that he would give himself a respite that would allow one final gush of utter brilliance. It never happened, but many of us are very grateful that he kept on trying. Without that compulsion, after all, we would not have the gift of his early poems. In the end, his work will always linger at the edges of the avant-garde while refusing easy assimilation into conventional schools, and the best of his work will continue to be a constant rediscovery of an imagination heading off towards unexpected destinations of  poignantly startling reverie. Carol Ellis’s recent collection of poems cites one of my favorite images from his poems:  “a dark star passes through you on your way home from the grocery.” His best poems are the darkest of stars, and once you have read them, you will never again be the same.

I’m going to eat a dish of blueberries in his memory tonight.

 

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Ground Level Conditions Philosophy Poetry

The Perfume of the Soul

June 28, 2015 – 1:11 pm

June 28, 2015

The Perfume of the Soul

I have been working on a talk I am scheduled to give in Dijon, France in November and reading with great pleasure and interest Michael Davidson’s On the Outskirts of Form: Practicing Cultural Poetics. In discussing George Oppen’s poetry, he mentions that “a number of recent books in critical theory have chronicled modernism’s ocularcentrism …. At the same time, social theorists have provided a critique of modernity’s ocularcentrism, pointing out how metaphors of seeing and sight dominate the work of philosophers and theorists from Marx’s theory of ideology as a camera obscura, Heidegger’s “Age of the World Picture,” and Bergson’s duree to Foucault’s emphasis on the panoptical gaze, to Sartre’s “regard” and Laura Mulvey’s theory of the gaze” (116-117). To limit ocularcentrism to moderism and modernity, however, is to underplay its role in Western philosophy and culture. Sight was the key sense cited by Plato in The Republic, for instance, so this privileging should hardly be limited to a contemporary rendition of “modernity.” Rather, sight’s dominance is the mark of modernity, whether we are thinking of remote modernity or the prosthetic forms that pass themselves off as the post-modern.1

It is my understanding that this emphasis upon sight has a pragmatic basis, for I read somewhere that well over two-thirds of the information our brain receives and works with is directly accessed through sight. That proportion of appetitive perception will probably not alter much in the centuries ahead, but we might be better off if we take the time to cultivate the other senses, too, in the same way that pianist must learn to play with the “weak” hand as well as the hand that ‘s inclined to take the lead. In fact, would both Plato and Heidegger have been better off emphasizing another sense, that of smell. The latter’s quarrel with the former might well have led him to a different understanding of Being if smell had been the sense to which he entrusted the fate of his soul.2

A recent prose poem of a blog entry that points to the possibilities of an epiphany based on smell can be found at: http://www.juliaharis.com/ Her entry, “Textures of the Unknown,” is a profound meditation on how the aquifers of the olfactory nourish the perfume of the soul. After reading her entry, I trusted more than ever Heraclitus’s proposition that “if all things turned to smoke, the nose would know all things.”3

 

1 In particular, the discussion in Book VI of The Republic at one point becomes a eulogy for the interwoven nature of the sun, its light, the eye and the soul.

2 Two recent articles in the Los Angeles Review of Books examine the on-going destabilization of Heidegger’s impact on twentieth century philosophy due to his affiliation with the Nazi Party in Germany.

http://lareviewofbooks.org/essay/what-to-make-of-heidegger-in-2015  What to Make of Heidegger in 2015? by Santiago Zabala (June 24th, 2015)

http://lareviewofbooks.org/review/king-dead-heideggers-black-notebooks   “The King Is Dead: Heidegger’s Black Notebooks” by Gregory Fried.

3 Michael Kincaid. There Are Gods Here Too: Readings of Heraclitus. Dickinson, North Dakota: Buffalo Commons Press, 2008, 53.

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Ground Level Conditions Poetry

Some Lamb, Some Shepherd

June 22, 2015 – 9:47 am

Monday, June 22, 2015

W.C. Fields once observed that no actor willingly goes on stage with children or animals; the likelihood of being upstaged is all but certain. This morning’s announcement of the death of Walter Scheib, whose body was found on a hiking trail in New Mexico, led me to read his blog on his website. The most recent entry is about six weeks ago, when he visited the Benioff Children’s hospital in San Francisco to spend some time baking with a young patient named Elizabeth. The new context shifts the picture of them working together to make peach-blackberry cobbler. The late poet Stan Rice wrote a book in tribute to his young daughter, who died of leukemia, entitled Some Lamb, in which Death speaks of his most recent feast. Some Shepherd, too.

http://www.walterscheib.com/

 

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Performance Poetry

Bill Mohr Reads in San Diego

June 14, 2015 – 7:47 am

UPSTART CROW / New Alchemy Poetry Series

San Diego, CA

presents

Bill Mohr

Wednesday, June 17, 2015

7:00 p.m.

Seaport Village 835 West Harbor Drive, San Diego, CA 92101 (619) 232-4855

After 6 p.m. parking is free at Embarcadero Park behind Harbor House.

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