Category Archives: Poetry

Books Poetry

Pruebas Ocultas — Publishing Update

October 8, 2014 – 9:24 pm

I received an e-mail from José Luis Rico two days ago in which he announced that Bonobes Editores has been awarded a grant from an arts agency in Mexico that is somewhat the equivalent of the National Endowment for the Arts in the United States. The manuscript of my poems that José and Robin Myers have been working on for the past year is likely to published in the next six to nine months and I’m looking forward to having my poetry available in a Spanish edition, which will include the English originals.

This recognition of my poetry in Mexico stands in contrast to its neglect in my birth country. Since I cannot control the quirky tastes and curious preferences of the current fashion show in American poetry, all I can do is continue to write poems that are worthy of translation, and wait for audiences here to catch up with readers in Mexico.

Some of you may have seen, by the way, an announcement that Mantis Editores was going to publish this collection. Such appeared to be their intention, but when I gave two readings in Mexico City last May, I learned that Mantis Editores had not received the grant it had applied for, and so was not able to publish my book. Fortunately, the host of one of my readings liked my work so much that he called a friend at Bonobes Editores and encouraged them to pursue the possibility of publishing my book. They contacted me and we proceeded from there, with the good news about their application arriving as I mentioned above.  I especially want to thank Amelia Suarez at Bonobes Editores for her confidence in my writing.

 

 

 

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Poetry

“Early Beyond Baroque” by Harry Northup

October 7, 2014 – 10:57 pm

Harry Northup has given me permission to post a link to his recollection of the early days at Beyond Baroque. I can only hope that the person whose appointment as the new poet laureate of Los Angeles will be announced on Thursday, October 9, will take the time to read Harry’s piece and to commit its details to memory. If the new poet laureate is to be an effective representative of the maturation of poetry as an art form in Los Angeles in the past 65 years, then familiarity with personal accounts such as Harry’s is absolutely necessary.

http://timestimes3.blogspot.com/2014/09/early-beyond-baroque.html?view=sidebar

Harry Northup is giving a reading at Beyond Baroque in a week and a half. I wish I could attend, but I will be attending an all-day and into the evening meeting, on Friday the 17th, regarding a summer arts program in Monterey Bay.

http://timestimes3.blogspot.com/2014/10/poetry-reading-beyond-baroque.html

Poetry Reading – Beyond Baroque

POETRY READING

MARK RHODES

HARRY E.  NORTHUP

at BEYOND BAROQUE

on Friday, October 17, 2014, at 8 P.M

 

Santa Monica poet & playwright Mark Rhodes reads

with Harry E. Northup, a “wild language explosioneer,”

who makes the most of his love for Holly Prado, walks

in East Hollywood & film acting, in his poetry.

 

Beyond Baroque

681 Venice Blvd.

Venice, CA 90291

(310) 822-3006

ADMISSION: $10 general; $6 students/seniors

 

FREE TO MEMBERS

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Music Performance Poetry

“Round About Midnite” — Stuart Z. Perkoff at LACMA

October 4, 2014 – 7:38 pm

Saturday, October 4, 2014

I gave a talk this past summer at LACMA along with George Drury Smith that was part of the programming associated with the exhibit of a mural from the Venice Post Office. As that exhibit comes to a close, LACMA has decided to celebrate the Venice West scene with a staging of Stuart Z. Perkoff’s “Round About Midnite,” which was last publicly presented in Venice in 1960. It will be a staged reading with live jazz music by the Eric Reed Trio. For those interested in reading about the Venice West scene, I recommend John Maynard’s Venice West as well as the chapter on that portion of the Los Angeles poetry renaissance in my book, Holdouts (University of Iowa Press, 2011).

 

The California Beat Scene: The Eric Reed Trio

and Stuart Z. Perkoff’s Round about Midnite

Saturday, October 11, 2014

 2:00 pm

LOS ANGELES COUNTY MUSEUM OF ART

 BING THEATER

 Free and open to the public
 Note: Doors open at 1:30 pm

Bill Mohr—noted L.A.-based poet, professor at California State University, Long Beach, and a top authority on Los Angeles poetry—introduces the verse play.

Stuart Perkoff’s poetry appeared in Donald Allen’s classic anthology, The New American Poetry (Grove Press, 1960) as well as several anthologies edited by Paul Vangelisti. Eric Reed has long been known as one the best jazz pianists working today. This is the first appearance at LACMA of the Eric Reed Trio.

 

 

 

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Books Painting and Sculpture Poetry

Slater Barron and Karen Holden – STONE ROSE GALLERY

September 30, 2014 – 1:18 pm

I drove down to San Diego this past Friday to check on my mother and all seemed relatively well. She has benefitted immensely from working with several physical therapists the past couple weeks and seemed in better spirits than I expected. Her situation is a day-to-day proposition, though, and addressing the different needs of my mother and my siblings required a substantial effort on Saturday. I had driven back to Long Beach on Friday, and being a long-distance intermediary is much more challenging than talking with people face-to-face. I suspect that long-distance learning, as it is currently being pushed in college curriculums, will prove to involve equally intricate balancing acts.

The usual round of attractive reading bills beckoned this past weekend. Beyond Baroque had a terrific program with Jan Beatty, Bill Harding, and Maria Gillin, but I simply was not up for another long drive. As a local alternative, on Saturday night, I had hoped to attend Karen Holden’s reading at the Stone Rose Gallery in Long Beach, but didn’t keep a sharp enough eye on the clock and Linda and I ended up arriving after the reading, which began at 7:00 p.m. on the dot. Our tardiness led to missing what the lingering audience described as a very fine reading, although it did not prove to be the publication reading it was advertised as; the book is behind schedule and won’t be out for another two weeks. I’ll make sure to be there on time at the next event, when her book will be there for me to purchase and savor.

While we were at the Stone Rose Gallery, though, we learned of a “must see” show that will open there next week:

Slater Barron “More Is More : A Fifty Year Survey

Stone Rose Gallery

342 East Fourth Street, Long Beach, CA

www.stonerosegallery.com

(562) 436-1600

 

October 4th – November 1st 2014

Opening Reception

Saturday, October 4, 7-9 p.m.

 

 

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Ground Level Conditions Performance Poetry

The Search Engine Generation

August 2, 2014 – 9:53 am

Saturday, August 2, 2014

The Search Engine Generation

 In the past 15 years, e-mail has become the normative means of instant commercial and personal communication, and social media such as My Space, Facebook, and Twitter have aligned themselves with YouTube as the prime means of generating and accessing personal identity. All of these mechanisms are embedded within the data gathering combines of various corporate agencies and governmental vacuum machines. The unprecedented scale of this information shift has not (as far I can tell) generated any term to describe the coming-of-age youth who have been born since Bill Clinton was first elected president. These young people both generate source code and have lived their entire lives enmeshed in the uroboros-like labyrinth of source code.

An earlier generation (those born in the 1970s) got tagged with the term “Gen X,” which became popular enough as a rubric that almost everyone knew soon after its appearance to whom it was referring. A similar naming process, however, does not seem to have occurred for a subsequent generation. About three years ago, I was standing in line somewhere and suddenly the phrase ‘The Search Engine Generation” echoed in my thoughts. It felt as if someone not visible to me or anyone else had suddenly whispered to me, in the same way that a colleague will comment on something at a public meeting. It made sense to me and I’ve subsequently talked about the term with various strangers I’ve met at airports and conventions over the past couple years. As far as I can tell, the phrase has not gained any traction, and I doubt that posting it here will affect its neutral standing. Nevertheless, as a way to contextualizing the writing of Matthew Dickman and some other younger poets in a future post, I want to post this term as the best way I’ve been able to characterize the impetus behind the enormous social shifts that are taking place in our cultural and economic lives. My choice of a technological mechanism in some ways should not be that surprising. “Print culture,” for instance, is the term used to bracket the impact that the printing press had on the development of the modern world. The imprint of next half-millennium will be derived from the emergence of the search engine as the fundamental synapse of post-modern life in its post-chrysalis life.

The first time I heard the term “search engine” used by anyone engaged in cultural critique was during a seminar at UCSD in the spring of 1999. Marcel Henaff, one of my three or four favorite professors in the Department Literature, was talking about how he was the first person in the department ever to send an e-mail and during the course of his talk he mentioned the term, “search engine.” “Search engine?” I thought to myself. “What’s a search engine?” Obviously, I was still working at the level of a print-culture typesetter, who regarded his Compugraphic 7500 as sophisticated because it made use of a floppy disc to store information. Fundamentally, I was still functioning as a person shaped by a Fordist economy. As I puzzled over Professor Henaff’s citation of “search engines” as a paradigmatic shift, my limited imagination remained unable to comprehend an engine as anything other than a mechanism in which the energy results in visibly moving parts. I still don’t have a sense that the results of typing of a term into my web browser involve an engine. Nevertheless, I can’t imagine my life the past 15 years as anything other than one in which search engines have enabled me to keep track of far more projects than I could previously have handled. On the other hand, I still feel emotionally embedded in print culture and only recently have I realized that I no longer find myself wistfully thinking of entrances to libraries as places where rows of wooden drawers with paper card catalogues await my perusal. The visual joke of the card catalogue erupting in Ghostbusters will only be a puzzling prank to a new generation of film watchers.

At this point, anyone who is twenty to 25 years ago has basically been as shaped in a social sense by search engines as much as my generation was shaped by radio, television, cinema, and vinyl records. If social identity the past four centuries has largely been a plastic phenomenon, in which one performs in public space some consistent model of inclinations and preferences, it now involves an intense degree of constant reinvention, all of which is both he subject and object of search engines. The pressure to provide new “content” for these search engines seems voracious, and some of that pressure seems to have surfaced in the development of newly prominent poets. In particular, I am interested in how the overflow of information seems to have reduced the need to be held accountable for what one says. Instead, as with social media, success in being visible is justification enough for one’s artistic production. The result is an image of the poet as an “air personality” or “court jester” to the powers that control search engines. No one poet is guilty of falling into this trap, and future posts are not meant to assign responsibility for this problem to a particular poet as such. I have to start somewhere, though, and at this point it appears that Matthew Dickman is a likely candidate for cross-examination.

 

 

 

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Painting and Sculpture Poetry

Mike Kelley Retrospective

August 1, 2014 – 1:30 pm

August 1, 2014

THE MIKE KELLEY RETROSPECTIVE

The one and only time I happened to see the late Mike Kelley was at Beyond Baroque in one of his first major public presentations. I was not as impressed with his performance as I was with Johanna Went, whose work was also being featured at BB around this period. The younger poets showing up at Beyond Baroque at the time, however, such as Dennis Cooper, Amy Gerstler, as well as fiction writer Benjamin Weissman, were enthusiastic about Kelley’s flare for self-centered intensity. Kelley seemed to have the charisma of the undeterred: what other choice was available, his taciturn presence on the stage seemed to insist.

Kelley’s charisma, it turned out, derived in part from his desire to subvert some inner dichotomies that he knew he was not responsible for. If post-modernism denied the transparent culminations of any knowledge-oriented project, Kelley was not about to succumb to some easy road to absurdist consciousness. Flamboyantly concise and expansively precise, Kelley’s work exuded a commitment to a mission from which few return less damaged than at the start, and make no mistake about it: this society’s post-World War II ideologies ran ramshackle over Kelley’s youthful sensitivities. One piece in particular summed up the traumatic origins of Kelly’s angst. On a wall near the large scale model of his childhood’s institutional indoctrination sites, one could find posted a “Suspected Child Abuse Report,” which the following comments were registered: “Raised by Zombies / Brainwashed by a Cult / Take me back, please.” If the first two comments suggest a prickly revulsion akin to Bob Dylan’s line, “Is there a hole for me to get sick in?” the third comment reveals how difficult it is to escape from the black hole of one’s bleak childhood.

“Educational Complex” was one of the last pieces I encountered as I worked my way through the major retrospective of Kelly’s work at the Geffen Temporary Contemporary, and it remains one of the three or four pieces I would most want to see again. It vibrates in my memory like a massive omphalos of sanitized ideology in which all the personal responsibility for the imposition of egregiously repressive social control has been utterly effaced. No one needs to utter the platitude of “I take full responsibility” because those who benefit the most from this structural edifice have already made their victims the only ones who are permitted to make such a confession.

I wish I had the time to read a few essays on Kelley’s work before posting this entry, but almost immediately after Linda and I viewed this show, I received a call from the Los Angeles Review of Books wanting to know if I would write something about Joseph Hansen and gave me a two-week deadline. I agreed, and that more or less eliminated any chance to go into any more depth on Kelly. As I have thought about his show, though, I have found myself wanting to rearrange the order of the pieces. I would love to have encountered the following sequence: “Abused Child Report”; “Educational Complex”; “Kandor”; the video of Superman reading Plath’s The Bell Jar; “The Greatest Tragedy of President Clinton’s Administration”; and “Pay for Your Pleasure.”

At the beginning of this post, I mentioned L.A. poets who were among Kelley’s earliest admirers.  One I didn’t mention was Bob Flanagan, who went on to become a performer in one of Kelley’s pieces mid-way through this exhibit. As I think about it, in fact, I wonder if Bob Flanagan’s self-portrait as “super-masochist” might possibly have been part of the germination of the “Kandor” project in which Superman’s hometown undergoes a version of whimsical gentrification. I must admit that I was rather enchanted by the scale model that one had to climb a short staircase to view. It was a full of radiant crystals, about two dozen towers in all, on a circular platform. No figures were visible, as if the only life were taking place inside these cathode tubes of utter peacefulness, a kind of mineral chrysalis.

“The Greatest Tragedy of President Clinton’s Administration” proved to be a belated caustis manifesto of sexual rebellion. Kelley’s half-dozen paragraphs choreographed the rhetoric of health with scathing irony. His logic was seething with self-evident obviousness: don’t people see how they’ve been swindled out of their birthright of pleasure? Kelley’s argument moves with a lucid ferocity from health care to sexual health, in which his recommendation is that rock figures should become the sexual servants of those who disempower their own libidos by fixating on the paradigmatic success of others.

“Pay for Your Pleasure” deserved to have a more pungent dialectical rebuke. One also wonders if Kelley at any point ever paused and thought to himself, “Hmmm, all males. In what way does my work differ from the effigies of figures that decorate the upper walls of the Boston Public Library as the fundamental resources of knowledge in Western Civilization?”  I will confess that “Pay for Your Pleasure”  did catch me off –guard with the intensity of a sudden desire to appropriate this piece and to stage it in Texas. In point of fact, what would it have meant for Kelley to have purchased and installed one of George W. Bush’s portrait paintings as the terminal point of this prêt-a-porter philosophical tour.

The video in which Superman reads portion of Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar was easily one of the most tantalizing parts of the entire exhibit. I would love to be able to use this video in a classroom. It was one of those rare moments when a combination of well-known cultural figures is a perfect blend, and one wonders why no one thoughts of this before. Michael Garvey’s performance of Superman deserves a special commendation.

“Infinite Expansion” (1982, Broad Art Foundation), which Linda saw as having a visual logic of “contraction,” has a chiastic quality of zig-zag overflow, as if it were an image of a fountain of rippling temporality. It served as a rare moment of respite in Kelley’s retrospective. Perhaps I am misreading this piece, but for once Kelley might have found a way out of duplicity of social manipulation and achieved a glimpse at a logic that frees the spirit rather than demolishing it under the pretence of human progress.

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Music Performance Poetry

Idyllwild Poetry and Jazz – Summer, 2014

July 8, 2014 – 12:42 pm

Tuesday, July 8, 2014

Idyllwild Poetry Festival: “What to do with the rest of your life”

The poetry week at Idyllwild in the summer, 2014 held its first reading last night in the Parks Exhibition Center. Ed Skoog led off with a long poem about taking a shower at night that seemed somewhat akin to another of his poem that was recently published in American Poetry Review. In “Being in Plays,” Skoog invokes the “foldable theater / half-constructed on page or mind” that is plastic enough to enfold itself with “the unseen,” implicitly half-visible to him in the poem’s lyric silence. The poem about taking a shower at night, however, is much more ambitious than “Being in Plays” and towards the end began to rise to the dramaturgic challenge posed by Wallace Stevens in “Of Modern Poetry.”

Because the gallery was going to hold an opening at 8:00 p.m., the reading had an hour time limit, and Skoog very generously allotted the bulk of the time to his two featured poets, Troy Jollimore and Ellen Bass. Jollimore focused on poems he had recently written, which immediately earned my admiration. It’s all too tempting for a poet to view a reading as an opportunity to impress the audience with one’s best efforts, and sometimes such a reading is appropriate, but Jollimore seemed to trust both his work-in-progress and the occasion of a new audience in a remote, small town as fully compatible.  Of the half-dozen or so poems he read, my favorites were “On the Origins of Things” and “Marvelous Things without Number.”

Ellen Bass read about the same amount of time, though she focused on published poems from her most recent collection, Like a Beggar.  She led off with that book’s first poem, “Relax,” followed by “Padre Hotel,” “The Morning After” and the evening’s most immediately memorable poem, “What Did I Love,” an extended meditation on being held accountable for the meat you eat by being willing to execute it. Bass is an exceptionally fine reader, and her voice embodied the subtle cadences and rhythms propelling her imagistic rhetoric.

 

The best moment of the evening was yet to come. On her suggestion, Linda and I walked over to Bowman Auditorium for a jazz presentation. We walked in while someone was concluding a number that featured a meditation on John Lennon’s “Norwegian Wood.” Then Marshall Hawkins slowly strode across the stage and took up an enormous upright bass, upon which he began to stroke his bow for the opening moments of a composition entitled “What to Do With the Rest of Your Life.” When I opened my eyes after listening intently to the first 30 seconds or so, I kept looking for the horn. But no one was playing a horn. It was Hawkins, deftly coaxing the strings of the upright into a plangent spindrift of suspended yearning. I don’t have any idea of how he managed to transform his instrument from string to brass, but he did. I have heard Hawkins perform several times over the past 15 years when I was on the main amphitheater stage at Idyllwild for the festival, back when it was impeccably run by Cecilia Woloch. Hawkins is one of the master artists of our time, and I doubt a moment of equally fierce tenderness was offered to any audience on the West Coast last night. It was a privilege to hear him still sharing his vision at the heights of his undiminished powers.

 

 

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Books Ground Level Conditions Performance Poetry

The Great California Drought, Notwithstanding

July 4, 2014 – 5:43 pm

Friday, July 4, 2014

The Great California Drought, Notwithstanding:

Hen House Records, MC Ford, and Bob Peters

The Great California drought of the second decade of the twenty-first century has the potential to be “The Big One” that shakes the state to its core. Although small-scale earthquakes seem to be occurring with increasing frequency in the past 12 months, and “The Big One” (as measured on the Richter scale) is well overdue at this point, this drought is not a disaster subject to fantasized deferral. Unfortunately, the Governor’s call for a voluntary water reduction of twenty percent apparently fell far short of that parsimonious ideal, in part because California’s residents already consciously began to constrain their water usage at the start of this decade. Such casual efforts, however gratifying as they might be in demonstrating civic allegiance, are not going to be sufficient in resolving this crisis, which now ranks as “exceptional” for well over a third of the entire state on the U.S. Drought Monitor map

The lack of water is especially pronounced in Idyllwild, which I drove up to this past weekend to teach at the high school summer arts camp again. Idyllwild depends completely on whatever water is in storage on the mountain itself. Nothing is piped in from elsewhere. Although the sparse rainfall of the past couple years certainly contributed to the ferocity of the fires that forced an evacuation last summer, the surviving forest has still managed to retained a fairly green radiance. Some of that may be due to the astonishing persistence of summer storm patterns in these mountains. Last summer’s major fire was in large part put to rest by a fairly heavy storm that arrived just at the right moment. This afternoon, a 15 minute rainstorm was followed by a moderately steady downpour for about twenty minutes. I doubt the total precipitation was more than an eighth of an inch, but it was most welcome.

Last Friday, before heading up here, Linda and I attended a record release party for Michael C. Ford’s Look into each other’s ears. Harlan Steinberger, the producer and impresario behind Hen House Studios in Venice, made use of his new facilities in Venice to host one of the most impressive gatherings of poets on a single evening outside of any formal literary event in recent years. Everyone was delighted to see Michael’s remarkable blend of cultural skepticism and wistful irony still finding wide-spread support.

Perhaps the evening’s most delightful surprise was the presence of Paul Trachtenberg, the surviving spouse of the late Bob Peters. I had exchanged a few notes with Paul since learning of Bob’s death, and while Paul sounded in his messages, both to me and others on Facebook as if a kind of rare solace had taken possession and drenched his inner self with equanimity, I hardly expected him to be at Harlan and Michael’s party. Seeing Paul reminded me of his request that we remember and celebrate Bob’s life not in a public gathering, but in the privacy of our own reading. Get one of his books from your shelf, he urged us, and read a favorite poem.

For the past several days, I have been intermittently dipping into Gauguin’s Chair, a volume of selected poems from his first years as a poet. The title page reads “1967-1974,” but this refers more to the publication dates of the books from which the poems are drawn. (For reasons of sentiment, perhaps, the original sales slip is still in the book: 5-18-80. 4.95 plus 30 cents tax, purchased from A Different Light Bookstore: Gay Literature/Periodicals/Aesthetera. 4014 Santa Monica Blvd. (at Sunset), Hollywood, CA 90029 (213) 668-0629).

In an interview conducted by Billy Collins in April, 1974 (when Collins was a grad student at UC Riverside), Peters talked about how the sound of words is the primal attraction of poetry. “I keep saying ear when I talk about poets. I may perhaps be too attuned to sound. I luxuriate in splendid sounds in poems, my own as well as other people’s.” Peters had the rare ability to intermingle “splendid sounds” with a wide range of subject matter, including historical subjects such as Ann Lee of the Shakers or King Ludwig of Bavaria.

Peters began his creative career at a relatively late point in his life. The sudden death of his son, Richard, on February 10, 1960, at the age of four and a half, left Peters unable to derive sufficient meaning from his life as a professor of literature, and he began writing poems, many of which addressed the cauterizing loss of his child due to a one-day illness. These poems eventually were collected in Songs for a Son. As an example of the pleasure he took in “splendid sounds,” let us savor nine lines from a poem in that first book, “Transformation”:

Between death’s

hot coppery sides

the slime of birth

becomes a chalky

track of bone

compressed in time

to slate, or gneiss,

or marble – pressed

lifeless into stone.

 

The overall pattern of iambic dimeter is remarked upon in a fine instance of metapoetry: “compressed in time” refers not just to the brevity of the son’s journey in life, but to the constricted metamorphosis enacted as “compressed” becomes “pressed” in the stanza’s penultimate line. The layered internal rhyme of gneiss and lifeless provides the solemn intonation that completes the move from slime to stone. Splendid concatenation, indeed!

As the kind of memorial requested by Paul, though, and since I am in mountains now, at 5,000 feet, I have decided to share with you a poem by Bob that is rarely (if ever) reprinted in anthologies. Here is part eight of “Mt. San Gorgonio Ascent”:

At a drop below

hangs a cloud, mercurial.

The mountain it claims

gloats green, lung-red, and blue.

Pines flare. Boulders

glow. Light falls

Total mountain,

total drift of mist,

of flesh. The trance

is my own.

 

My hand is a peach

attached to a limb

swung over a gorge.

It hangs beyond all reach

gathers ripeness in.

 

Ichor swells the vein,

proceeds to the nipple end.

A bee strikes, hovers over.

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Ground Level Conditions Poetry

Harry Northup — a poem to guide a future laureate

July 3, 2014 – 12:16 pm

About two weeks ago, I received an e-mail announcing that the Cultural Affairs Department of Los Angeles was seeking nominations and applications for the post of poet laureate. I responded with a list of poets that the nominating committee should consider contacting, one of whom was Harry Northup. I saw Harry at the talk I gave with George Drury Smith at LACMA on June 21, and he let me know that he appreciated my nomination, but that he was not going to apply for the position. He sent me a poem he wrote at the start of this month, though, in which he pushes back against the normative rubrics that any bureaucracy finds itself enmeshed in, no matter how well intentioned. I wish that Harry’s poem had been the preamble for the announcement of the application period by the CAD. With his permission, I post it here.

Poet Laureate for the City of Los Angeles

 

First shut the door.  Write what you want to write.

Write with sincerity.  You’ve seen those writing rules.

Be all-embracing.  Be not afraid of the dark.  Each has

a gift.  Fulfill your gift.  Follow your inner journey.

It is important to have a community of poets so that

each poet can go further.    The Divine Feminine is

more than a man.  Ask her for guidance.  Poetry is

grace & grace is giving.  Learn the tradition of poetry.

Learn & practice the many forms.  Support your fellow

poet.  Be not afraid of the lack of respect poetry gets in

America.  America is not a poetry loving country.  We

are fortunate to have a large community of poetry here

in L.A.  Divine is silence.  Listening & being receptive.

We have had too much of the aggressive cutting into the

other.  Meaning someone who is different from you.

Write poetry as if it is the most important thing in the world.

Because it is.  From Homer & Sappho on, to Whitman &

Emily D.  The epic poets & the Greek Dramatists are the

greatest writers in the history of literature.  Because they

were first.  Ann Stanford & Holly Prado, as well as Hickman

& Thomas McGrath, are among the finest poets from L.A.

Walk the streets of East Hollywood & listen to the Armenians,

Peruvians, Hispanics, blacks, Koreans, whites talk.  Ride the

bus & watch the riders; observe the hookers on Sunset & the

homeless men near Sunset & Vermont, & the homeless black

men who sit on a bus bench at Normandie & Sunset.  Walk

around Echo Park lake & bow & give thanks to the Lady.

Forgive all the ruined men who try to make relationships.

Write poetry from the streets of L.A. & from the halls of

academe.  H.D. is the greatest poet of the Twentieth Century.

She sculpts words on the page.  She is the myth the men made

up.  Demolish myths.  Give the Poet Laureate for the City of

Los Angeles to a man or a woman, any ethnicity, any gender,

any age above voting age, any criminal, librarian, teacher who

is actually real.  Who teaches the personal & the mythic.  Who

is an Advocate for Poetry.  Who has written excellent poetry,

who knows the tradition, who has integrity, self-reliance within

him or her, who knows that the main themes of poetry are life

& death; that the purpose of poetry is to praise & affirm life

(a poet said long ago), that this failure to have a golden shining

cross within me is not apparent to you.

 

7  1  14

Harry E. Northup

 

 

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Books Poetry

Cobalt Cafe and LACMA Readings

June 17, 2014 – 11:34 am

Tuesday, June 17, 2014

This past spring I had the pleasure of giving a poetry reading at Beyond Baroque in Venice with Rick Lupert, one of the most stalwart and ebullient members of the Los Angeles poetry community. It was the first time I had ever read with him and I enjoyed the event very much. He subsequently invited me to read at the Cobalt Cafe, where I will be reading tonight at 8:00 p.m. Here is the information anyone interested in attending might need:

BILL MOHR plus OPEN READING Tonight!

Plus “Old Friend with New Project” MARIE LECRIVAIN

Tuesday, June 17 ~ 8:00 pm at the Cobalt Cafe
22047 Sherman Way (Just west of Topanga Cyn.), Canoga Park

The Cobalt opens at 7:30 pm tonight

I probably have read in the San Fernando Valley about a half-dozen times during the past 40 years, and it’s a considerable drive from my current residence at the very southern edge of Los Angeles County, but I’m looking forward to it very much, especially since it appears that several of my MFA students are going to drive up there, too, to take part in the open reading. They have also started a new poetry magazine, American Mustard, which just had its inaugural issue posted on-line. In particular, I am pleased to see that they adopted the flip-the-page approach that Larry Smith’s Caliban magazine has made such good use of as a means of keeping the origins of print culture present in electronic production.

This past Friday Linda and I drove up to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art for a meeting with Susan Power and George Drury Smith to organize the presentation that George and I will make at LACMA this coming Saturday at 2:00 p.m. Here’s the link to LACMA’s announcement:

http://www.lacma.org/event/bill-mohr-and-george-drury-smith

I will be reading poems by Stuart Perkoff, Bruce Boyd, Eileen Ireland, and John Thomas, as well as a few of my own poems. Some of the poems I will be reading will also appear in a forthcoming anthology, Cross-Strokes, which Neeli Cherkovski and I have been back at work on during the past week. Our co-editing has been a process of commitment made intermittent by the multitudinous distractions of our other obligations, but we both now feel a renewed sense of urgency that will no doubt impel us towards completion of this project. Both of us are very grateful for the patience of our contributors.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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