| News
+ Notes, June 1, 2010
Our deepest condolences to Leslie
Scalapino’s family, who composed this obituary,
and to Rusty Morrison, who has shared it with us
and others in the writing community on their behalf.
—Editor
Leslie
Scalapino
1944-2010
 “Scalapino
makes everything take place in real time, in the
light and air and night where all of us live, everything
happening at once.”
—
Philip Whalen
Leslie Scalapino passed away on May 28, 2010 in
Berkeley, California. She was born in Santa Barbara
in 1944 and raised in Berkeley, California. After
Berkeley High School, she attended Reed College
in Portland, Oregon and received her B.A. in Literature
in 1966. She received her M.A. in English from the
University of California at Berkeley in 1969, after
which she began to focus on writing poetry. Leslie
Scalapino lived with Tom White, her husband and
friend of thirty-five years, in Oakland, California.
In
childhood, she traveled with her father Robert Scalapino,
founder of UC Berkeley’s Institute for Asian
Studies, her mother Dee Scalapino, known for her
love of music, and her two sisters, Diane and Lynne,
throughout Asia, Africa and Europe. She and Tom
continued these travels including trips to Tibet,
Bhutan, Japan, India, Yemen, Mongolia, Libya and
elsewhere. Her writing was intensely influenced
by these travels. She published her first book O
and Other Poems in 1976, and since then has
published thirty books of poetry, prose, inter-genre
fiction, plays, essays, and collaborations. Scalapino’s
most recent publications include a collaboration
with artist Kiki Smith, The Animal is in the
World like Water in Water (Granary Books),
and Floats Horse-Floats or Horse-Flows (Starcherone
Books), and her selected poems It’s go
in horizontal / Selected Poems 1974-2006 (University
of California Press) was published in 2008. In 1988,
her long poem way received the Poetry Center
Award, the Lawrence Lipton Prize, and the American
Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation.
Her plays have been performed in San Francisco at
New Langton Arts, The Lab, Venue 9, and Forum; in
New York by The Eye and Ear Theater and at Barnard
College; and in Los Angeles at Beyond Baroque.
In
1986, Scalapino founded O Books as a publishing
outlet for young and emerging poets, as well as
prominent, innovative writers, and the list of nearly
one hundred titles includes authors such as Ted
Berrigan, Robert Grenier, Fanny Howe, Tom Raworth,
Norma Cole, Will Alexander, Alice Notley, Norman
Fischer, Laura Moriarty, Michael McClure, Judith
Goldman and many others. Scalapino is also the editor
of four editions of O anthologies, as well as the
periodicals Enough (with Rick London) and
War and Peace (with Judith Goldman).
Scalapino
taught writing at various institutions, including
sixteen years in the MFA program at Bard College,
Mills College, the San Francisco Art Institute,
California College of the Arts in San Francisco,
San Francisco State University, UC San Diego, and
the Naropa Institute.
Of
her own writing, Scalapino says “my sense
of a practice of writing and of action, the apprehension
itself that ‘one is not oneself for even an
instant’—should not be,’
is to be participation in / is a social act.
That is, the nature of this practice that’s
to be ‘social act’ is it is without
formation or custom.” Her writing, unbound
by a single format, her collaborations with artists
and other writers, her teaching, and publishing
are evidence of this sense of her own practice,
social acts that were her practice. Her generosity
and fiercely engaged intelligence were everywhere
evident to those who had the fortune to know her.
Scalapino
has three books forthcoming in 2010. A book of two
plays published in one volume, Flow-Winged Crocodile
and A Pair / Actions Are Erased / Appear
will come out in June 2010 from Chax Press; a new
prose work, The Dihedrons Gazelle-Dihredals
Zoom will be released this summer by Post-Apollo
Press; and a revised and expanded collection of
her essays and plays, How Phenomena Appear to
Unfold (originally published by Potes &
Poets) will be published in the fall by Litmus Press.
Her
play Flow-Winged Crocodile will be performed
in New York at Poets House on June 19 at 2:00 pm
and June 20 at 7:00 pm by the performance group
The Relationship, directed by Fiona Templeton and
with Katie Brown, Stephanie Silver, and Julie Troost.
Dance by Molissa Fenley, music by Joan Jeanrenaud,
and projected drawings by Eve Biddle. This production
is co-sponsored by Belladonna and the Poetry Project.
There
will be a memorial event for Scalapino at St. Mark’s
Poetry Project on Monday, June 21.
A
Zen Buddhist funeral ceremony will be conducted
by Abbott Norman Fisher in about a month with the
arrangements in a subsequent announcement. Tom requests
that in lieu of flowers, Leslie’s friends
consider a charitable donation in her memory to:
Poets in Need, P.O. Box 5411, Berkeley, CA 94705;
Reed College for the Leslie Scalapino Scholarship,
3203 Southeast Woodstock Boulevard, Portland, OR
97202-8199; The AYCO Charitable Foundation, P.O.
Box 15203, Albany, NY 12212-5203 for the Leslie
Scalapino-O Books Fund to support innovative works
of poetry, prose and art; or to a charitable organization
of their choice. Condolence cards may be sent to
Tom and Leslie’s home address, 5744 Presley
Way, Oakland, California 94618-1633.
to
make my mind be actions outside only. which they
are. that
collapses
in
grey-red
bars. actions are life per se only without it.
(so)
events are minute — even (voluptuous)
—Leslie
Scalapino
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News + Notes, Rob Lipton,
December 13, 2009
Loving
Tribute to an LA Original:
francEyE
Beyond
Baroque 40th Anniversary Tribute
to francEyE with an open sign up,
hosted by Amelie Frank and S.A.
Griffin, Saturday, December 19,
2009, 7:30, Beyond Baroque
Literary Arts Center, 681 Venice
Blvd., Venice,
http://beyondbaroque.org.
 My
friend francEyE died this last
June 2, 2009, at 87 years old.
Besides her considerable talents
as a poet, she was known both in
the Los Angeles and Bay Areas as
an indefatigable
habitué/participant in
innumerable poetry readings and
workshops. francEyE was already
bearded grandmother-looking when
I first met her in ’88, one
of the first people who noticed
that I hadn’t been at the
Beyond
Baroque workshop before. She
would do a punctuating hum as
someone read their poem. Looking
very stern, she would then tell
you that you had forgotten to
sign your name, that your poem
had too many adjectives, and that
it didn’t make any sense to
stick a block quote from a Fiat
mechanics’ manual into your
poem of disconcerting love and
annulling sex (she was hard, very
hard). Or she might simply love
your poem and tell you not to
change a thing, and if you
crossed her, told her to lighten
up, bad things would happen to
you. Like Macbeth’s
witches, or the hall monitor in
middle school, she didn’t
do grandmotherly, nor old biddy,
she simply did francEyE.
Francis
Dean Smith, a.k.a. francEyE, came
to LA in the early 1960s, born in
San Rafael on March 19, 1922. She
had just gone through a difficult
marriage and wanted to pursue
writing more fully. In LA she
involved herself with the
poetry/writing scene then
percolating in west LA.
Initially, francEyE, along with
Charles Bukowski, would attend
workshops of the Unitarian poetry
group through the mid-1960s which
morphed eventually into the now
long running Beyond Baroque
workshop. Contrary to
stereotypical ideas of Hollywood,
the entertainment “industry”
there was and still is a vibrant,
intense sub-culture of writing
that has at its anchor point the
public literary arts center in
Venice, Beyond Baroque, in which
she has been active, in one form
or other, since the mid-60s.
francEyE was a constant and
foundational member of the weekly
poetry workshop at Beyond
Baroque. Through the late 1980’s
and early 90’s this weekly
workshop, run by Bob
Flanagan and Mark Robbin,
would have an amazing assortment
of characters at all levels of
poetry show their wares. francEyE
was always there, through the LA
equivalent of hell or high water.
Indeed, there was a wonderful
synergy between francEyE, Bob and
Mark, they all provided a steady
rudder during sometimes very
strange, chair-throwing nights. .
.ah those romantic poets. Through
this all, francEyE would remain
ever hopeful, on the edge of her
seat waiting for the next poem,
whether it was from the new
Bukowski or someone who treated
the workshop like an AA
meeting.
francEyE
could trick you into thinking her
seemingly natural sounding
language was casually created, as
if she was simply jotting down
what randomly came to her. To the
contrary, she was meticulous in
her phrasing and imagery. Hearing
her read, you would immediately
notice the music and force of her
language. She compressed her life
into poems, stamped her sense of
the day into the eternal book of
words. francEyE wrote of her
notions, curiosities, she would
almost surprise herself (as much
as the reader), with questions
she would come across as she
rummaged through the day. There
is always this questioning manner
of a precocious child in her work
crossed with an uncompromising
self-examination and rigor. When
she applied her pen to actual
children in her life, a magical
comingling of beginner’s
eyes and wisdom unleashed a joy
that is the rarest kind of thing
to find in poetry:
For My
Birthday
Someday
To N.H.B Sahoo (her
grandson)
please,
make me a book
of pictures of dragons,
pictures of all the dragons that
you know.
I would like to see a picture of
the dragon of sunrise,
and I would like to see a picture
of the dragon defender of all
frogs
and toads
and I would like to see a picture
of the dragon of mercy
and one of the dragon of no
mercy, too,
and above all I need a picture
of
The Dragon of Everything and if
there is a Dragon of Nothing
I need that one,
and then to end the book I think
there should be a picture
of a dragon of excellent birthday
parties and
one of
sweet sleep. Especially yes, I
want to see with my own eyes
a picture of the dragon of
sweet
Sleep.
Start
in Art At One
(for
all those friends who keep asking
me if Marina’s [her
daughter] going to be a
writer)
I watch you
making water on the rug,
sitting round-backed
to see your pee run out.
You put your finger in it to
stopper it,
and then, forgetting fingers,
stop it at the source,
hanging your head ‘way down’
to see if you can see
what you are doing.
On, off, on again.
I think I read your mind,
imagining a room-sized flood
for us to sail our shoes on,
but, after all, your tiny,
finished work
Seems enough.
The sponge I offer puzzles
you.
- Wipe it up?
- My puddle?
so we admire together
this temporary spot
on the face of things
that you made by
yourself
fdb (Francis Dean
Bukowski) 10-7-65
Each
of these poems captures her
generosity and the unpredictable
place she will take you to. She
has the ability to look at this
thing here, mull it (take you
along as she mulls) and make it
more and less familiar than you
can imagine. Like a magician who “shows”
you the trick, still leaving you
baffled and amazed. In short, she
enlivens and does the work poets
do. No surprise, and no surprise
either that she did this without
garnering any great notoriety;
she worked in the trenches. This
is something she did for almost
fifty years of her life. And by
so doing, she has tremendously
enriched poetry on the West
Coast.
Besides
the rich memory of her active
presence on the California poetry
scene, francEyE has been widely
anthologized and has three books
of poetry and one of short
stories published,
Snaggletooth in Ocean
Park (1996, Sacred
Beverage), Amber Spider
(2004, Pearl Editions),
Grandma Stories (short
stories, 2008, Conflux) and her
last book, Call (2008,
Rose of Sharon). In 2004, she was
honored in Santa Monica with the
Church in Ocean Park’s
Communitas Award.
francEyE
was a proud, non-strident lefty
pacifist who believed poetry was
a change agent: “My job is
to be myself and encourage people
to be themselves. Things aren’t
going to change until people
change, one person at a time.”
Robert
Lipton’s book of
poems is A Complex
Bravery (Marick Press). His
poems have appeared in New
Orleans Quarterly, the
Texas Observer, and
elsewhere. He writes as a
journalist for the blog
Muzzlewatch.org and published the
essay “Bearing witness in
the promised land” in “Live
from Palestine.” He also
writes on the philosophy of
science/causation. He now lives
in Boston.
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News + Notes, Susan Kelly-DeWitt,
November 9, 2009
Remembering
Walter Pavlich
& The Spirit of Blue
Ink
Walter Pavlich was a close
friend of mine for almost twenty
years. When he died on July 9,
2002, at the age of forty-six, I
was devastated. I still am. As
too many of us know, you never
get over the deaths of good
friends, especially when they die
young.
In 2000, Walter and his wife, the
poet Sandra McPherson, started a
press called Swan Scythe, working
out of their home in Davis,
California. They published a
wealth of chapbooks by poets from
around the country, including one
of my mine. Walter was the
managing editor. We saw each
other frequently and talked
poetry, art and fish decoys a
lot; Walter looked over my
manuscripts in the early days
too; I loved his poems and
respected his critical eye.
I remember so well hearing him
read for the first time—a
gentle reading from his first
book, Ongoing Portraits
(which sports a cover photo
of Walter’s father, the
buff third of an acrobatic
threesome called “The
Herculean Trio”), and a few
years later from Running Near
the End of the World, which
won the Joseph Henry Jackson
Award from the San Francisco
Foundation and the Edwin Ford
Piper Award from the University
of Iowa Press. (In between he
published some chapbooks—I
did an ink drawing for the cover
of one, Theories of Birds and
Water, from Owl Creek Press,
1990; he also published The
Lost Comedy, Howlet Press,
1991, a sequence about the Laurel
and Hardy duo.)
Walter and I had some things in
common. We both taught in the
prisons—in fact, it might
even have been Walter who got me
going in that direction back in
the early ’90s. We taught
at Folsom (at different times),
and we both knew a marvelous poet
there, a Lifer named Patrick
Nolan, who also died too young,
of hepatitis, at the age of
thirty-six. I still believe that
Walter’s poem “In the
Belly of the Ewe” is one of
the finest poems ever written on
the subject of prisons/prisoners.
Here is the poem in its entirety,
from Running Near the End of
the World:
In the
Belly of the
Ewe
And so he told
us how he had been sewn
into the belly of a ewe by his
father
and a couple of uncles, because
his legs
would not unfold after
delivery,
as though in the womb the
ligaments
had looped around bone and
kinked,
heels clamped to thighs, a
spiritual
cramp from God, an execration
for what they did not know.
His mother kept next to him in
the barn,
pinching off sheep ticks, not
sleeping
while the baby slept, helping the
animal
to its side when its own legs
hardened
from the standing, and kept the
hooves
from kicking his exposed
tottering head.
On the second Sunday of his
life
they slit him free, limbs in a
dangle
like severed rubberbands, and
slaughtered
the beast with the same knife for
that
day’s blessed supper. He
told us this
in the yard of the world’s
largest prison,
on the way back to his cell
where
he continued to cough up little
wet
moths of blood, where he was
always
cold, always ashamed, as he
gathered
the wool blanket up and around
him.
(You can read more about Walter
and what he had to say about this
poem in the online interview I
did with him in Issue 5 of
Perihelion: http://www.webdelsol.com/Perihelion/p-verbatim.htm)
In 2001, a year before his death
but many chapbooks later in the
history of Swan Scythe, Walter’s
last book came out in Swan Scythe’s
own series.
The book is The Spirit of
Blue Ink, and in many ways
it stands as a coda to Walter’s
work and life. I think it might
even be my favorite of Walter’s
collections, with twenty-five
poems and forty-seven pages of
titles like “Fatness,”
and “Faintness,” and “Etherealness.”
It’s a book full of
compassionate vision, a book of
humor (Walter studied with
Richard Hugo at the University of
Montana), full of humility and
great humanity. Here, in closing
is the title poem of the book,
still very much alive:
The
Spirit of Blue
Ink
What, this morning, do I have
As I put out my welcome mat for
hope?
Enough millet for six months to
keep
My bargain with the finches—I
fill,
They eat, and then they fly
away.
A yard of Thoreau on the
bookshelf,
In case I want a paragraph on
sweetgrass,
Floating-heart, or
pigweed. Or the dry
Field guide to the ocean, the
sea
Still in print, with
punctuation.
A gospel record, Christ in vinyl
from
The Fifties, 33 1/3
hallelujahs
Per minute. A school bell
across
The street teaches the
lessons
Of time, velocity
And hard music. A mirror
waiting&
A morning movie shot during
The previous war, smiles and
cigarettes,
Bright songs and cocktails.
And if I’m lucky, I can
approach
The spirit of blue ink, the
glory
Of the hand that works the
difficult
And the dead, that waits out the
past,
Attached as it is, not to a
wrist,
But the heart. The heart that
is
The leaf, that blows its way to
you.
You can find The Spirit of
Blue Ink at Swan Scythe’s
website:
http://www.swanscythe.com/books/spirit_of_blue_ink.html
(Note: Pavlich also published a
chapbook I haven’t
mentioned above. Of Things
Odd and Therefore Beautiful
appeared in 1987, from Leaping
Mountain Press.)
Susan
Kelly De-Witt is a
widely-published Sacramento poet
and book reviewer who teaches at
UC Davis Extension. Her recent
book of poetry is The
Fortunate Islands; she is a
contributing editor of Poetry
Flash.
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News +
Notes, Joyce Jenkins, October 27,
2009
If you are an LA woman
writer, and have been considering
using your skills to help young
women and girls, WriteGirl is for
you. Since 2001,
WriteGirl has been empowering
girls by helping them develop
their confidence, self-esteem,
creativity, and communication
skills through the craft and
practice of creative writing.
WriteGirl
offers opportunities for high
school girls to read and share
their writings, and publishes
annual anthologies of work by
high school girls and women. The
most recent is Listen to Me:
Shared Secrets from
WriteGirl, with poetry,
fiction, scenes, songs, essays,
and writing exercises. Carol
Muske-Dukes, California Poet
Laureate, says, “Listen
to Me is a dazzling chorus
of smart, tough, inspired voices
of independent-minded young
women.”
Through
mentoring, writing workshops,
public readings, performances,
and publications, WriteGirl teens
explore poetry, fiction,
journalism, screenwriting,
songwriting and more. Monthly
workshops are held near downtown
Los Angeles and weekly workshops
take place across the greater Los
Angeles region.
WriteGirl
is looking for mentors and
volunteers for their teen-girl
creative writing workshops and
mentoring program. All women of
diverse professional backgrounds
are invited, and writers, of
course, are especially needed.
WriteGirl could also use your
help with events, book marketing,
mentoring, public relations and
more.
For
more information, call (213)
253-2655, or download an
application from
www.writegirl.org. Application
deadline: November 10, 2009.
The
final 2009 orientation/training
for new volunteers will be held
on Saturday, November 14, 2009,
in Los Angeles.
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News +
Notes, Neeli Cherkovski, July 31,
2009
POEM FOR
A
FESTIVAL
by Neeli Cherkovski
some of those who live here were
not born
in the poem, but they arrive on
reed rafts
anyway and are recognized, some
of the roar
at the center of the poem comes
from the
people who await us on shore
the voices of our ancestors
scream from twin jetties,
there is a god for understanding
and
one for giving up, there are
signs of drought
and dispossession, rising sea
water and men
who wear the horns of their
animal
as a matter of obedience to a
high and indefinable
law, we have the capacity to
listen, and the right
to be reborn, we choose
arrogance, or anonymity
maybe both, and we dwell in the
word
the season of forgiveness
arrived, we watched
the captains come off of their
ships, the sailors
wrote pages of poetry which they
fed to the waves,
our ancestors were borne over the
tides to find us
standing on the docks, a sea
breeze fell, the gulls
and pigeons paraded, a limber
goddess dressed
in dance welcomed all to a
fictional island
we boarded a moon boat, we
fingered
words as if they were gems, we
bore
the old epics with kegs of olive
oil, we knew how
to judge by simply observing,
orange light, amber light
a Homeric odor, rustle of leaves
on branches of the
trees in a deer park, strong
amber, stale amber, the rose
of the olive as it is poured by
an expert hand
a mind with which to believe
tall wooden pagoda standing solid
on a granite base, a series
of stepped roofs (one on top of
the other) until the sun
seems as if it were an invention
of the human mind, which
may lead us to wonder about our
songs, where they might
come from, how deep we may travel
inside of time
as if time came from the
stream
This poem was first read
at the San Francisco
International Poetry Festival
kick-off event in Kerouac Alley,
North Beach on Thursday evening,
July 23.
Neeli
Cherkovski is a San
Francisco poet, biographer, and
literary chronicler. He is the
author of many books of poetry
and prose,
including Animal, Elegy
for Bob Kaufman, From the
Canyon Outward, Whitman’s
Wild Children,
and Bukowski: A
Life. He was featured in
events of the San Francisco
International Poetry
Festival.
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News +
Notes, Joyce Jenkins, May 15,
2009
 At
a brief ceremony and announcement
at the Richmond Branch Library in
San Francisco today, a great San
Francisco poet from the heart of
the Beat generation—Diane
di Prima—has been
named by San Francisco Mayor
Gavin Newsom the new Poet
Laureate. The previous San
Francisco Poet Laureate was Jack
Hirschman.
Diane di Prima’s
Revolutionary Letters,
her youthful classic, was
published in a new, expanded
edition by Last Gasp in 2007;
other recent publications are her
memoir Recollections of My
Life as a Woman and a
revised, expanded edition of
Loba, di Prima’s
ongoing epic of the wild feminine
spirit. City Lights published
Pieces of a Song, her
selected poems, in 2001.
She is the author of
forty-three books of poetry and
prose. Her work has been
translated into more than twenty
languages. Among her honors, she
has received poetry fellowships
from the National Endowment for
the Arts, and an honorary
Doctorate from St. Lawrence
University. In 2000, she was
Master-Poet-in-Residence at
Columbia College, Chicago. In
2006, she was presented the Fred
Cody Award for Lifetime
Achievement at the Northern
California Book Awards, and in
2008 she was recipient of the PEN
Oakland Lifetime Achievement
Award. She has been a Buddhist
practitioner for more than forty
years and was one of the founders
of The Jack Kerouac School of
Disembodied Poetics, Naropa
University, Boulder, Colorado.
She also teaches private classes
and workshops to a wide circle of
students in San Francisco and the
North Bay.
This summer, Diane di
Prima is offering the
latest installment in her ongoing
series of workshops on the lyric
poem, “Reading and
Writing the Lyric with Diane di
Prima: Lyric Poetry Since World
War Two.” The
workshops began in 2005, focusing
on the work of Chaucer and Wyatt,
and will continue this summer
with discussion on the use of
lyric poetry by contemporary
poets such as Joanne Kyger and
the late Ted Berrigan.
These Sunday classes will be held
June 14, June
28, and July 26,
2009, 10:00 a.m.-5:00,
with a potluck lunch. Each
workshop is centered on
discussion of poems distributed
as handouts, with time in the
afternoon for writing and
sharing. The fee for all three
classes is $400; first-time
participants are welcome. For
more information, call (415)
841-0717.
Diane di Prima’s
life is rich with creativity,
political activism,
experimentation, and cultural
openness. She was born in
Brooklyn, New York in 1934, a
second generation American of
Italian descent. Her maternal
grandfather, Domenico Mallozzi,
was an active anarchist and an
associate of Carlo Tresca and
Emma Goldman, who sometimes wrote
for Tresca’s newspaper,
Il Martello. Diane di
Prima began writing at the age of
seven and committed herself to a
life as a poet at the age of
fourteen. She lived in Manhattan
for many years, where she became
known as an important writer of
the Beat movement. During that
time she co-founded the New York
Poets Theatre and founded the
Poets Press, which published the
work of many new writers of the
period, including the first books
of Audre Lorde, Herbert Huncke,
David Henderson, and Clive
Matson. Together with Amiri
Baraka (LeRoi Jones) she edited
the literary newsletter The
Floating Bear in the 1960s,
and during that decade she moved
to upstate New York where she
participated in Timothy Leary’s
psychedelic community at
Millbrook.
In the 1970s she
began her epic poem
Loba,
of which Book I (Parts 1-8) was
published in 1978. In the 1980s,
she taught Hermetic and esoteric
traditions in poetry in the
short-lived but significant
Masters-in-Poetics program at New
College of California, which she
helped to establish with poets
Robert Duncan, Duncan McNaughton,
David Meltzer and Louis Patler.
She has also taught at the
California College of Arts and
the San Francisco Art Institute.
She was one of the co-founders of
San Francisco Institute of
Magical and Healing Arts (SIMHA),
where she and three colleagues
(Sheppard Powell, Carl Grundberg,
and Janet Carter) taught Western
spiritual traditions from 1983 to
1992.
For more than forty years
she has lived and worked
in northern California, where she
took part in the political
activities of the Diggers,
wrote Revolutionary Letters,
and raised her five
children. She makes her home in
San Francisco.
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News
+ Notes, Joyce Jenkins, April 11,
2009
For subscribers and other readers
who are wondering what Poetry
Flash is doing these days,
or who don’t know the range
of our programs, please read this
recent update. And if you are in
the Bay Area and like “old
stuff,” come by Poetry
Flash on May 16 for our
benefit sale of donated items. As
Robert Creeley used to say,
Onward!
What’s up with Poetry
Flash?
|
|
The
only war that matters is
the war against
the imagination
All other wars are
subsumed in it —Diane
di Prima
|
Dear Friend,
Many have asked, what’s up
with Poetry Flash? And
the answer is immense. Everything
is up with Poetry Flash.
For the last two years, we have
faced changes and challenges of
every kind. And now, the economic
climate has slowed us. But slowed
is not the same as stopped. We
are moving, with imagination and
innovation, into the future. We
have hope and possibility.
Our mission is to build community
through literature, to make
literary activity as accessible
as possible. Since 1972,
Poetry Flash accomplished
that by publishing a review and
literary calendar. But now, given
what all of us face, culturally,
technically, and economically, it’s
time for a change. As that
innovative thinker Buckminster
Fuller said, “In order to
change an existing paradigm, you
do not struggle to try and change
the problematic model. You create
new model, and make the old one
obsolete.”
We are introducing a new look for
Poetry Flash, which will
debut this spring, featuring
longer reviews, interviews,
articles, photos, poems, news and
selected event highlights. It
will continue to be distributed
free (unless mailed by
subscription), and it will
continue to explore contemporary
poetics and creative writing. We
have been holding back on this
announcement—and on asking
for your support—until you
could have it in your hands.
Unfortunately, delays due to the
economy and several notable
computer crashes changed that
plan. But now, change is here. It’s
time to show off the “new
model, and make the old one
obsolete.”
The comprehensive Poetry
Flash literary calendar for
California and the West is now
published at PoetryFlash.org.
Updated on a daily basis, new
online features are being added
daily. We have embarked on a web
site design revolution that
includes Calls for Submissions,
shorter reviews written just for
our web site, and featured poems,
along with expanded print
archives and index.
We are also carrying our mission
forward by presenting our
nationally recognized reading
series, which has continued for
over three decades, at Moe’s
Books in Berkeley, and Diesel, A
Bookstore, in Oakland, hosting
almost fifty readings each year
with these new partners. Our
free, annual Watershed
Environmental Poetry Festival
will be presented September 26,
2009, in Berkeley’s Civic
Center Park.
And we are excited to announce
the 28th Annual Northern
California Book Awards, at the
San Francisco Main Library on
April 19. Our production of these
awards and the Fred Cody Award
for Lifetime Achievement are a
lot of work, but we believe that
by sponsoring these awards and
celebrating (and recommending)
these books and authors, we are
bringing another spark of
imagination to our shared culture
and home. And if we don’t
step up to support and celebrate
the imagination, who will?
Please join us in making this
exciting transition by sending a
check today, or click on Donate
from the home page (on this web
site).
Warmly,
Joyce Jenkins
Editor/Publisher/Director
P.S. We are having a
benefit “Old stuff”
Sale, lots of donated old stuff
and vintage items, May 16, 2009,
9am-4pm, at Poetry
Flash, 1450 Fourth Street
#4, Berkeley, CA 94710 (between
Cedar and Gilman in west
Berkeley).
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News
+ Notes, Jack Foley, February 25,
2009
James
Schevill,
1920-2009
Poet-playwright-critic-teacher
James Schevill died on January 1
of pneumonia. He was 88.
James Schevill was born in
Berkeley on June 10, 1920. His
father, Rudolph, was a professor
of Spanish and founder of the
Department of Romance Languages
at UC Berkeley. His mother
Margaret was an artist and a
scholar of Navajo culture and
mythology.
In 1950, asked by UC Berkeley to
sign a loyalty oath, the young
Schevill wrote to UC President
Robert Sproul, “Loyalty—is
not a matter of signature”:
“Many of my father’s friends—have been fired as if
their years of service meant
nothing. I cannot bring myself to
betray the devotion with which my
father served a free university.”
The result was that he was
immediately fired and
black-balled from teaching in
public institutions. Hired by the
private California College of
Arts and Crafts, Schevill later
commented that it was the “best
thing that ever happened to me. I
met [Richard] Diebenkorn,
all those great artists.”
Schevill’s loyalty oath
experience is the indirect
subject of his most
widely-produced play, The
Bloody Tenet (1957), about
the trial of Roger Williams. The
play was premiered by San
Francisco’s Actor’s
Workshop, of which Schevill was
an active member.
James Schevill was present in
Germany during Kristallnacht
(November 9-10, 1938), the
prelude to the Holocaust during
which ninety-one Jews were
murdered and 25,000–30,000
were arrested and deported to
concentration camps. The
experience horrified him, and out
of it he produced his first poem.
Though Schevill later thought the
poem a poor effort, the passion
for social justice remained an
aspect of his long career. He
went on to produce hundreds of
poems, over thirty plays, many
critical essays, and biographies
of Sherwood Anderson and Bay Area
artist and promoter Bern
Porter.
In 1961, Schevill became Director
of the Poetry Center at San
Francisco State, where he
remained until his departure for
Brown University in Rhode Island
in 1968. The Poetry Center took
an active part in the city’s
cultural life, and through it
Schevill initiated the Poetry in
the Schools program. When, in
1966, Lenore Kandel’s
erotic poem, The Love
Book was brought to trial
for obscenity, Schevill organized
a read-in of the book at San
Francisco City Hall. Publicity
accompanying the protests
eventually led Police Chief
Thomas Cahill to instruct the
Juvenile Bureau to cease
responding to complaints about
obscene books.
In 1964, Schevill published one
of his finest books, The
Stalingrad Elegies. Schevill’s
poem, with illustrations by San
Francisco artist Leonard Breger,
was based on the book, Last
Letters from Stalingrad, a
compilation of letters from
German soldiers who, freezing,
starving and facing certain
death, were given a chance to
write a last letter home. The
letters were flown out on the
last airlift from Stalingrad,
then seized by the German High
Command. The addresses and
senders’ names were
removed, and the letters were
analyzed in a study of troop
morale. The results were so
damaging to the Nazi regime that
the letters were suppressed and
locked away in army archives. In
one of Schevill’s dramatic
monologues, a soldier writes to
his minister father, “There
is no God—He is not here in
Stalingrad.”
James Schevill returned to
Berkeley with his second wife,
singer/anthropologist Margot Blum
Schevill, in 1988. His first
marriage, in 1942, had been to
music teacher Helen Shaner. That
marriage produced two daughters,
Deborah and Susanna, before it
ended in 1965. Schevill married
Margot Blum in 1966. In 1983 they
collaborated on Performance
Poems, an LP released by
Cambridge Records.
James Schevill’s major
works are collected in
Ambiguous Dancers of Fame:
Collected Poems 1945-1986
(1986); Collected Short
Plays (1986); 5 Plays 5
(1993); and The Complete
American Fantasies (1996)—all
available from Swallow Press. In
the American Fantasies,
Schevill attempts “to catch
the tone of the country
as I witnessed it during the
major part of the
twentieth-century”: “Through
circumstances of war, theatre,
poetry readings, and teaching, I
have wandered and lived widely
throughout my country, traveling
frequently east, south, and north
from my western upbringing.”
In 1991, he was awarded the
Literary Drama Prize of the
American Institute of Arts and
Letters.
James Schevill is survived by his
wife, Margot; his daughters,
Deborah Schevill and Susanna
Schevill; a stepson, Paul Blum; a
stepdaughter, Sherifa Zuhur; and
by three grandchildren and four
step-grandchildren.
Contributions in his memory may
be sent to Poetry Flash,
1450 Fourth Street, #4, Berkeley,
CA 94710.
Jack Foley is a poet,
critic, and host of the “Cover
to Cover” Wednesday program
on KPFA radio, Berkeley. His most
recent book is The Dancer
& the Dance: A Book of
Distinctions. He is a
contributing editor of
Poetry Flash.
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News +
Notes, Joyce Jenkins, February 5,
2009
Jennifer Joseph of Manic D Press
reports the sad news that George
Tirado passed away in San
Francisco on January 17 at the
age of 44. His work appears in
the Manic D Press anthology,
Molotov Mouths: Explosive New
Writing, featuring powerful
works of social justice and the
political imagination by Molotov
Mouths Outspoken Word Troupe,
three women and four men from
diverse cultural and
socio-economic backgrounds:
Chilean-born Ananda Esteva, queer
activist Dani Montgomery,
performance poet Raw Knowledge,
housing rights organizer James
Tracy (editor of The Civil
Disobedience Handbook),
African-American essayist and
disabled rights activist Leroy
Moore, Chicano poet George
Tirado, and Spanglish storyteller
Josiah Luis Alderete.
Peter Byrne wrote in his
excellent review of the
collection in SF Weekly:
“In Tirado’s poem ‘Silent Friend,’ the poet
asks a dead friend if Death's
personality was frightening. ‘Were
his eyes soft and kind?/ Did he
hug you? or touch you?/ Did he
wipe the sweat from your
forehead?/ Such a private moment
to be shared by someone/ who did
not even know you.’”
George Tirado was active in
the spoken word scenes in the Bay
Area and Phoenix, Arizona; he
spent a summer on the
Lollapalooza Tour, and was a
founding member of Molotov
Mouths. A Chicano performance
poet/activist, he released
several CDs, and read and rocked
with the legendary, from beat
writer Hubert Selby, Jr. to
former San Francisco Poet
Laureate Jack Hirschman, to Lydia
Lunch and Henry Rollins. George
Tirado was active in the pre-Slam
San Francisco spoken word scene.
As poet Bucky Sinister says, “George
and I shared a fascination with
dirty, earth-bound angels as
images in our work.” Some
of George Tirado’s solo
books include The Final
Observations of a
Technoshaman and the Road
Kill Press chapbook From My
Heart Revolution.
A memorial and reading
organized by Roberta Goodman will
take place on Wednesday,
February 18, 4:00 p.m.,
at the Empress Hotel, 144 Eddy
Street, between Taylor and Mason,
where George Tirado was living
when he passed.
You can hear George Tirado at
www.myspace.com/georgetirado.
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News +
Notes, Joyce Jenkins, November
17, 2008
Last Thursday Governor
Schwarzenegger appointed Los
Angeles poet and novelist Carol
Muske-Dukes to succeed Berkeley
poet and writer Al Young as
California Poet Laureate, a
rotating position that was
created in 2001, offering a $10,
000 stipend for a two-year term.
The California State Senate now
must approve the appointment.
(Carol Muske-Dukes is a
Democrat.)
 Carol
Muske-Dukes, who teaches at the
University of Southern California
and founded the school’s
graduate program in Literature
and Creative Writing, has
published seven books of poetry,
four novels, and two books of
essays. She also founded and
taught in a Creative Writing
program at a women’s prison
on Riker’s Island in New
York.
The Laureate works with the
California Arts Council to
promote poetry, "from classrooms
to boardrooms across the state"
as the Governor's official press
release puts it, especially among
children and those not usually
exposed to poetry and creative
writing, and "to inspire an
emerging generation of literary
artists and to educate all
Californians about the many poets
and authors who have influenced
our great state through creative
literary expression." The council
takes nominations and recommends
four to the governor.
Carol Muske-Dukes’s husband
was the actor, David Dukes, who
died of a sudden heart attack in
2000. Her most recent book of
poetry, Sparrow, which
was a finalist for the National
Book Award, is a book of elegies
for him. Others of her books of
poems include Applause, Red
Trousseau, and An Octave
Above Thunder, her new and
selected poems which was
nominated for the Los Angeles
Times Book Prize. Carol
Muske-Dukes most recent novel is
the Los Angeles Times
best-seller Channeling Mark
Twain. The Irish poet Eavan
Boland has said of her, “Carol
Muske is a beautiful, ambitious
poet who has not rested on her
gifts for language and cadence.
She has chosen instead to let a
musical light become the
infinitely more testing light of
disaster and interrogation.”
Among her honors are National
Endowment for the Arts and
Guggenheim fellowships, an
Ingram-Merrill grant and several
Pushcart Prizes.
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News
+ Notes, Joyce Jenkins, October
29, 2008
Along with our daily postings
of event listings for California
and beyond, I'm going to be
posting editorial tidbits as they
come in to Poetry Flash.
Many have called and asked where
the Watershed Poetry Festival in
Berkeley will be held if, well,
it is raining on Nov. 1. The rain
venue is Berkeley City College,
2050 Center Street, half a block
from Civic Center Park on Martin
Luther King, Jr. Way at Center
Street, downtown Berkeley. These
locations are all very close to
downtown Berkeley BART (Berkeley
City College is half a block from
BART). The weather is looking
pretty good here now! And we are
looking forward to a powerful
festival. Come check out the
readings, music, and
exhibitors---including Manic D
Press, Heyday Books, Tea
Party Magazine, River of
Words, Sixteen Rivers Press,
California Poets in the Schools,
and others.
Intersection for the
Arts in San Francisco
has just announced the winners of
the San Francisco Foundation's
2008 Jackson Phelan Literary
Awards. The judges this year were
Bay Area writers
Persis M. Karim, Toni Mirosevich,
and giovanni singleton.
Joseph Henry Jackson Award -
Kelly Luce, Woodside, California,
fiction writer
James Duval Phelan Award -
Allison Benis White, Irvine,
California, poet
The winners will be celebrated
at a reading November
18, 7:30, at
Intersection for the Arts, 446
Valencia Street (between 15th
Street and 16th Street), in the
Mission, San Francisco. See
Northern California November
Calendar for event details.
About the winners,
from Intersection:
Kelly Luce is
the winner of the 2008 Danahy
Fiction Prize from Tampa
Review, and has published
fiction in North American
Review, The Gettysburg Review,
Fourteen Hills, Opium,
Nimrod, and
Alimentum. Her work has
also been recognized by a
fellowship to the MacDowell
Colony and a residency at Devil's
Tower National Monument.
Originally from Chicago, she
worked for two years in Japan.
She now lives in the Santa Cruz
mountains, where she divides her
time between writing and trying
to start fires in her wood stove.
She can be found online at Crazy
Pete's Blotter:
www.thecrazypetesblotter.blogspot.com.
The judges
said:
The three short stories that
comprise Kelly Luce's fiction
manuscript, "Ms. Yamada's
Toaster," are engaging feats of
imagination and awakening. In the
collection's title story,
divinity becomes as accessible as
a toasted piece of bread. "Cram
Island" takes karaoke to a place
beyond song while the last and
longest story, "Rooey," maps
intricate social and emotional
terrain. Each narrative
effectively challenges commonly
held beliefs and raises important
questions about the multi-layered
relationship between life and
death. As if "working a jigsaw
puzzle in the dark," Luce
masterfully threads ordinariness
through a focused lens, be it a
street, an alley, or a beer
bottle, with captivating results.
A fusion of magic and reality
dramatically expands the
possibilities of our human
existence. These stories do not
end with their last sentences but
rather they are a shore from
which the reader sets sail on a
journey of transformation. And it
is truly "a marvel for anyone who
care(s) to look."
Allison Benis
White's poems have
appeared in The Iowa Review,
Ploughshares, and
Pleiades, among other
journals. Her awards include the
Indiana Review Poetry
Prize, the Bernice Slote Award
from Prairie Schooner,
and a Writers Exchange Award from
Poets & Writers. Her
full-length manuscript,
Self-Portrait with
Crayon, recently received
the 2008 Cleveland State
University Poetry Center First
Book Award, and is forthcoming in
spring 2009. She is currently at
work on a second manuscript,
Small Porcelain Head,
and she teaches as a lecturer in
the English Department at the
University of California,
Irvine.
The judges
said:
In Allison Benis White's "Small
Porcelain Head" the panel of
judges found a seamless cycle of
poems that employ the figure of
the doll---as emblem, as
childhood nostalgia, as
subject/object for the human
figure, as locus for attachment,
detachment, and the careful way
one learns to love and to see
one's own human frailties in
another. Benis White's poetry
engages her reader by
simultaneously holding both the
physical and the abstract in
language that is deceptively
simple and beautifully
complex:
After our
fingers, we put our mouths to the
pain--a ceramic tongue broken off
like chalk.
As a child, I pressed my tongue
to my wrist to see what it would
be like to feel someone.
What should I do with my mind?
Think of the way it broke until
breaking is language.
Benis White employs a fresh
poetic voice, at once
experimental and still
accessible, giving a sense of
openness and possibility. "Small
Porcelain Head" was unanimously
selected as the 2008 James Duval
Phelan Literary Award winner by
this year's judges for both its
accomplishment and promise.
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News +
Notes, Joyce Jenkins, July 15,
2008
Alfred
Arteaga, 1950-2008
Alfred Arteaga, poet and
University of California Berkeley
Professor of Chicano and Ethnic
Studies, died of a heart attack
on July 4 at the age of
fifty-eight.
 A
groundbreaker in postcolonial and
ethnic minority literature
studies, a key early Chicano
movement poet, he will be
remembered, among much else, for
the creative fusion of his art
and his academic studies, and
among his students and colleagues
for a special sweetness,
receptiveness, and
accessibility.
Arteaga was born in Los
Angeles in 1950 and began writing
poetry at the age of eight,
loving music and words in their
twinings. He earned a M.F.A. in
Creative Writing from Columbia
University in 1974, a M.A. and
then a Ph.D. in Literature from
UC Santa Cruz in 1984 and 1987,
respectively, and arrived at UC
Berkeley in 1990 after three
years teaching in Houston.
His five books of poetry are
Frozen Accident (2006),
Zero Act (2006),
Red (2000), Love in the
Time of Aftershocks (1998),
and Cantos (1991). He won
a PEN Oakland/ Josephine Miles
Award in 1997 for his eclectic
book of essays House with the
Blue Bed, an unusual
collection of poems, literary and
artistic criticism, and personal
reflections, and he published,
right at the heart of his
concerns, a pioneering book of
literary theory, Chicano
Poetics: Heterotexts and
Hybridities, as well as the
collection of essays he edited,
An Other Tongue: Nation and
Ethnicity in the Linguistic
Borderlands.
"He was a very beautiful, a
very large-hearted generous human
being," says Laura Pérez,
a UC faculty-mate."He was loved
and respected by his students as
a caring mentor and by his
colleagues as a collegial man
with an easy laugh." She also
praises Frozen Accident as
his "masterpiece...very bold,
daring and successful." She
describes it as a book that
stages a dialogue between Western
and pre-Columbian philosophies
about meaning, truth, and the
afterlife. A long poem on
California as the last stop for
Western culture, published by Tia
Chucha Press, it echoes Dante in
its primary section,
"Nezahualcoyotl in Michtlan," a
trip to hell. Gilles Deleuze
wrote of Cantos,
"Something strikes me profoundly:
you are among those rare poets
who can draw into or cut from
their language a new language. A
new language in which roots and
sources would be heard."
In a beautiful evening of
Berkeley poetry, Alfred Arteaga
last read for Poetry Flash
at Black Oak Books on November
26, 2006. A sixth book of his
poetry will be published
posthumously. Campus memorial
services at UC Berkeley are being
planned for early fall.
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News
+ Notes, Joyce Jenkins, July 14,
2008
Welcome
to the
unveiling
of the PoetryFlashBlog. As often
as I can, I'll post news,
thoughts, poems,
reviews…whatever doesn't
make it into our print magazine.
At this moment it can't be
interactive, because of our
current technical limitations,
but hopefully in the future it
will be. For now, send me your
news and ideas at
editor@poetryflash.org. And
please try to be
patient---sometimes this is like
flying by flapping your
arms.
One of
the biggest surprises of this
summer of rapid change was the
sudden closing of Cody's Books in
downtown Berkeley on June 20.
Perhaps there were rumblings, but
even to most employees it was a
shock. After moving the Poetry
Flash Reading Series all over
town since the Telegraph Avenue
store closed in 2006, and moving
back to Cody's twice, once to
Fourth Street and finally to
downtown Berkeley, and watching
the number of books on the
shelves dwindle like fading
oxygen, the one strong feeling
that remains is that the book
will survive, damn it, poets and
writers and chewy syllables are
not going away. We'll find a way
and make the best of it---the
economy, the Internet, the book
as an object of nostalgia---all
of it. The Poetry Flash
series will continue with
spirited readings at the
marvelously vital Moe's Books,
the new anchor of Telegraph
Avenue, one Thursday evening each
month, and at Diesel, A
Bookstore, on College Avenue in
Oakland, monthly Sunday
afternoons this fall. Diesel is a
bookstore so intelligently run
that it practically beams. Just
to walk in these bookstores makes
my heart glad and I fall in love
with books all over again. It's
never over.
Spreading
the love wherever they go, it's
all over the Los Angeles book
world that the previously
mentioned Diesel folk, who
already have a cozy and
beautifully selected store in
Malibu, have announced plans to
start a new Diesel bookshop in a
1,500 square foot space in
Brentwood Country Mart, in the
Westside neighborhood still
grieving from the final closing
of Dutton's this past spring. And
just the thought that Skylight
Books in Los Feliz in LA and
Small World Books in Venice are
doing well is reassuring. I've
had the pleasure of sitting and
shuffling through books at both
of those stores, pulling down
favorites, comparing
translations, finding old friends
on the shelves and introducing
them to new readers (often my
patient and bookloving daughter).
Those have been some of the most
pleasurable moments of my life.
Like losing an afternoon at
Powell's Books in Portland, an
evening reading at Open Books,
the poem emporium, or a shiny
morning with coffee at Elliott
Bay Book Co. in
Seattle…
Down the
street from Cody's, Pegasus Books
on Shattuck Avenue also stopped
presenting their readings, but
for a much happier reason. The
mastermind of their poetry
series, Clay Banes, has moved to
his dream job, marketing at Small
Press Distribution, also in
Berkeley---he'll still be
nurturing small presses and
selling poetry and prose to indie
bookstores from his new nonprofit
base.
Our
first Poetry Flash reading
in a Cody's Free World will be
Sunday, August 3, 7:30, at Moe's
Books, 2476 Telegraph Avenue,
Berkeley. Richard Silberg,
Associate Editor of Poetry
Flash, will read his own work
with Chad Sweeney (co-editor of
Parthenon West Review and
editor of "Listening In," a
feature on MFA poetry in
Poetry Flash) and Jennifer
K. Sweeney, who are both leaving
San Francisco for the Midwest.
They will be missed.
Here's a
poem by Jerry Ratch, who will
read his poetry at the East Bay
JCC in north Berkeley, 1414
Walnut Street, July 23 at 7:00.
The more things change, the more
they remain the same?
Immolation
at Cody's Bookstore Reading
by
Jerry Ratch
A
man in the audience immolating
himself
cutting his leg over and over
with a pen knife
moaning: Oh God, oh God
Groaning, is more like
it
All
I can think from up at the podium
is
this guy must absolutely hate
these poems
I'm
reading from Puppet X, the first
time in public
for this long 60 page
admittedly somewhat
depressing
but very funny (if you give it a
chance)
book length series of
poems
This
guy must be ready to retch
right in the bookstore
he hates it so much
That is all I can
think
I
am mortified
I didn't think it was that
bad
This
is Berkeley, 1973, Telegraph
Avenue
Anything can happen. The war
keeps raging on
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