Tag Archives: Robert Mezey

Books

Robert Mezey — A Tribute at the Huntington Library

July 4, 2025 – 9:23 am

I remember hearing Robert Mezey (1936 – 2020) read at San Diego State College in the spring, 1968. I was 20 years old and just beginning to get familiar contemporary poetry. I was taking two poetry courses with Glover Davis, one in creative writing and one survey of poetry course in which Sylvia Plath’s ARIEL was read in its entirety. Davis had studied at Fresno State under Philip Levine as an undergraduate who had first served a four year enlistment in the U.S. Navy., and he had then attended the University of Iowa’s MFA program. In his classes, I read — and re-read — Hart Crane’s THE BRIDGE as well as many poets in Donald Allen’s anthology, THE NEW AMERICAN POETRY.
Unlike now, when the budget to bring poets to a large state university campus such as Cal State Long Beach is not something the poets on campus have any control over, Davis was able to bring Allen Ginsberg, Robert Mezey, and Philip Levine to San Diego State in a single semester. Two years later, when I began reading an anthology Mezey had co-edited, NAKED POETRY, I also purchased THE DOOR STANDING OPEN, Mezey’s “new and selected” volume of poems, and it served as an outstanding example of the transformation that many poets made, who had attained recognition in the Hall-Pack-Simpson anthology, NEW POETS OF ENGLAND AND AMERICA.
Mezey’s shift to free verse, however, did not last the rest of his life. The drum-kit of meter is not that easily put aside, given what a pleasure it can be to work the high-hat. By the very early 1980s, Mezey was adamantly back at work in the formal arena. If it was unfashionable, and cost him a larger audience, he didn’t seem to care.
When he died, of covid-19 at age 85 in 2020, there was of course no public gathering to mourn one of our finest poets. Among the many who particularly admired him in Los Angeles, one would have to count both Suzanne Lummis and myself. Given how often Suzanne and I diverge in our tastes, it is no small thing that we both savor Mezey’s poems, and I was pleased to learn that she was selected to speak at the recent gathering at the Huntington Library in Mezey’s honor. Among the poets who spoke, in fact, I thought that Suzanne Lummis did the best job in not only speaking about his work, but in reading his poems so that every subtle palpitation in the verse resounded with an understated fervor. I also appreciated Jodie Hollander’s recollection of her first meeting with him and how much he subsequently nurtured her poetic maturation.

I myself had hoped to attend, but circumstances and my own faltering capacities led my absence. However, the event was recorded and is now available on-line. It’s worth watching all the way, I assure you, if only to hear Mezey read his great sonnet to the poet Thomas Hardy.
https://rail.huntington.org/Share/dqte03tx036dfa07156vcl82v6t785d3

One of the key things that comes across in the tribute is that Mezey truly lived a literary life: poet, translator, anthologist, and critic. Perhaps my personal fondness for Bob Mezey, however, derives from his commitment to other poets in ways that don’t fall into any literary category. For instance, while Dick Barnes was mentioned several times as Mezey’s co-translator of Borges’s poetry, no one apprized, let alone praised, the role Mezey played in getting a posthumous collection of Dick Barnes’s poems into print (A WORD LIKE FIRE). I had published one of Barnes’s books of poems and it meant the world to me that Bob Mezey did not let Dick’s work fall by the wayside.

I must say one thing about a particular comment by Dana Gioia about the second edition of NAKED POETRY: expanding the table of contents so that it included a greater variety of poets did not make it “useless.” Does Gioia not remember that the first edition had only ONE living woman poet (Denise Levertov)? ONE! And not a single poet of color? NONE. Even Donald Allen’s anthology had four women and one African-American poet, and that was in 1960. A decade later, the first edition of NAKED POETRY amounted to a full scale erection of a white man canon.

These kinds of choices do make a difference. Think of the difference it would have made to Bob Kaufman’s reputation if Allen had included him. Allen certainly knew about Kaufman’s work in the late 1960s, so he couldn’t plead that he simply hadn’t read as widely as he should have. I myself have faltered in that regard, so I am not in any position to judge Mezey for a lapse, but I’m not willing to sit back and accept Gioia’s dismissal of the second edition of NAKED POETRY. I do think it is the case that that anthology had already made its most important contribution, which was to help both Weldon Kees and Kenneth Patchen to regain some footing in the canonical discussion.

I want to close this post by coming back to Mezey’s homage to Hardy, in which the birth of Hardy is recounted as a near-death experience; Hardy only survives being set aside as stillborn because the midwife in attendance coaxed the lingering soul in Hardy’s infant body into taking its initial breath. In describing Hardy’s evasion of death before he had begun living, Mezey reminds us of our own unfathomable odds in being plucked from the abyss of unconsciousness. It is a poem worth memorizing. I would even go so far as to suggest a further absorption. Memorize it, and then recite it to yourself with your eyes closed. Then open your eyes and recite it out loud, imagining your inner voice, with closed eyes, in a duet with your voice propelling the words into your quivering ears.

And then, in grateful memory, say the poet’s name: Robert Mezey.

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Books Poetry

A Lake on the Earth / A Word Like Fire

January 9, 2018 – 8:16 am

Tuesday, January 9, 2018 – Robert Mezey and Dick Barnes

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A LAKE ON THE EARTH / A WORD LIKE FIRE

I’ve been keyboarding material in a pamphlet I issued back in late 1982 that served as a catalogue for Momentum Press. I wanted to do a mailing to libraries in hopes of generating more book orders, since surprisingly few libraries were ordering volumes of poetry that certainly deserved a place on the shelf next to the ones that were winning the big book prizes. Indeed, one of the books I had published in 1980 had landed on a list of five finalists for the best book of poetry published that year. I have no doubt that the editors and publicist at Knopf had never heard of Leland Hickman’s Great Slave Lake Suite until the day that title appeared in the finalist list. Many of the other titles I published deserved equal attention, and some had received resoundingly respectful notices. There were enough such reviews, in fact, that I felt I might improve sales if I put together an overview of the press up to that point. About two years earlier, I had done a joint catalogue with Dennis Koran’s Panjandrum Press and Mudborn Press (edited by Judyl Mudfoot and Sasha Newborn) in Santa Barbara, and that had generated some sales, so it made sense to try it again. (Unfortunately, the recession of Reagan’s first term of office had a devastating effect on small presses and bookstores, and Momentum Press never recovered.) In creating computer files of excerpts from two dozen reviews of Momentum Press books the past couple days, I have once again realized how fortunate I was to have so many talented poets entrust me with their work.

Indeed, it is only in recent years that I have fully appreciated what a large percentage of the writers, whose debuts I gave precedence to, proved to be individuals possessing an enduring and substantial talent. The number of novels or books of poems produced since the late 1970s and early eighties by Jim Krusoe, Alicia Ostriker, Kate Braverman, Holly Prado, James Grabill, Jim Moore, and Michael C. Ford far outpaces the production of most authors associated with typical small press of that period. Equally unusual are the instances in which the poets I published achieved some measure of posthumous recognition; Leland Hickman and Dick Barnes most certainly fit that category. Lee Hickman was on the verge of being forgotten as a poet, until I nominated him to Stephen Motika at Poets House in NYC. Stephen’s Nightboat Books collaborated with Seismiscity Editons at the Otis College of Art and Design to published TIRESIAS: The Collected Poems of Leland Hickman at the end of the past decade.

Today, though, I want to point to another poet whose work received some glowing reviews, but only after he died. I hope I don’t end up sounding too aggrieved at this development, but I must admit that it was difficult to repress an internal rant about the tardy praise for Dick Barnes’s poetry that I read online yesterday in venues such as Ploughshares, New Yorker, and the Library of America blog. Donald Hall and Tom Sleigh are full of praise for Dick Barnes in the 21st century, but where were they when I published A Lake on the Earth in 1982? If anyone deserved more attention at that point, it was Dick Barnes, but he was one of the most modest men I ever met, and modesty has rarely helped anyone achieve immodest literary stature.

Is there a lesson for young writers in the survival of Barnes’s poetry? Well, it might be a good idea to find a friend who respects and cares enough about your work to keep speaking up for it. If it weren’t for Robert Mezey, in fact, Dick Barnes would not be visible at all right now, except in the backlist of Momentum Press and a few other even more underground projects. Here are the links to the notices on Barnes’s A Word Like Fire, which was edited by his good friend – and most extraordinary poet himself – Robert Mezey. Let me pause and say it here, since I don’t see it said often enough in places that should know better: Mezey is among the dozen or so poets in the past half-century who have written truly memorable poems. I first heard him read at San Diego State in the spring of 1968, and he has remained a model of devotion to poetry as the supreme art of the imagination ever since. In the course of speaking up for other poets, both as an editor and translator, he has not surprisingly been neglected in terms of appropriate honors for his own poetry. If anyone deserves the George Drury Smith Award, for instance, it is Robert Mezey, but I fear that reading is mainly fashion these days. That Mezey reads and speaks up when the work merits praise, regardless of the writer’s so-called reputation, is one of the traits that Mezey shared with his former colleague at Fresno State, Philip Levine. While Levine is certainly one of the most prominent figures in American poetry, it is Mezey I find myself thinking more of these days, and wishing that I could have studied with him. Indeed, at the very least, I wish I could find the money to have him come and give a reading at CSU Long Beach.

By the way, there are two poets the equal of Dick Barnes who are missing from the list I posted the other day. I know of two other poets who are long-time friends of these two missing poets who would spot each absence right away. I doubt, however, there is anyone who can name them both. And so it goes….

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2005/08/29/a-word-like-fire-selected-poems

https://www.pshares.org/issues/spring-2005/word-fire-dick-barnes

http://blog.loa.org/2011/10/tom-sleigh-on-dick-barness-word-like.html

Finally, I wish to note that on the Amazon company’s page on which A Word Like Fire is advertised as still available, one can read the comment to the effect that all future anthologies should contain Barnes’s poems. Apparently, no one takes this kind of pronouncement seriously, since as far as I know only Suzanne Lummis, Robert Mezey and myself have included Dick Barnes in their anthologies. Odd, isn’t it, that all three of us live in Southern California, supposedly a place with little capacity for literary discrimination?

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Books Ground Level Conditions Military Life Poetry

The VA (the value added tax of class servitude)

September 3, 2013 – 8:23 am

Tuesday, September 3, 2013

The VA (the value added tax of class servitude)

The Veterans Administration, popularly known as the VA, at some point set up its health system in Southern California so that its hospitals were located next to major colleges or universities. In San Diego, there is a huge VA center next to UC San Diego; in Los Angeles, the VA is on the flip side of the 405 freeway from UCLA; in Long Beach, the hospital is adjacent to CSU Long Beach. I went over to that VA the other day to work on getting some veterans benefits for my mother, who was a WAVE in World War II. She receives medical care through both Medicare and a program called TriCare, which is available to the surviving spouses of career military personnel. She will need to be in an assisted care home at some point in the near future, though, and I wanted to get information about her benefits.

Walking around the grounds of the VA complex, I felt on one level as if I could relax in my performance as a college teacher. How much chance was there that I would meet up with a colleague in a building at the VA? In fact, when was the last time any of the tenured professors I have taught with or studied under or conversed with at conferences would have found themselves visiting the VA? It is a social ghetto, in certain ways, and the fact that it is right next door to the campus only mounts the spotlights on the three hundred and fifty-nine degrees of separation between military and civilian life. Power extends from the organization of space itself, and the milieus one is assigned are meant to delimit your activities in a manner befitting one’s station in life. That I find myself at the VA, in hopes of finding a remedy for my mother’s plight, is only what might be expected, given the initial terms of my childhood enlistment. I remember a spokesperson from Brotman Hall who greeted the cohort of new faculty at CSULB in 2006: “When one has a Ph.D.,” she said with utter sincerity, “class is no longer an issue.” Even if one has severed all contact with one’s family, I doubt that’s true. To the credit of my colleagues, a skeptical murmur of disagreement ricocheted around the room.

I did, in fact, have one teacher who was a veteran, and he was perhaps the crucial teacher in my development. In the fall of 1967, I ended up enrolling in classes at San Diego State, mainly because my application to UCLA’s theater department had been turned down. I would be successful the following spring in gaining admission, but in the meantime I decided to study at SDSU and found myself in a poetry class with a young poet named Glover Davis, who had studied under Philip Levine. I had never heard of any of the poets Davis taught me about in the 1967-1968. I was 19 years old when I started studying in his classes and by the time I was 20 I had learned more from him than most MFA students learn in their two or three years in current programs.

Glover Davis’s class would serve as a prime example of how Don Allen’s The New American Poetry ended up as the most influential anthology of the past half-century. After his discharge from the U.S. Navy, Davis had enrolled at Fresno State University and had moved on to the Iowa Poetry Workshop, where I believe one of his classmates was James Tate. I took poetry writing courses with him as well as a survey of poetry course in which I first read Hart Crane’s The Bridge as well as substantial amounts of WC Williams. We read Williams first, so encountering Crane was initially a bewildering experience. I was utterly intrigued by Crane’s dense lyricism and imagery, but how could his poetics be reconciled with Williams’s? Which side was Davis on? He seemed to be presenting an equal case for each poet, and I found myself unable to decide between the two. In the end, I liked Crane’s sense of the line better than Williams, whose sense of enjambment never really matured.

One of the best parts of the year was a chance to attend readings by Allen Ginsberg, Philip Levine and Robert Mezey. Ginsberg didn’t read “Howl” or “Kaddish,” but instead gave a powerful reading of “Wales Visitation,” which even the conservative member of the English faculty, John Theobald, appreciated. Ginsberg by far attracted the largest crowd, but it was his talk in the afternoon that made an equal impression. In retrospect, I have to concede that the overwhelming emphasis on male poets in Davis’s canon would have been daunting for the female students; perhaps this is part of the reason for Rae Armantrout’s unflattering characterization of Davis in her memoir. She neglects to mention, however, that he would have been the first teacher she had to have praised at length the writing of Denise Levertov, with whom Rae went on to study at UC Berkeley.  Memory can be capricious, and maybe Rae wasn’t in the class in which I remember Davis giving “The Sharks” a close, deeply appreciative reading. Davis was perhaps the most fortunate encounter I could have hoped for at that point, given my limited options. For the first time, I encountered a man who embodied a masculine variant of physical prowess that was also vulnerable to the subjunctive.

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