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Beyond Baroque in 1998: The 30th Anniversary Rededication Candlelight Walk (Photographs)

August 25, 2018 – 7:46 pm

Beyond Baroque in 1998

Twenty years ago, Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Center in Venice, California celebrated its 30th anniversary. Founded in a storefront on West Washington Blvd. by George Drury Smith as the headquarters for his nascent publishing project, Beyond Baroque magazine, the project had spawned a weekly poetry workshop, free and open to the public, that still meets on Wednesday evening, a reading series that has featured some of the most famous poets in the United States (Philip Levine, Mark Strand, John Ashbery, Amy Gerstler) as well as fiction writers, such as Charles Baxter. Under the direction of Alexandra Garrett, Beyond Baroque cultivated a superb library of small press publications, and it still operates a bookstore that can provide any young writer with a chance to peruse books not easily found at Barnes and Noble.

Beyond Baroque will be celebrating its 50th anniversary on November 10th with an extraordinary evening of featured artists, but before I write in this blog about this upcoming event, I first want to share with you some photographs I took of the evening on which poets recommitted themselves to this project. The president and artistic director of Beyond Baroque at that time, Fred Dewey, and I had come up with the idea of holding a brief pilgrimage to mark the 30th anniversary, and so we gathered at the Old Venice City Hall, lit some candles and walked up to West Washington, which now goes by the name of Abbott Kinney.

CandleWalk - BB30

The storefront in which Beyond Baroque operated was the first floor of one of the taller buildings on West Washington. The lot to the south was empty and used only in a minimal manner as a boat building and repair lot; it is occupied by a popular specialty. restaurant, Lemonade. This first picture focuses on George Drury Smith, and it appears that he is gazing offstage at road taken, and retaken, mulling over the changes on Venice Blvd. as we made the 12 minute walk. Just over his shoulder is Harry Northup, and he is facing Frances Dean Smith, one of the first members of the Wednesday night poetry workshop, founded by John Harris and Joseph Hansen.

GDS - BB - 30

This next photograph features John Harris, wearing a blue cap; he is obviously enjoying the company of Barry Simons, who gave several memorable readings at The Bridge on the other side of town in the early 1970s; since Frances Dean Smith could hardly afford the services of a babysitter in the early to mid-1960s, she often brought her daughter, Marina Bukowski, to this very room to listen to poets who now regard Ellyn Maybe (dark hair, blue pullover), the only one of this quartet still alive, as a writer who has truly honored their legacy with her vivacious poetry.

Haris - FDS - BB30

Holly Prado and Harry Northup, who met as a result of Harry reading FEASTS, the first major success I had with Momentum Press in the 1970s, are talking with George Drury Smith in the next photograph.

Holly - Harry - GDS - BB30

Ellyn and Frances again:

Ellyn - FSM -- BB30

John Thomas and Philomene Long drove from the Old Venice City Hall to the original site. John Thomas’s eponymous first book of poem had an extraordinary influence on the first generation of Beyond Baroque workshop poets.

John - Philomene - BB30

David James, on the far left, read his poems on a Friday evening in 1974 with me as the other featured poet. It must be said that David’s poems were far better received than mine were, as they should have been Although he eventually concentrated on film criticism, his poems are still a crucial contribution to my second anthology, “Poetry Loves Poetry” (1985).

David James - BB30

And now for some “cameo” photographs of other poets in attendance:

BB - 30 - CAMEO-1

BB - 30 - CAMEO2

BB -30 - CAMEO3

(All photographs (c) copyright Bill Mohr. Permission required to reproduce or disseminate these photographs in a form or medium.)

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Poetry Small Press Publishing

Blue Collar Review – Vol. 21, Issue 3 — Gil Fagiani (in memoriam)

July 21, 2018 – 10:07 am

Saturday, July 21, 2018

I first heard of Blue Collar Review when I was living in Lynbrook, New York, between 2004 and 2006, and using a combination of car, train, and bus to get to teaching jobs in Garden City (Nassau Community College), Queens (St. John’s University), and New Jersey (Rutgers). It was an exhausting two years of apprenticeship as a college teacher, and I had little time to write my own poetry or to keep up with literary magazines that had emerged in the previous decade. One of the few magazines that caught my attention then for its forthright political advocacy was Blue Collar Review, a self-described “Journal of Progressive Working Class Literature.” Al Markowitz and Mary Franke are the primary editors, and they can be reached at Partisan Press, P.O. Box 11417, Norfolk, VA 23517.

The latest issue (Spring, 2018; Vol. 21, Issue 3) arrived in the mail the other day. I don’t always have a chance to read every poem in every issue, but I do try to make time for the editorial essay that opens every issue. Al Markowitz and Mary Franke address the reader in a manner that is far more radical than the analysis proposed by Bernie Sanders, but they do so without being strident. Indeed, while BLUE COLLAR REVIEW has an unabashedly polemical poetics, the poems often surpass the kind of caricatures of workers and bosses that tend to dominate political poetry. In this issue, I particularly appreciated “Ten Dollars and Forty-two Cents” By Matthew J. Spireng; German Piedranhita’s “Haiku” and “Choice?”; John MacLean’s “Gypsum Mill”; “I Want to the People’s Pharmacy” by Mark Franke; “The Great American Novel” By E.P. Fisher; J.C. Alfier’s “Tishomingo Landscape”; Ben Prostine’s “All the Food on the Table”; and “Baling Hay” by John Robinson. I am grateful to the editors for accepting one of my poems, “Life’s Study,” to accompany these poems to their readers.

If you know that any task — paid or unpaid — is not without a political context, subscribe: $20.00 for four issues a year. It’s more than worth it to hear the meaning of labor tested out in the actual practice of the work of words.

Post-Script:
Two-thirds of the way through the issue, a small “In Memoriam” box notes the death of Gil Fagiani, “Worker-Poet * Comrade.” I attach the following links for those who might be curious about his life and poetry. In particular, I would recommend Lynn McGee’s very fine review, in Big City Lit, of Fagiani’s Serfs of Psychiatry.

http://www.bigcitylit.com/fall2012/reviews/reviews.php?page=mcgee

https://brooklynrail.org/2017/12/books/Gil-Fagianis-Logos

https://brooklynrail.org/2017/12/books/Gil-Fagianis-Logos

https://brooklynrail.org/2017/12/books/Gil-Fagianis-Logos

Goodbye to Poet Gil Fagiani

https://www.eco-poetry.org/gil-fagiani.html

https://2leafpress.org/online/team/gil-fagiani/

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Poetry Small Press Publishing

“The West Coast as a Literary Capital”

July 2, 2018 – 8:55 am

Monday, July 2, 2018

“The West Coast as a Literary Capital: Independent Publishers as a Contumacious Canon of Underground Poetry” — William Mohr

La côte Ouest comme capitale littéraire : les éditeurs indépendants, vecteurs d’un canon irrévérent de la poésie ‘underground’

La costa Oeste como capital literaria: los editores independientes, agentes de un canon irreverente de la poesía ‘underground’

The revised paper I gave at a conference in Dijon, France has just been published in a trilingual (French, Spanish, and English) magazine published on-line in France. The issue contains a total of a dozen articles which were all originally presented at the conference. In addition to the superb introduction by the editors, Fiona McMahon et Paul-Henri Giraud, I would especially recommend the following articles:

Kamila Benayada
“Redefining Modernism: Stuart Davis’s Cold War Champion series”

Anna Aublet
“Bill & Carlos : les Amériques de William Carlos Williams”

Isabelle Pouzet
“Arts visuels et stridentisme dans la revue mexicaine Irradiador (1923)”

Marcos Rico Domínguez
“L’échec et la splendeur : les allégories du baroque moderne dans l’œuvre d’Octavio Paz”

François Hugonnier
“Reassessing Modernisms in Light of Jerome Rothenberg’s Work”

Smaro Kamboureli
“Opera in the Arctic: Knud Rasmussen, Inside and Outside Modernity”

https://journals.openedition.org/ideas/2271

http://www.institutdesameriques.fr/fr/article/revue-ideas-modernites-dans-les-ameriques-des-avant-gardes-aujourdhui

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“Mondo Deco” — A Panel on THE QUICK at BB

June 14, 2018 – 8:51 am

Thursday, June 14, 2018

“Mondo Deco” — A Panel on THE QUICK at Beyond Baroque

Dennis Cooper’s Little Caesar magazine was one of the best literary magazines published in the 1970s, although categorizing it as a “literary” magazine minimizes its cultural contribution. Cooper wanted poetry to be read with the same pleasure and admiration as the best of pop music, but he also wanted poets to listen to pop music with the same level of appreciation that they had for Frank O’Hara. Little Caesar did not keep its affections for pop music in its back pages. A full frontal shot of Iggy Pop stands out as one of its issues’ classic covers.

Tonight, at Beyond Baroque, there will be a panel discussion devoted to The Quick, one of the bands that Dennis Cooper incisively championed. The Quick only performed for about three years in the mid-1970s, and they seem to have had the bad luck of emerging just before the lassitude of the post-1960s cultural success of pop music collided with the Punk movement. If any account of an artistic period almost always oversimplifies things (and the statement I just made is a prime example), then it is the inexplicable failure of gifted artists to attain proportionate recognition that provokes reassessments of those accounts. While tonight’s panel, which features the main songwriter for The Quick, Steve Hufsteter, along with Lisa Fancher, the founder of Frontier Records, will no doubt talk about the inability of the band to break through the stultified filters of the music industry at that time, I would hope that the conversation would devote itself to a mood of celebration.

The Quick’s first and only album, Mondo Deco, was far from a commercial success, but it was not forgotten by its devoted listeners. It is finally being re-released over 40 years after its first appearance, in a version that includes a second album’s worth of additional songs that were subsequently recorded before the band broke up. I hope the success of the panel tonight, which has added a 10 p.m. follow-up to its sold-out 8 p.m. presentation, helps spread the word about some of the music that fascinated the youthful insurgency of poetry in Los Angeles in the 1970s.

I wish I could attend this event, but I am teaching English 474/574 in the first summer session at CSULB, and it meets in the evenings on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

For further background information:

http://www.laweekly.com/music/best-of-la-music-rock-and-metal-bands-venues-a-video-and-a-record-store-9555978

http://www.laweekly.com/music/power-pop-icons-the-quick-finally-find-heaven-after-decades-in-rock-and-roll-purgatory-9565219

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YSo98Iyxh94

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The Jackson Wheeler Poetry Reading Report

March 30, 2018 – 9:10 am

Friday, March 30, 2018

French Concrete One

Linda and I drove up to the Carnegie Arr Museum in Oxnard, California this past weekend for the reading with Vincent Mowry, a poet from Ojai who deserves to be much better known. The plan for the return trip was to stop by Linda’s sister house and relieve her of her care for Linda’s mother for a couple of days.

The reading went better than I ever could have expected. Almost 40 people showed up, which is over two dozen more than usually show up for readings in Los Angeles. I was especially grateful that several poets I knew as a youth showed up: Ricardo Means-Ybarra, Florence Weinberger, ellen, as well as their painter friend, Annie. The reading started with some earnest, intriguing work by a young poet, Sarah Krashefski, and then Marsha de la O introduced me with some very kind remarks.

I led off with “Big Band, Slow Dance,” and followed with “Why the Heart Does Not Develop Cancer”; I then read “The Eviction,” “Wrinkles,” “In the Ocean of Nothingness,” an untitled haiku that was recently published in Hummingbird, and a large section of “Scorpio in Transit,” which appeared in KYSO.

Vincent Mowry read several very fine poems, including one exquite poem that almost eerily served as a parallel vision to one of the poems I had read in the first half of the reading. I have almost never been combined with another poet in a reading whose work I don’t know ahead of time and found that we had much in common; somehow, though, it turned out that Vincent’s poetry had more in common with mine that either of us could ever have expected. His poem about a dream of swimming in the ocean took on the bleakness of Dickinson’s “without even a report of land / To justify despair” and broke through to another realm of vision, closer to that occasion she describes as being a vision of “morning’s nest.” Mowry’s poem about that vision was one of the best I have heard in recent years.

After the reading, neither Vincent nor I had any books for sale, so we mingled with the audience. The museum, though, made copies of Was I Asleep: New and Selected Poems by Jackson Wheeler available for purchase. The reading series is named in his honor, and he deserves it. Marsha read an extraordinary poem that Wheeler wrote about a visitation by his dead father, a World War II veteran, to his bedroom the night before leaving his Appalachian hometown. It’s as deeply moving and poignant as anything in Winesburg, Ohio. In other words, a classic poem. I have been reading Wheeler’s book since I returned, and certainly hope to review it by this summer.

By chance, in Oxnard the next morning, we happened to meet one of Linda’s oldest friend, Vicki, who was having breakfast with her companion, who turned out to a manager for a concrete delivery company. I told him that I had always liked those trucks and like many very young boys thought about driving one of them when I grew up. I mentioned to him that such a truck had recently been in my neighborhood to pour concrete for a roundabout at the intersection where we live, and I had taken photographs of its massive cylinder. When I showed him the photographs, he said, “That’s my company,” which turns out to be owned by a French family. In fact, he explained, the three dots inside the triangle represent the three generations of the family’s commitment to the company.

As Darwin pointed out, the success of any individual in an evolutionary scheme can be gauged by whether its offspring have offspring. It’s as true in poetry as it is in concrete. Here is to the names of the poets I have invoked in my lifetime of work being written in concrete along with their solemnly joyful affirmations of our shared journey.

Once again, thanks to Marsha and Phil for being kind enough to include me in this series.

French Concrete Two

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A Reading to Honor the Poetry of Margaret Tynes Fairley

March 17, 2018 – 10:59 am

Saturday, March 18, 2018

The Years Wear The Seasons - BLOG

A number of years ago, one of the poets I most admire, Robert Mezey, worked assiduously to get the poems of Virginia Hamilton Adair into wider circulation. Ants on the Melon, Adair’s debut collection, was published in 1996, when she was 83 years old.

The poet and editor Bambi Here, whose imprint is Bambaz Press, has just published a book worthy to be set alongside Adair’s volume. The Year Wears the Seasons, by Margaret Tynes Fairley (1902-1986) is a collection of poems that contains some of the most exquisite lyrical poems to have been written in the 20th century. In drawing upon the metrical traditions of English poetry, Fairley makes it look easy to write in this manner. What impresses me the most, in fact, is how Fairley could be said to ride her lines like a jockey who trusts her mount. Her touch on the reins is light, but precise.

There is indeed a tendency, especially on the part of inexperienced readers, to tense up when they hear the word “prosody.” Indeed, it is a word that can strike fear all too quickly into even experienced readers, as if the traditional use of meter transformed a reader into astronaut being dared to double-down on Hopkins’s sprung rhythm, and that some black hole of spondaic immersion hunches on its throne at the edge of a galaxy, waiting to pull you into its inescapable gravity.

Relax! Fairley has no desire to have you do anything other than begin to appreciate your own inner rhythms.

“The whole wide orchestra of earth gives sound
To each who tunes his fiddle simply
On his holy ground.”
(“Why Should We Seek to Do it All”)

No doubt this reassurance will not suffice, and there will be readers who first start reading Kay Ryan or Marilyn Hacker in hopes of making their prosodic muscles loose and nimble enough again to savor the swirl of Fairley’s dancing syllables. If you truly feel that ill at ease, however, I am not sure that any poet could accommodate your anxiety. At that point, I can only recommend that you go back to the best of Thomas Hardy or renew your acquaintance with that forgotten classic of English poetry, “The Listeners,” by Walter de la Mare.

For those who feel at home in reading a poet with subtle metrical dexterity that turns away all pretense about its use, however, then Fairley’s book has some memorable poems to share with you immediately: “The Question”; “Come look –“; and “Bodies Touch.” In particular, I would like to praise Fairley’s “Although Unasked,” which is a poem that deserves to be set aside the minor masterpiece of Janet Lewis’s marvelous “Baby Goat.” Rarely does metrical nuance embrace a set of images with so much forthright tenderness.

Only the new=born calf
Is real and intimate as hand.
He couldn’t wait for warmer days.
This was his hour, he learned to stand,
When other creatures shivered in some hole.
He had no time or chance to know
If there was room or even shelter from the cold.
The star that brands his knobby head
Is clear and soft and shining white;
Although, unasked, he came to birth
On this the coldest winter night.

On Sunday, March 19, starting at 12:30 p.m., Beyond Baroque will host a reading to celebrate the publication of The Year Wears the Seasons. Along with members of Fairley’s family, both Alexis Rhone Fancher and I plan on being there to read a few of her poems. We hope you can join us.

Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Center
681 Venice Blvd.
Venice, CA 90291

Websignature - two

— Bill Mohr

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Poetry Small Press Publishing

“There weren’t a lot of poets back then”: A Valentine for Our Muse

February 14, 2018 – 9:30 am

Wednesday, February 14, 2018

Holly Prado Northup and Harry Northup sent me a link to an interview done with them by Aram Saroyan on the “Poet’s Cafe” show on KPFK. As I listened to it, one of the comments made by Aram Saroyan confirmed what many of us who have been working as poets for a half-century remember as being the case: “There weren’t that many poets back then.”

I don’t think it’s the case that there were only a few hundred poets in the United States back in the late 1940s, as Ron Silliman more than once suggested in his blog; nor do I think that a full census of poets in the mid- to late 1960s would have resulted in a tally only slightly over 2,000. But it is the case that poetry was not a career option between 1960 and 1975, as it appears to be now, for those born since that period. “Baby boomers” born between 1945 and 1955 who found themselves turning 20 years old and proclaiming to one and all that they had decided to commit their lives to poetry were individuals for whom life was so haphazard that nothing else could establish some inner equilibrium.

Yes, I know it will seem like sentimental nostalgia, but I preferred it the old way. And once again, I send the muse who has returned our devotion with her unceasing succor a valentine of profound appreciation.

To hear the interview:

https://www.podomatic.com/podcasts/poetscafe/episodes/2018-02-02T21_58_36-08_00

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Best U.S. Poetry Books of this Decade (A List in Progress)

January 5, 2018 – 3:39 pm

Friday, January 5, 2018 (updated, Saturday, January 6, 2018) (Updated: January 10, 2018)

Lid Pan - Two

I recently took a look at some lists of poets and their books that were being recommended as worthy of my attention. Well, not just recommended, but in some cases configured in such a manner as to be made “mandatory.” Apparently, Louise Gluck and Jorie Graham each have their advocates as being the “greatest” American living poets. Given a choice of walking three blocks and hearing them read, and staying home to read one of the following books, I’ll be staying home.

I doubt very many people will be familiar with all these books, but I hope the ones you have read will encourage you to investigate the unknown titles. In fact, I also hope that the absence of some well-known poets will underline the contrast that the poets in this list provide to the fashion show of American poetry. The list will top itself off around 100 titles within the next two years.

And, I do have to confess (a week after first posting this) to having failed to offer a disclaimer. Unlike most people who engage in some form of cultural critique, I once was a publisher and editor of an independent press (Momentum Press 1974-1888). In the course of that work, I published the poetry of some of the writers listed below in either my magazine, in one of my anthologies, or as a chapbook or book. I believe that I can still be objective about ranking their work. On the other hand, if you use that excuse not to investigate at least some of the poets whose work you are unfamiliar with, I am not the only reader of contemporary poetry who will doubt your sincerity in making yourself more imaginatively literate.

I Am Flying into Myself: Selected Poems – by Bill Knott (edited by Thomas Lux) (Farrar, Strauss, Giroux, 2017) – NOTE: My choice for the best book of the year. All genres.

Imperfect Pastorals — Gail Wronsky What Books, 2017

Calligraphy / Typewriters: The Selected Poems of Larry Eigner, edited by Curtis Faville and Robert Grenier (University of Alabama Press, 2017)

So Where Are We? — Lawrence Joseph (FSG, 2017)

The Trumpiad — Cody Walker (Waywiser Press, 2017)

Waiting for the Light — Alicia Ostriker University of Pittsburgh Press, 2017

Enter Here — Alexis Rhone Fancher (KYSO Flash, 2017)

The Stars of Earth: New and Selected Poems — Emily Grosholz (Able Muse Press/Word Galaxy, 2017)

Whereas — Layli Longsoldier (Graywolf Press. 2017)

I Will Not Be A Butcher For The Wealthy — Anthony Seidman (Eyewear Publishing, 2017)

Moonglow á Go-Go: New and Selected Poems — Joan Jobe Smith (NYQ Books, 2017)

Quickening Fields – Pattiann Rogers (Penguin Books, 2017)

Star Journal — Christopher Buckley (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2017)

Thousand Star Hotel — Bao Phi (Coffeehouse Press. 2017)

The Darkening Trapeze — Larry Levis, edited by David St. John (Graywolf, 2016)
NOTE: One of the extraordinary collections of the decade. A must-read.

Psychosis in the Produce Department — Laurel Ann Bogen (Red Hen Press, 2016)

Olio – Tyehimba Jess (Wave, 2016)

Questions of Poetics: Language Writing and Consequences — Barrett Watten (University of Iowa Press, 2016)
(NOTE: This book should be read simultaneously with any book on this list that you choose to sit down or stretch out with.)

Squander – Elena Karina Byrne (Omnidawn, 2016)

Porridge — Richard Garcia (Press 53, 2016)

Night Sky with Exit Wounds – Ocean Vuong (Copper Canyon, 2016)

Last Train to the Missing Planet — Kim Dower (Red Hen Press, 2016)

Pacific Standard Time: New & Selected Poems — Kevin Opstedal (Brooklyn, NY: Ugly Duckling Presse; 2016)

Wide Road to the Edge of the World — Jack Grapes (Bombshelter Press, 2016; Second Edition, 2017)

The City Keeps: Selected and New Poems 1966-2014 — John Godfrey — 2016

Border Music — Paul Vangelisti (Talisman House, 2016)

The Age of Reasons: Uncollected Poems 1969-1982 — Ted Greenwald; edited by Miles Champion (Wesleyan University Press, 2016)

The Couple Who Fell to Earth — Michelle Bitting. (C&R Press, 2016).

Partly: New & Selected Poems 2001-2015 — Rae Armantrout (Wesleyan University Press, 2016)

Sober Cooking — Lynn McGee (Spuyen Duyvil Press, 2016)

The Missing Museum — Amy King (Tarpaulin Sky, 2016)

A Sleepless Man Sits Up in Bed — Anthony Seidman (Eyewear Publishing. 2016)

In the Empire of the Air: The Poems of Donald Britton — Donald Britton (Nightboat Books, 2016)

Ask Me about My Poetry — Julien Poirier (City Lights, 2016)

The Swimmer — John Koethe (FSG, 2016)

Antidote for Night — Marsha de la O (Boa Editions, 2015)

The Official Language of Yes — Scott Wannberg (Perceval Press, 2015)

What Snakes Want — Kita Shantiris (Mayapple Press, 2015)

Sea-Level Nerve (Book Two) (Prose Poems) — James Grabill (LeGrande, Oregon: Wordcraft, 2015)

The Yellow Door — Amy Uyematsu (Red Hen, 2015)

How to Be Drawn — Terrance Hayes (Penguin, 2015)

As Luck Would Have It — Mark Weiss (Shearsman Books, 2015)

The Empty Form Goes All the Way to Heaven — Brian Teare (Ahsahta Press, 2015)

Earth — Cecilia Woloch (Two Sylvias Press, 2015)

Scattered at Sea — Amy Gerstler (Penguin, 2015)

The Chronicles — Ramon Garcia (What Books, 2015)

All You Ask For Is Longing: New & Selected Poems — Sean Thomas Dougherty (Boa Editions, 2014)

Conraband of Hoopoe — Ewa Chrusciel (Omnidawn, 2014)

Against Conceptual Poetry — Ron Silliman (Counterpath Press, 2014)

Panic Cure: Poetry from Spain for the 21st Century Forrest Gander, Editor & Translator (Otis Books/ Seismicity Editions, 2014)

The Chair — Richard Garcia (Boa Editions, 2014)

The Other Odyssey – Richard Garcia (Dream Horse Press, 2014)

Messenger to the Stars: A Luis Omar Salinas (New Selected Poems & Reader), edited by Christopher Buckley and Jon Veinburg. (Tebot Bach, 2014)

Open 24 Hours — Suzanne Lummis (Lynx House Press, 2014)

Towards the Primeval Lightning Field — Will Alexander (Litmus Press, 2014)

Like a Beggar — Ellen Bass (Copper Canyon, 2014)

I Want a Job — Carol Ellis (Finishing Line Press, 2014)

Ice Children — Edward Harkness (Split Lip Press, 2014)

The Magicians Union — James Cushing (Cahuenga Press, 2014)

Revising the Storm — Geffrey Davis (Boa Editions, 2014)

Patter — Douglas Kearney (Red Hen Press, 2014)

Oh, Salt/Oh Desiring Hand — Holly Prado (Cahuenga Press, 2013)

Lightning Dialogues — Michael Kincaid (Nemesis, 2013)

Imaginary Burdens: Selected Poems — Michael Hannon (Word Temple Press, 2013)

Our Obsidian Tongues — David Shook (Eyewear Publishing; 2013).

A Wild Surmise: New & Selected Poems & Recordinss — Eloise Klein Healy (Red Hen Press, 2013)

Bleed Through: New and Selected Poems — Michael Davidson (Coffeehouse, 2013)

Varieties of Religious Experience — Christopher Buckley (Stephen F. Austin State University Press, 2013)

The Story of My Accident Is Ours — Rachel Levitsky (Futurepoem Books, 2013)

Urban Tumbleweed: Notes from a Tanka Diary — Harryette Mullen Greywolf Press, 2013.

Deep Meanings: Selected Poems 2008-2013 — Gerald Locklin (Presa Press, 2013)

Plume — Kathleen Flenniken (University of Washington Press, 2013)

Even So: New and Selected Poems — Gary Young (White Pine, 2012)

Collected Poems — Ron Padgett (Coffeehouse, 2013)

Revelator — Ron Silliman (BookThug, 2013)

Spectrum of Possible Deaths — Lucia Perillo (Copper Canyon, 2013)

This Constellation Is a Name: Collected Poems 1965-2010 — Michael Heller (Nightboat Books, 2012)

Life on Mars — Tracy K. Smith (Greywolf Press, 2012)
(NOTE: This book was translated and published, in its entirety, in Mexico.)

Thrall — Natasha Trethewey (Houghton Mifflin, 2012)

The Naked Eye: New and Selected poems, 1987-2012 — Jack Grapes (Bombshelter Press, 2012)

Gaze — Christopher Howell (Milkweed Editions, 2012)

Olives — A.E. Stallings (Triquarterly, 2012)

Walking Across a Field We Are Focused on at This Time Now — Sara Wintz (ugly duckling press (2012)

notes from irrelevance — Anselm Kerrigan (Wave, 2011)

Music for the Black Room – Sarah Maclay (What Books, 2011)

Invisible Strings — James Moore (Graywolf, 2011)

Of Indigo and Saffron: New and Selected Poems — Michael McClure (edited, and with an introduction by Leslie Scalapino) (University of California Press, 2011)

THE GRAND PIANO: An Experiment in Collective Autobiography (Parts 1 – 10) — Rae Armantrout; Steve Benson; Carla Harryman; Lyn Hejinian; Tom Mandel; Ted Pearson; Bob Perelman; Kit Robinson; Ron Silliman; Barrett Watten (Mode A/This Press, 2010)

NOTE: I can’t think of a better way to “end” this list than with a ten-book volume project that was primarily written in the final years of the previous decade. The first book in the serial publication of The Grant Piano appeared in November, 2006; and the final installment was published in 2010. As with Watten’s book listed elsewhere in this provisional sketch of Current American poetry, The Grand Piano provides a context of exuberant causerie for anything else that might be picked up.

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The Exquisite Prolongation of Immediacy: The Translation of Life and Poetry by Paul Vangelisti

September 24, 2017 – 10:29 am

Sunday, September 24, 2017

This evening I will be at the Beyond Baroque Awards dinner, which is being held once again at the Church in Ocean Park (235 Hill Street, Santa Monica, CA 90406). I have been asked to make the presentation speech for the George Drury Smith Award, which will go to Paul Vangelisti this year. Prior winners include Eloise Klein Healy, Wanda Coleman, David St. John, Holly Prado, and myself.

For those who cannot attend, here is what I plan to say.

The Exquisite Prolongation of Immediacy: The Translation of Life and Poetry by Paul Vangelisti

In one of my blog posts about a year and a half ago, I cited John Holten to the effect that “a good form of torture for any serious writer would be to deny them reading anything other than works produced in their own language or country.” If anyone could be said to have led the resistance to monolingual tyranny in Los Angeles the past half-century, it would have to be Paul Vangelisti, whose devotion to the art of translation goes far beyond any mere literary metamorphosis. Indeed, his writing is nothing short of an inspiring reminder of the daily necessity of accounting for each day of this quirky journey, and of how that accounting demands nothing less than the imperative: “You must translate your life.”

In translating his life, Paul is the single most ambidextrous person I have ever encountered. His accomplishments are manifold, and while they are too numerous to sum up easily, Paul would be the first to delineate how much others have assisted him over the years. The virtues of collaboration are much like those of translation: audacity, candor, commitment; and Paul has enabled those with whom he has worked to strengthen those virtues in their own lives. If Paul has inspired so many people with whom he has collaborated, it is largely because simply to be in his presence distills and effaces one’s own uncertainties and self-doubts, and enables one to renew that personal covenant with the imagination that insists on having a immediate connection with social reality.

Notwithstanding the scope of his generative collaborations, it remains Paul who has been the cynosure of the effort to make Los Angeles a place worthy of being at least a provincial capital in the world republic of letters. If Pascale Casanova’s description of literary enfranchisement meant that a truly representative body of arbitration within the realm of the imagination could actually function, then there would be little doubt that the person we should elect as our senator should be Paul Vangelisti.

He has earned this stature with a multi-decade production of superb poetry, but with a personal masthead of magazines, books, and anthologies featuring the work of other poets, especially within the maverick avant-garde. Yet no matter how much he accomplishes, he remains rigorously engaged with the increment yet to come. I have recently talked with Paul about the need for an anthology that presents the canon of West Coast poets. Every anthology on my bookshelves at best includes a smattering of West Coast poets, and it is time for California, Oregon, and Washington, along with Baja California and Vancouver, Canada, to assert itself as an autonomous site of poetics. Paul’s reaction to my suggestion was an emphatic “Let’s do it,” but of course in certain ways he has already done it, for that anthology will largely draw on those who have appeared in the dozens of issues of magazines that he has edited or co-edited or published, magazines such Invisible City, New Review of Literature, Ribot, and OR, as well as on the books of poetry published by his subversive enterprises, Red Hill Press and Seismicity Editions. The anthologies he himself has worked on, beginning in the early 1970s, will be the kernel of this future volume’s vision.

I should mention that I am the stand-in tonight for the person who would traditionally give this awards speech, but last year’s award winner, Holly Prado cannot be here in person tonight, due to the unfortunate fire that recently scorched the apartment she shared with her husband, the poet and actor Harry Northup. I happy to report that their recovery from this incident is going well, in large part because we as a community came together in their support. When it became apparent Holly would not be able to make this event, I suggested Dennis Phillips be asked to have this honor of presenting the award to Paul, since Dennis after all served as President of Beyond Baroque in the mid-1980s and would be the perfect intermediary at this gathering. In taking on this assignment, I knew one thing from the start, and that was I was going to quote Dennis Phillips as a way of featuring their deep bond. I have one ready-made advantage in doing this, for Dennis was the driving force behind a book, Nausikaa’s Isle, that was published two years ago to honor Paul on his 70th birthday. In the preface to that book, Dennis observed that “As a poet, a translator, an editor, a publisher, an educator, and for all the right reasons, an administrator, Paul Vangelisti has created a force of gravity felt by his readers, several international generations of poets, and his students, that brings to mind the similar influence of Pound.” In completely agreeing with Dennis, I would especially note this important understanding of the nature of that “force of gravity”: it is the quintessential trialectic gift exchange of space and time that generates history with more than literary meaning. Indeed, it is, as Dennis observes, “how deeply integrated in his work – and I mean all his work – are the poetic and the political.”

All of this magnitude has not gone unrecognized. In addition to NEA grants for both his own poetry and to assist his translation projects – and it should be noted that very few poets are at a level of this double achievement — he has also received numerous awards for his translations, including Italy’s Flaiano Prize and the PEN USA Prize for Translation in 2006. In 2010, the Academy of American Poets gave the Raiziss/de Palchi Book Prize. Paul is most certainly not without honors, accolades and awards as a writer and a translator, but there have been too few occasions in Los Angeles for Paul to receive a full measure of our appreciation for his enormous contribution to our cultural maturation. We are about to mark the 50th anniversary of Beyond Baroque, and two years after that celebration, it would only be appropriate for Beyond Baroque to hold a celebration of a half-century of editorial and publishing endeavors by Paul Vangelisti that have enabled so many poets and writers to attain an international audience. In the meantime, however, let this award serve as an initial installation. Paul has frequently configured his experience in Los Angeles as one of exile, and while I do not wish to contravene that assessment, I hope that for one night – tonight – he can briefly imagine himself at home, as we award him the 2017 George Drury Smith Award. Please join me in welcoming Paul Vangelisti to the stage for the bestowal of this award.

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Biography Obituaries Poetry Small Press Publishing

Austin Straus Obituary — by Rev. Roscoe Barnes III

September 1, 2017 – 2:32 pm

Friday, September 1, 2017

It’s a scorching afternoon in Long Beach, California, and the only relief from the heat has been the arrival of an e-mail from Reverend Roscoe Barnes III, who first wrote me about ten days ago and asked what I knew about the life of Austin Straus, a Los Angeles poet whose death I had taken note of in my blog. In particular, Rev. Barnes was curious about how much I knew about his life before he arrived in Los Angeles in the late 1970s.

“Not much,” I responded. “In fact, almost nothing at all.”

For those of you who share that response, I am pleased to post today the link to the first serious obituary of Austin Straus.

http://roscoereporting.blogspot.com/2017/09/poet-austin-straus-former-husband-of.html

My profound thanks to the Rev. Barnes.

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