| 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.
RETURN
TO TOP
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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.
RETURN
TO TOP
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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.
RETURN
TO TOP
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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.
RETURN
TO TOP
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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.
RETURN
TO TOP
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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).
RETURN
TO TOP
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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.
RETURN
TO TOP
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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.
RETURN
TO TOP
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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.
RETURN
TO TOP
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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.
RETURN
TO TOP
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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.
RETURN
TO TOP
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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
RETURN
TO TOP
|
