Category Archives: Poetry

Painting and Sculpture Poetry

C. Feign Jr. presents Maja Ruznic and Yevgeniya Mikhailik

Monday, June 9, 2014

C. Feign Jr. presents Maja Ruznic and Yevgeniya Mikhailik

Before heading over to Beyond Baroque yesterday afternoon to take part in a “birthday tribute” reading to Frank O’Hara and Lucille Clifton, Linda and I went to a talk by two young painters at a new gallery, the Bustamante Gill, on La Cienega Blvd. Be forewarned: it is a bit hard to find, even though it’s on the major thoroughfares of Los Angeles. Its second show, featuring Maja Ruznic and Yevgeniya Mikhailik, went up about a week ago.

I had met Maja Ruznic several months ago when she and her boyfriend Josh, who is also an artist, were out for a run on their second day in Los Angeles. They had just moved down from San Francisco in hopes of finding a place to work outside the confines of the limited gallery scene in the Bay Area.

I myself was hardly running. Those days are long gone, but as my brisk morning walk got me within fifty or so yards of the bluff along Ocean Avenue just south of the Long Beach Museum of Art, I saw an exuberant young couple who had paused to tie their shoes and something intangible made me comment on the rare clarity of that morning’s air (Long Beach, on the whole, has some of the most foul air in the nation). Whatever it was they said in response initiated a conversation that soon led to our discovery that we both admired the work of Marie Thibault. Eventually, Linda and I met them at Portfolio for a long conversation and we’ve stayed in touch since then.

Maja Ruznic’s half of the show consists of a dozen paintings, which seem to range in their influences from Alexej von Jawlensky to Eva Hesse. Linda was probably closer to the mark of her affilations; when she mentioned Marlene Dumas, Maja’s face glowed with recognition at the fondness she felt for that kinship being noticed. Maja spoke about how she has allowed herself to work in a manner that is “all intuitive,” a word she added that “I’d never use when I was at the California College of the Arts. She noted that her paintings are meant to be “anti-heroic” and that she was interested in depicting people who are completely overlooked. One way she works on this focus is to “pay attention to hold old people walk.” Indeed, her paintings seem to demarcate with a subtle haunting effervescence the entrapment felt in that forgotten classic by W.H. Auden, “The Unknown Citizen.” In one particularly poignant image, a man of disparate elongations seems pinned within a corrupted, plastic sphere; it is doubtful that a cotton swab of his mouth’s mucous lining would yield DNA much different from Gregor Samsa. One shouldn’t regard this work as only evocative of despair. Ruznic noted that she sees her process as one in which she goes “into a forest, looks for a way out, and the figures are a way out.” The way out would appear to be the willingness to acknowlede the suffering of others. Certainly, the image of a young Jordanian girl in a hospital bed retains its unflinching tenderness in my memory’s screening room a full 24 hours after we left the gallery.

The other artist in the show, Yevgeniya Mikhailik, provides a biographical complement to Ruznic’s journey to the United States from Bosnia. Mikhalik emigrated from the Soviet Union, although she emphasized in her talk that she regards herself as being “nomadic.” Anyone who categorized her life as some kind of exile would be completely off the mark, she insisted. Nevertheless, her status as an “artist from elsewhere” perhaps inevitably led to a question about the possible presence of nostalgia in her images, to which she responded with the reflection that her work derives from “constructed memories,” many of which work on a symbolic level of presence and absence.

In demonstrating the first eruption of solid maturity of her artistic practice, her illustration skills prove to be more adept at supporting her vision than one often encounters in artists with that kind of training. One image, in particular, of a rockpile took the risk of withholding its most important underpinnings from anything but the most close-up view. Only then did I comprehend the extent to which Mikhailik is willing to risk being mistaken rather than compromise her acuity. It is hardly nostalgia that impels her to generate these tightly enmeshed inner buttresses of half-intended drifting coming to rest against more intractable forces. Rather, it is her yearning for a revivified stability that could blossom from a cleansing of selfish motivation that eases her arduous, self-imposed pilgrimage. The next few twists and turns should be very intriguing.

The gallery is located at 2675 S. La Cienega Blvd. It is in the back patio between two buildings that front the street and is not at all visible from the sidewalk. Look for it though, and someday you’ll say one of their first shows in Los Angeles.

 

 

 

Poetry Translation

The Origins of Language

Sunday, June 1, 2014

http://vimeo.com/96123533

Doren Robbins recently sent along a link to a half-hour television program entitled Descendants of the Imagination, produced and directed by his wife, Linda Janakos. This particular program features Stephen Kessler as well as Doren Robbins. The host of the program, Dennis Morton, has a voice with a timbre that mildly echoes Charley Rose and Bill Moyers, and he seems at ease in keeping the conversation moving along between readings of poems.

Morton asks them where they think poetry came from, and Kessler responds by quoting Merwin’s proposition that poetry started when humans acquired the ability to make use of consonants. The problem with Merwin’s conjecture is that it leaves out any sense of motive, either rational or irrational. If language is a form of displacement, it originates in the incredulity of dreams; specifically, the need to form consonants, as a modulating mechanism that could describe nocturnal consciousness, probably reached a crisis point when a woman encountered her dead mother in a dream, which was so palpably real that the only way to convey this knowledge to her companions was an utterance akin to lava pouring from a volcano: the living stuff of earth itself. When it cooled, we had vowels and consonants for the gardens of our languages.

Stephen Kessler’s comments on translation are particularly worth consideration. He argues that it’s a form of “impersonation” that involves a certain level of “forgery.” “I’m tricking the reader into believing it was originally written in English.” I suppose that one test of a translation would be to ask a fluent translator to look at a translated text and then without any reference to the original, translate it back into the original language. How close would the translator come in the reverse current?

At one point, Doren says that “When the cart stops, I am the man who whips the cart and not the ox.” Ah! A reversal that tricks me into believing it was originally thought of just now, for the first time, as indeed it was when he wrote those words. And yet there is something elusively timeless about that metaphor, as if it were the lesson that Job had learned after all of his suffering.

http://vimeo.com/96123533

Books Poetry

“The Anthology Wars” reframed

Saturday, May 31, 2014

I’m back from a four-day trip to Mexico City, during which I spent a fair amount of time talking about poetry with my translators, Jose Luis Rico and Robin Myers. I also had a chance to meet a fair number of young poets and writers, thanks to two poetry readings that they set up for me. I also gave a talk about post-World War II American poetry during which I realized that the first round of the “anthology wars” had a slightly different inflection than I’d previously attributed to it. I’d always thought of the conservative volume as simply being academic, and that the decision to have both England and the United States in the Hall-Pack-Simpson project was simply the alignment of mainstream verse into one phalanx. New Poets of England and America, however, has a slightly more complicated history than is usually attributed to it. The first edition integrated all the poets from both countries into a single table of contents. In a sense, it was an attempt to conflate the cultural capital of England’s long poetic tradition with the empowering affluence of the Unite States. The editors of the second edition of New Poets of England and America decided to split apart the contributors from both countries, as if to indicate that England and the United States should be considered as separate canonical projects, and (on second thought, so to speak) that the relatively recent maturation of the United States into the dominant world power should be acknowledged by its own section in the anthology.

What I had never thought of before is that the equivalent in Mexico between 1955 and 1965 would be first to have an anthology called “New Poets of Spain and Mexico” followed by a more successful rival anthology called simply “The New Mexican Poetry.” I suspect that such a speculative pair of anthologies would have different implications in Mexico, though, than the most famous U.S. entries in the so-called “anthology wars” that began in with the publication of Hall-Pack-Simpson’s and Donald Allen’s collections. For one thing, the editors in Mexico of “New Poets of Spain and Mexico” would probably have known poets who had had to flee Spain after the collapse of the Spanish Republic in the late 1930s. My guess is that such affiliations would have generated a far different genealogy of poetics in this imaginary bi-national anthology in Mexico. This theoretical contrast I am suggesting is built on historical reality: the residential choices made by W.H. Auden and Thom Gunn hardly amount to the same caliber of exile undertaken by Emilo Prados and León Felipe.

The trip to Mexico reinforced my need to begin a long forestalled period of intense reading of poetry outside that published and valorized in the United States. The challenge is to undertake this reading of poems within the critical context of transnational poetry.

 

Ground Level Conditions Poetry

Capital & Main Newsletter; “Complexities”

Monday, May 19, 2014

Linda and I just came home from an anniversary dinner and I found an e-mail from Jessica Goodheart, letting me know that “Complexities” has been officially posted in the “Words of Fire” poetry column she edits for Capital & Main. For those interested in the poem’s provenance, I wrote a rough draft of the poem shortly after arriving at my typesetting job in Century City back in the late 1980s. I had seen the scene depicted about a mile from work.

Here is the link:

http://www.laane.org/capitalandmain/complexities/

According to its site, “Capital and Main is a news website (that) originated at the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy.” Its goals seem remarkably similar to the editorial position of Blue Collar Review, a poetry magazine based in Norfolk, Virginia, which I wholeheartedly recommend to all my readers.

 

 

 

Ground Level Conditions Poetry Teaching

Phoebe MacAdams on Teaching

Friday, May 16, 2014

I first met Phoebe MacAdams after she moved to Los Angeles from Ojai, or at least that’s how she remembers it. I did, in fact, meet Phoebe very briefly in Boulder, Colorado in the mid-1970s, but the “hello” of introduction that occurred before some reading we both found ourselves at was so brief that I can’t fault her for not remembering it. We ran the Gasoline Alley reading series on Melrose Avenue for a couple of years and in 1989 both of us were founding members of the Cahuenga Press poetry collective. Somewhere I have a photograph of all six of us (Harry Northup, Holly Prado, Phoebe MacAdams, Jim Cushing, Cecilia Woloch, and myself) gathered together in front of the side wall of some store near Cahuenga Boulevard. We had met at a restaurant to discuss the launching of this project and when it came time to talk about the name, which we wanted to echo Los Angeles in some way, I thought how the street the restaurant was on would make a perfect allusion: Cahuenga Press. I dropped out after the first two books got produced, but that was due to my own financial situation, and not to any aesthetic disagreements.

Phoebe spend several decades working as a teacher; one of the books that Cahuenga Press published was her year-long journal-meditation on the craft of teaching. She recently wrote me that Susan Suntree made use of her book, Livelihood, and invited Phoebe out to talk to her class of students about the practice of teaching. Phoebe wrote up a set of notes to share with the students and recently sent them to me. With her permission, I enclose them in today’s entry.

THOUGHTS: TEACHING AND WRITING

For Susan Suntree’s students at East Los Angeles College

 Background:

 School has always been a refuge for me. I had a difficult home life, and school was a place where I felt secure. One of my earliest memories is of the library at my small school in New York City, nestled in a big armchair –sitting and reading and feeling safe, surrounded by books.

My feelings about school translated in wanting to do well, which added another level of pleasure. Nothing feels better than doing well and being praised for it. Once that started,  studying became a habit – a good one. It got me out of my house and into college. When I began to think about earning a living, teaching was a natural choice. My stepdad was a teacher and then a principal at Fountain Valley School in Colorado Springs, and one of the most inspiring men I have ever met. He, too, loved teaching. He thought it was a noble endeavor and the best job in the world. We had long talks about it.

I loved teaching.  I taught in a variety of situations – from a small boarding school in Ojai, California, with 100 students to Roosevelt High School with 5000 students. When I started in 1986, there were as many students at Roosevelt as there were people living in Ojai at that time.

I loved teaching for many reasons. I got to talk about various aspects of reading and writing all day – my favorite things to think about; and also, being with kids is good for the soul. It is never boring.

Teaching:

 I like teachers a lot. I found that most teachers are good people. People go into teaching primarily for unselfish reasons. Sure, there are some bitter and burnt out people in the profession, but on the whole, I think teachers have humanity’s best interests in mind. I made it a point to hang out with teachers who loved teaching and were hard working innovators, people who inspired me.

Inspired teachers are what make a good school – not test scores, not computers in every classroom, not State Standards or Common Core Standards – but good teachers who love kids and want to inspire and engage them. The most important decision a principal makes is who he hires. We had a principal at Roosevelt, Mr. Henry Ronquillo, who had a knack for hiring good teachers. He could tell by talking to someone who would work out well. Not every principal has this instinct. I was on a hiring committee at Roosevelt and I know how difficult it is to tell who will be good.

Teaching and Writing:

I am a poet. I am working on my seventh book of poems, and, in 1989, I co-founded a small literary press called Cahuenga Press. There are four of us in the Press: Harry Northup, Holly Prado, Jimm Cushing, and myself. We are about to publish our 22nd book.

Balancing a job and creative work can tricky. One of my poetry heroes is William Carlos Williams, an extraordinary poet and prose writer, who was also a doctor in Rutherford, New Jersey. He had a typewriter (no computers then) on a shelf under his desk that he would pull out to type up poems in between patients. That impressed me.

Very few poets make enough money from their poems to live. It is rare. Most poets teach. Teaching English or literature allows you to think about writing all day. It also gives you time to write. Even in high school teaching, there are long breaks – Christmas, spring and summer – which are times that you can spend writing.

Teaching won’t make you rich, but it does provide enough money. I taught at Roosevelt for 26 years and retired in June of 2011. It is hard work, but because of its secure income, I didn’t have to spend time worrying about money. The lack of anxiety was important for my mental health. It allowed me to relax and therefore, to write more.

Being a Poet and Teaching:

 I consider writing poetry a sacred activity. Here is a poem I wrote about what a poet does. It is called Poet’s Work:

POET’S WORK

This morning the birds

ate most of the black sunflower seeds.

I fill up the feeder,

watch squirrels on grass

look at asparagus fern in garden

and read old poems.

I move from room to room,

think about my mother, my sister.

I sit quietly for a long time

then mail letters and observe the hummingbird.

I am thinking of the Eastern Sierras

and the sweep of mountains up to

the red tailed hawk’s air current glide.

Now I am looking at the yellow Buddha cat

and the bright red minutes of Holly’s clock.

The first time I heard a poem,

the poet fell right off the stool

and I thought:   why yes,

that must be the voice of God.

 

This poem talks about the noodling quality of poetry. The mind wanders – here, there, the bird feeder, letters, the Eastern Sierras, relatives, the swoop of a bird, and then in the last line, a memory of the first time I begin to understand exactly what poetry is. Poetry is a tracking of spirit: keeping track of spirit through the breath and through words. It is a very important job, but it is not a skill that is really marketable. Adding the market, selling spirit – how to do that? It would ruin it, no?

Perhaps it is a good thing that poets can’t market themselves strictly as poets. It is important to keep this activity separate, to keep it in a sacred space.

However, one has to figure out how to have a decent life while maintaining that space – not an easy task. I decided I wanted to do something that mattered to me, that I thought was an important job, and that provided enough money for me to live a relatively comfortable life. Teaching fulfilled all these criteria.

 

Process:

 I tried to write a little at night after papers and preparations were done. I tried to write on the weekends, to get something down on paper. Over vacations I would edit and expand what I written during the semester. Because my time was limited, I didn’t have any time for writers’ block – I just had to keep writing. The discipline of the job helped me. It kept me disciplined in my creative life as well.

For me, having a job in the world is important. Writing is an interior, lonely activity. I spend a lot of time looking at the inside of my mind, and at my computer screen. I can get very isolated. Teaching brought me back to the world and it was very good for me.

Here is a poem about a dream:

POETRY LEADS ME BACK

I sit in my red chair,

a quiet afternoon where

the poems of Frank O’Hara

are a lyrical bell.

 

I think of my room at school,

full of students, posters,

rubber bands and paper clips,

 

but this is a moment of poetry.

My neighbor is salsa dancing in her driveway.

I sit under my quilt and play hooky,

getting well, leaving my students with a substitute.

 

In my dream last night I was in a canoe,

rowing toward the light on a still lake.

I paddled first on one side,

then the other.

 

It is always the same:

the world leads me away,

poetry leads me back.

 

In my dream, I am rowing across a lake on a beautiful moonlit night, rowing towards the light. I row first on one side, then the other. If I row only on one side, the boat swerves. When I woke up, the meaning of this dream was clear. I need both sides of my life – my work life in the world, and my interior life as a poet. Only with both of these do I keep going toward the light.

Livelihood:

This book is about teaching. I asked myself – what is teaching anyway? What is it I do every day? I wanted to explore that. I decided to keep a poetry journal for a year, to write a poem every day about what I was doing that day during the 2001-2002 school year.  I kept it up, writing most days. I love the poetry journal form. If I don’t know where I am going next in my writing, I revert to it, sit down every day and write a poem as a journal entry. It is a wonderful form. Not all of the pieces are great poems, of course, but it is a wonderful way to track oneself. Because it is a poem and not a prose journal, it is an elevated kind of writing. Poems do that – elevate language – and it has a more significant tone than a regular journal. I recommend this form.

I had a lot of journal entries over the course of the year. I chose the ones I liked the best to include in the third section of the book. It covers all kinds of things that go on in a school – the classroom, teachers, teacher meetings, the insane goings on of LAUSD; it is all there.

At the end of the year, I had a book which tracked teaching for a year, but

I discovered that I still could not really explain exactly what teaching is! Teaching is a process of learning that you do together with your students, a dialogue. It is not something that you can exactly define.  I learned as much as my students did. I realized that you are teaching content, but you are also teaching yourself. You are teaching who you are and you are teaching your life. That is one reason why teachers can’t be replaced by a computer screen. It is just not the same thing. As a teacher you bring life to your curriculum – your life! I think that is what makes your teaching significant, what makes it matter. As you examine literature, you are also examining your life and helping your students examine their lives.

It is an honor to be part of this worthwhile occupation.

Phoebe MacAdams

April 18, 2014

 

 

 

 

 

 

Books Ground Level Conditions Poetry

Meeting Charles Hood at the Arroyo Seco Library

Sunday evening, May 11, 2014

Today I drove down to San Diego to see my mother, who is feeling much better than at the beginning of the fall semester. The time she spent with my niece in Michigan this winter somehow got her back on track. She reported that she was snow-bound most of the time, so I worried when I talked to her on the phone that she was not getting sufficient time out of the house to interact with people. If it was a kind of hibernation, however, as Michigan endured the harshest winter in 40 years, then she has found some new measure of vigor upon her return to San Diego. She’s eating better and is much more vigilant about making use of two canes instead of trying to get back with one.

I had hoped to write an entry before I left, but I woke up too late to get anything keyboarded; and, unfortunately, the traffic back was very slow between northern San Diego County and San Clemente. As such, the day is almost over and I am rather tired from the drive, at the end of which I unpacked my car with several boxes of books that had been stored at my mother’s place for the past decade. One of the biggest surprises was finding a box of Joseph Hansen’s One Foot in the Boat.  Only 29 libraries are listed on the World Cat as having a copy, so I hope to get some of these copies placed in a few other libraries.

Yesterday Suzanne Lummis hosted a follow-up reading at the Arroyo Seco Library for the prize-winners of the Highland Park poetry-in-the-windows exhibition. A fellow almost as tall as Ed Skoog introduced himself to me as Charles Hood, and said that he had missed meeting me during the walk-around on Figueroa a couple weeks ago. He mentioned that he had studied The Streets Inside, an anthology of Los Angeles poets I edited in 1978, “like a Bible” back when he was an undergraduate at UC Irvine, where he was friends with my best friend in Texas, Kevin McNamara. Charles is the first person to mention The Streets Inside to me in many years and I confess that he immediately endeared himself to me with that citation. As flawed as that anthology is, it still represented a ferocious amount of energy being devoted to poetry in a city rarely recognized for its activity in that art form. To have someone such as Charles Hood mention my anthology as an inspiring influence makes me proud once again of the all the poets back then who entrusted me with their work. What impressed me most, I suppose, is that the overwhelming majority of people I meet at L.A. readings barely remember “Poetry Loves Poetry,” which Charles mentioned that he also had a copy of on his shelf next to The Streets Inside. I had never heard him read before and it was pleasure to hear his brief outpouring of thoughtfully buoyant poems. I look forward to hearing more of them soon.

Birding Ground Level Conditions Poetry

Memories of the western tanager

Saturday, May 10, 2014

When I turned 20 years old in late October of 1967, I was living in Imperial Beach, California and beginning my first faltering attempts at writing poetry in classes taught by Glover Davis at San Diego State. I caught a ride to school from a young woman named Cindi, who was engaged to a forest ranger. On weekends, there was little to do in Imperial Beach but read poetry and plays. One afternoon in the winter months of 1968, I rode a bicycle along some dirt roads that took me into the fields past the Edgars’ cow farm. I looked over at a field one point and stopped pedaling. Several dozen birds that I was later to identify as western tanagers were on the ground in the field. I had never seen such a beautiful bird, and never again saw them until a few years ago I stopped at a rest stop halfway down to San Diego. This time there were fewer than twenty of them, but I’m quite certain that the birds I saw were western tanagers. Sometimes a vision return to confirm that it was not merely yearning unfulfilled.

I was reading the interview with Jim Krusoe in “RipRap” magazine yesterday. He said he believed that writers are divided into questioner and answerers. I suppose I am a questioner who has learned that God will not listen to any of my questions until I mistakenly believe with all my heart that I have found the answer to more than one of them. The irony, of course, will be that — by sheer, predestined chance — part of my answer will be correct; the problem is that there’s no way I can ever knew which part that is.

 

 

Books Ground Level Conditions Poetry

The Translation Crisis in American Poetry

Wednesday, May 7, 2014

Recollections of the AWP in Seattle: The Translation Crisis

I spent most of my time at my first AWP convention (in late February) at the book fair, where I had several conversations with small press book editors and publishers that focused on the issue of translation. At the Copper Canyon booth, for instance, I picked up a copy of a large volume of Norman Dubie’s poetry. “Has he had a stand-alone volume of poetry published in translation in another country?” I asked his publisher. “Not that I know of. That would be a rarity.”

That seemed to be the general sentiment. The folks at Tupelo Press, which has published a gross of titles, said that they were not aware of any author who had a book published in another country. I asked them to nominate someone who would be worthy of the honor. The editor suggested that Jeffrey Harrison deserved serious consideration. I bought a copy of Mr. Harrison’s latest book, which showed every symptom of being poetry likely to be found in the New Yorker. I can’t say that I would recommend it to the editors of Words without Borders, which according to its website has published writing from over a hundred languages. If this is the best that Tupelo Press can come up with as work that would justify the effort required to translate poetry, then the editors need to start reading beyond the fashion show of current canonical assemblies of American poetry.

The basic question is: Why is so little poetry written in the United States translated into other languages? Or at least, why is so little poetry endorsed by the National Endowment for the Arts translated into other languages? At this point, Copper Canyon has received over a hundred thousand dollars from the NEA. It defies literary credibility to believe that that not a single poet they’ve published who was born after 1940 has had a book of their poems published in another language. And yet that appears to be the case. I’m afraid that the editor of Copper Canyon had not a clue that this was something to be aspired to, and that a decision about whether to publish a writer should be based, at least in part, on whether someone in another language would find the poems worth translating. Instead, the provincial taste of monolingual cunning and homogenous exile within the academy seem to marginalize the visibility deserved by writers whose work is worthy of being translated. Two Los Angeles poets whose writing stands out in that regard are Anthony Seidman and Cecilia Woloch, both of whom merit much more attention for work that meets the ultimate challenge of a poem’s transmissible placement. Translation is a displacement, in which the connotations of the elusively literal (in being closely listened to) become the denotations of tantalizing metaphors, nestled in the sway and tug of replication.

 

 

 

 

 

Poetry

Poetry at CSU Monterey Bay, 2015

CSU Monterey Bay Summer Arts Poetry Class (2015)

Sunday, May 4, 2015

I’m happy to report that I have been given permission to organize a poetry class for the summer arts program at CSU Monterey Bay in the summer of 2015 and that Cecilia Woloch has accepted my invitation to be the primary artist-in-residence. The class will feature workshops and readings by a number of nationally known poets and promises to be even better than the Idyllwild Poetry Festival, which Cecilia was the guiding light for close to a decade. The class will take place from July 13 to July 26 (2015).

Although the summer classes are meant to provide a unique artistic experience for CSU students, they are open to enrollment by anyone of any age. If you are interested in taking a look at this year’s course offerings, here is the link:

http://blogs.calstate.edu/summerarts

The news that this class has been approved as part of the CSUMB’s summer arts curriculum is especially gratifying to me because Cecilia Woloch is willing to serve as the lead artist-in-residence for the full two weeks that the class will be in session. For both of us, the chance to work together on a project like this is the culmination of years of paying dues. Thirty odd years ago, I was working for a pittance for the California Arts Council as an Artist-in-Residence at various schools in the San Gabriel Valley. The classes in poetry I taught to elementary school students as a CAC artist were an outgrowth of a program called California Poets in the Schools, an organization based in San Francisco which I first worked with in 1974. By the early 1980s, I had worked in enough schools that I was regarded as a veteran to whom younger poets turned for advice about how to get young students to play with language and think in a more metaphorical manner. One of the poets I shared writing exercises with was a young poet from Kentucky named Cecilia Woloch. She impressed me immediately as one of the most promising poets to come out of the tail end of the baby boom generation. She has more than fulfilled that early, seething potential and has gone on to become one of the best, most inspiring teachers of poetry in the country. It is in large part because I saw first-hand what she accomplished as the guiding light of the Idyllwild Poetry Festival for many years that I want her as my primary featured artist-in-residence.

For those unfamiliar with Cecilia’s poetry and writing, here are some links that will give you an initial introduction.

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/cecilia-woloch

http://ceciliawoloch.squarespace.com/

 

 

 

 

 

 

Books Poetry

The poetry of Maw Shein Win

Monday, April 28, 2014

In the late 1980s, Phoebe MacAdams and I ran a poetry reading series, at the Gasoline Alley Coffee House on Melrose, that we inherited from its founder, Harry Northup. One of the poets who read in that series was Tim Donnelly, who seemed to disappear sometime in the early 1990s. The attrition rate for aspiring rates has not gone down in my lifetime, and I figured that he had stopped writing. At the Long Beach Poetry Festival in the Fall, 2012, however, I found myself talking with a member of the audience on the sidewalk outside the venue and he introduced himself as Tim Donnelly, and told me that he had been living in San Francisco for a number of years. I asked him to send me some poems for Neeli Cherkovski and me to consider for Cross-Strokes, an anthology-in-progress. In the note that accompanied his poems, Tim said, “There was a time I studied Poetry Loves Poetry like a writing manual.” It was gratifying to learn that a young poet had made use of my anthology, which was published back in 1985, as a means of developing his poetics. Tim furthermore impressed me by showing his generosity towards other poets. In sending along his poems via e-mail, he also cc’d his friend, Maw Shein Win, “an awesome poet who fits the LA/Bay Area profile of your project.” I say that Tim was generous in that he was taking a risk by passing along information to a potential contributor to the anthology. For all he knew, we might end up having to decide between his friend and him for the final spot in the table of contents. I don’t think this fear ever occurred to him. What mattered to Tim, I would guess, is that a poet he admired would have a chance to get her work published.

Maw Win did write, and it turned out that she, too, was a fan of PLP. “Like Tim, “Poetry Loves Poetry” was such an influential collection for me and included many poet friends and teachers while I lived and worked in Southern California. (I studied Creative Writing at CSULB, and Gerry Locklin was one of my instructors.)”

Neeli and I are finally beginning to assemble the final draft of this anthology and in doing so, some good news about one of our contributors has arrived. Maw Shein Win is one of three winners of the Arkadii Dragomoshenko Prize for the Summer Literary Seminars program. In addition to many other publications, you can find very recent examples of her writing on-line at the Zocalo Public Square:

*new poems on cinematic distance:

http://www.zocalopublicsquare.org/2014/03/28/cinematic-distance-5-films/chronicles/poetry/

*the wheelchair:

http://www.zocalopublicsquare.org/2014/04/25/the-wheelchair/chronicles/poetry/

 

Her latest poetry chapbook, Ruins of a glittering palace can be accessed on-line, too:

https://poetrychapbooks.omeka.net/items/browse/tag/Mark+Dutcher