Paul Vangelisti has recently launched a new outlet for book reviews, ENDS AND ODDS, which can be found on the MAGRA BOOKS website. You can find his commentary on several books, as well as a review by myself on Suzanne Lummis’s anthology POETRY GOES TO THE MOVIES, as the initial installments of this project. Vangelisti, who will turn 80 years old this coming September, is an indefatigable force in contemporary poetry, if one regards that term as meaning not just a temporal domain but the spatial interminglings that only translation can initiate. Beginning with INVISIBLE CITY, a magazine he co-edited with John McBride for the entire decade of the 1970s, Vangelisti has assiduously reminded the various scenes and movements in the United States of the social and literary contextualization that translators attain in serving as “authors.” What is translation, after all, but a conversation between two authors, neither subservient, and both overheard by others who patiently listen as a representative congregation for their own chance to speak out.

As for my review about “Poetry Goes to the Movies,” I would hope that readers would make the effort to place it within the context of my blog as a whole. Here, for instance, is a list of the most frequently read posts during the past ten days:

Suzanne Lummis in “The New Yorker”
“The Alphabet” by Ron Silliman (a review from ten years ago)
D.R. Wagner — Poet and Artist (1943-2023)
Wanting Animals on Her Side: a review of two books by Lynn McGee
The Invisible Strings of Returning Pleasure: Jim Moore reviews Holly Prado’s “Weather”
Quincy Jones (1933-2024): Composer, Arranger, Producer (and Advocate for SHAFT by Issac Hayes)
Paul Vangelisti Reviews “OUTLAW THEATRE”
“A Possibility: Music at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium
The Garden City Horse Sculpture
The Sam Shepard Tribute at the Bootleg Theater
“He, Leo: The Life and Poetry of Lew Welch” by Ewan Clark
“Wicked Enchantment”: Wanda Coleman’s Selected Poems
“A Complete Unknown”: Jorge Luis Borges, Shakespeare, and Bob Dylan
Christopher Buckley’s “Cloud Memoir” — Thirty Years of Longer Poems
Jan Wesley (1962-2025): a poet whose luminous presence will linger
“I Wanna Be Loved By You: Poems on Marilyn Monroe” (including “Labials” by Bill Mohr)
Fred Voss (1952-2025): Worker Poet Extraordinaire
Either/Or Bookstore and “Barbarian Days”
Happy 50th Anniversary, Chatterton’s and Skylight Bookstores
Chatterton’s Bookstore: The Legendary Forerunner to Skylight Books
Papa Bach Bookstore – Los Angeles AND Jackson Hole, Wyoming
Kate Braverman (1949-2019): Poet and Novelist
Louis Montrose and the Spider-Man Tribute
Anacapa Review’s Third Issue
The Collected Poems of Eugene Ruggles
Reliquaries: The Sculpture of Ted Waltz
“The Moon and the Night and the Men” — John Berryman
Ed Massey: The Revivifying Artist as Intermingling Citizen (“Portraits of Hope”)
BACKLIST (Best poetry books 2000-2010)
“Spin, Spider, Spin” – Patty Zeitlin’s Songs for Children
The Collected Poems of Eugene Ruggles

Condescending commentary about the importance of verbs notwithstanding, Suzanne Lummis does deserve to be the next poet laureate of Los Angeles. Living less than three miles from the northern border of Orange County, however, I am very unlikely to have a vote in this matter. Ah! Did I not once write a post about how the selection of the poet laureate should be put to a vote by all the poets who have earned the muse’s enfranchisement?

Onward!

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Here and There: Two New Books by Richard Milazzo & Kyle Harvey
REVIEW by Paul Vangelisti

https://www.magrabooks.com/ends-odds/2025/4/29/fxnnp6e1443iyxkycn3630otizdy2u

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ON THE AVENUE: VINCENT KATZ’ DAFFODIL

https://www.magrabooks.com/ends-odds/2025/5/30/ie0hkgive9oycesgadyu1i8v69y9vi

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OFF-SCREEN: A Double Feature of Poets and Movies
by Bill Mohr

https://www.magrabooks.com/ends-odds/2025/5/24/off-screen-a-double-feature-of-poets-and-movies