Saturday, June 13, 2026
It’s mid-June in Long Beach, California, and I have finally caught up with enough personal tasks that went undone in the past semester to be able to devote some time to my blog. About a month ago I happened to see Alex Umlas at a poetry reading featuring Alexis Fancher at DiPiazza’s and she mentioned that she hadn’t seen any new posts in a while. It always surprises me a bit when someone mentions that they actually read my blog. I don’t have any sense that what I broadcast is taken note of by anything other than screen crawling bots in China. On the off chance that someone other than a computer-generated entity might chance upon this blog, however, I am back on the poetry patrol.
Linda and I were at DiPiazza’s again this past Wednesday to hear Michael C. Ford read his poetry in Long Beach for the first time since we read together at Dizzy’s record store on E. Seventh. Before he read one of his mid-set poems, Michael gave us a glimpse of his first weeks on the planet as 1939 segued into 1940. When his youthful fondness for jazz music only increased as he reached adolescence, Michael’s mother commented one day that it was to be expected. “I asked your grandmother, when you were three weeks old, what kind of music we might play you for a lullaby, and she said, “Well, I was at a downtown department store on Saturday and I bought Artie Shaw’s “Moonglow,” so let’s try this.”
The other poet who read with Michael was Liz Marlow, whose first book The Ground Never Lets Go was recently published by Eric Morago’s Moon Tide Press. The book focuses on acts of resistance that took place during the Holocaust; afterward, I asked her if she knew of Gail Newman’s very fine collection, Blood Memory. Not only was acquainted with Gail and her poetry, Liz also knew my poet friend Lynn McGee. Both Lynn and she shared the distinction of having won a Slapering Hol chapbook contest. Given her subject, I mentioned that she should become familiar with a still too little known poem: “Feasts of Death, Feasts of Love,’ by Stuart Z. Perkoff, Over sixty years after its first publication, “FDFL” inexplicably remains obscure. As I pointed out in my book HOLDOUTS in 2011, even scholars who think they have comprehensively covered Holocaust poetry omit this poem, even though it appeared in the most important anthology of American poetry after World War II. Such is the fate of work written by a poet based in Los Angeles, rather than San Francisco or New York…..
Another gratifying recent reading was Harry E. Northup’s featured presentation of poems from his most recent collection, TO ASK FOR LOVE. Harry’s voice retains the timbre that made him a compelling presence on the cinematic screen during his decades as a professional actor in films such as “Over the Edge” and “The Silence of the Lambs.” The Cahuenga cohort of poets who read before Harry were very fine, too. I was especially pleased to hear Harry read the poem he composed about the John Ford chapel at MPTF in Woodland Hills, and which first appeared in my blog. At the request of the chaplain, the poem is also now framed on the wall of the chapel.
During the spring I gave a fair amount of what little time I had left over from teaching to reading three sets of proofs for my forthcoming book, REMIGES: THREE EXTENDED POEMS (1980-2025). I do want to thank Karen Kevorkian for her assiduous copyediting, which helped me scour these texts for the slightest stumble. I was abashed at how much needed attention, which perhaps was to be expected, given that I had long given up hoping that these three poems would ever be published, and I had stopped polishing them a very long time ago. Many thanks, therefore, to What Books in advance for taking a chance on a manuscript that so many other presses had rejected. My thanks go out to the editors of magazines that supported individual segments of these long poems: Paul Vangelisti, Greg Boyd, and Jocelyn Fisher, Lawrence R. Smith.
One poet editor who recently wrote me and requested poems for a magazine is Juan Delgado, who taught for many years at California State University, San Bernardino. Juan said that he has been the guest editor for spring issue of the monthly magazine, Cholla Needles, which comes out of Yucca Valley. Issue no. 115 has just been published, featuring work by David Garyan and George Hammons as well as myself. The magazine appears to limit itself to print editions that are primarily available on Amazon and at the California Welcome Center in Yucca Valley. While I’m not familiar with most of the contributors to this magazine, several issues that I checked at random do include poets whose work I have been aligned with at various points in the past half-century. For instance, No. 91 features A.D. Winans; Issue 97 includes work by John Brandi and Renee Gregorio; issue 100 has work by Tobi Alfier, the late John Brantingham, Miriam Sagan and Juan Delgado; No. 101 includes Donna Hilbert and Ellen Maybe; No. 112 has Penelope Moffet.
The poems I sent Juan Delgado and that were published in issue 115 are:
“The Anthropocene” (a cento)
“Paper, Scissors, Rock: Water, Fire, Pot”
“Tiptoe”
“Wall”
“Pencil Sketches”
“The Unknown Unknows”
“Pater Noster / Mater Nostrils”
“My Obsession”
Anyone who would like to read this set of poems is welcome to write me at William.BillMohr@gmail.com and I will send this set right along. I want to thank the Rapp Poetry Saloon, curated by Elena Secota, for giving me a chance last year to read all these poem in public for the first time, in the company of fellow readers Amy Gerstler and Guy Zimmerman. It was a memorable thrill to read with them. I was especially pleased that Beth Ruscio was in the audience to hear all of us.
The one lapse in this issue of CHOLLA NEEDLES is that there is no bio note of any kind for the editor, whose one page introduction is among the most precise yet compressed account of the contents of a particular issue of a magazine that I have ever read. There is, of course, a contributor’s page. As a way of making up for this omission, I would like to reprint the bio note from the selection of Juan’s poems that appears in an online anthology edited by David Garyan.
https://davidgaryan.wixsite.com/ladige/post/juan-delgado-california-poets-part-8-five-poems
Juan Delgado is Professor Emeritus in the English Department at California State University, San Bernardino, where, in addition to his professorial duties, he chaired the English and Communication Studies Departments and served as the university’s interim provost. His collections of poetry include Green Web (1994), published by the University of Georgia Press and selected by poet Dara Weir for the Contemporary Poetry Prize; El Campo (1998), a collaboration with the Chicano painter Simon Silva and published by Capra Press; and Rush of Hands (2003), published by the University of Arizona Press. His most recent book, Vital Signs (2013),was a collaboration with photographer Thomas McGovern and won the Before Columbus Foundation’s American Book Award. One can find a sample of his poetry and a critical essay on his last book at the Poetry Foundation: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/juan-delgado. In recent years, he has presented his photopoetics and signage throughout southern California in museum exhibitions such as Más Allá del los Fencesat the Peppers Gallery in Redlands, 2017. Manos, Espaldas y Blossoms, a collaborative art project with Thomas McGovern featured their artwork and poetry in the groves of the California Citrus State Historical Park, 2018. Sign Language, a mixed media exhibition at the CSUN Art Galleries, featured the collaborative work of McGovern and Delgado, and the artwork of Amando Lerma and Carlos Ramirez, aka “The Date Farmers.” In 2023, he won the California Established Artist Award for his Concrete Poetry.
The primary editor for Cholla Needles is r soos, who was the editor of the monthly literary magazine Seven Stars from 1973-1998. He launched Cholla Needles in 2017.
About Bill Mohr