name check

D. A. Powell has hit the big time. He’s won awards, been the subject of adoring essays, publishes in very competitive venues, goes on reading tours. That sounds like the big time to me.

I don’t know how many books he sells. I hope he sells some. Doug is a poet. Poetry sales can’t hope to match a mid-list mystery novel. In poetry the big time isn’t big money. Still, he’s been noticed. 

Doug found his feet as a poet in the Sonoma County poetry scene about the same time I did. He’s not much older than me, so we were peers. Weren’t we? Despite the smallness of the scene I don’t remember running into Doug much. I’m sure we had poet friends and acquaintances in common. 

It’s not easy to get around Sonoma County without a car. I didn’t have access to one, except when my mother would drive me somewhere — and, for a brief period, I got to use her old car after she bought a newer one. I was fortunate in that the Russian River Writers Guild based its reading series in Sebastopol, where I lived, and getting to it was a walk of about ten minutes. 

One of the organizers of the Russian River Writers Guild, Mo Hurley, has set up a blog for RRWG memorabilia. Going through a box of old papers last week I came across some copies of The Obligatory Hug, the RRWG newsletter. One of the Hugs wasn’t represented on the blog, so I snapped images of it and posted them.

In that Hug there’s a calendar of the reading series Doug Powell ran at a cafe in downtown Santa Rosa. I was never invited to read there, but many of the names are of people I knew well. I don’t remember if I ever attended. (See above about lack of transportation.) Since these poets would read in Sebastopol, maybe arranging to get to Santa Rosa didn’t seem necessary. 

In other words, Doug and I never really hung out. As he began to make a name for himself in the national poetry scene, I took for granted that Doug had no memory of me. 

Besides the RRWG blog Mo has set up a memorial blog for Marianne Ware, another RRWG stalwart, a self-declared mother figure for SoCo writers, and an instructor at Santa Rosa’s community college. Marianne was a sweetheart, and a fine performer of her own, often hilarious, writing. 

Reading through reminiscences at the Ware blog, I was surprised to find myself name-checked. By D. A. Powell. 

[Marianne Ware, Doug writes, was o]ne of the first of many passionate and gifted poets I met in Sonoma County. Donna Champion brought me to the Russian River Writers Guild for a holiday party, and introduced me to Maureen Hurley, Glenn Ingersoll, Paul Mariah and Marianne. I was nervous & young, and whatever poem I shared with the group that night was, I'm sure, crap. But Marianne, a gracious and nurturing presence, smiled and told me how wonderful the poem was. 

Wait, I remember the poem now! It's in a drawer somewhere, if I haven't burned it. Yes, it truly was crap.

I remember reading a manifesto Doug wrote, championing a new poetics — Badism. Write crap! Don’t be ashamed. Own it. 

Maybe, by 2010 when he wrote the note about Marianne, Doug had eschewed his old Badism beliefs. After all, he’d hit the big time with good stuff!

source: http://marianneware.blogspot.com/2010/06/class-act.html

“An accomplishment in a teacup”

John Oliver Simon wrote a book dealing with his daddy issues. We all have them! In Neither of Us Can Break the Other’s Hold John includes letters from his father. Dad isn’t in favor of the poetry thing. He wants his son to have a better life than that. Dad wants John to be ambitious, materially, at least. That’s what success is, right? 

When I was a teen and into my early 20s I was Depressed. I remember visiting my mother’s old friends, Jean and Lee. Lee was trying to figure me out. I said something about just wanting to be happy. Exasperated by this response, Lee said, “Any skid row bum can be happy!” They can? You mean, the key to happiness is to be a skid row bum? I couldn’t imagine that being the way to happiness, and suggesting that happiness was something anybody could get easily, even when they were barely getting by, seemed … contrary to my experience.

What does make a life? What makes a life worth living? In this excerpt from one of the letters, John’s father seems to have a Lee-like attitude toward happiness. It’s not enough! 

Your mother once said she’d be satisfied if you became a truck driver or any other sort of blue collar man, so long as you were happy, at peace with yourself. But I couldn’t agree then, or now. You have taken steps upward over me — Phi Beta Kappa, an athlete’s letter in college. And I gather you have some standing among the poetry followers of the Bay Area. Good.

But that reminds me unhappily of Rena Eisenkramer. Rena was a housewife in Pine Bluff, a friend and contemporary of my mother’s. But she was beset by the devils of ambition beyond her capacities. She wanted to be a song-writer — popular songs rhyming moon and June. Nobody would publish her songs so she got printed by a vanity publisher and the ladies of the Jewish congregation of Pine Bluff ooh’d and ah’d over her songs very politely. She persuaded my father, then owner of the town’s major movie house with occasional live acts, to persuade a singer … to sing her songs in public, and the local paper had a story about Mrs. Eisenkramer’s prowess as a song-writer. An accomplishment in a teacup.

The story about Rena Eisenkramer is clearly meant as a cautionary tale — the moral of the story is not to … what? Not to do everything you can think of to honor your commitment to your art, certainly not if that means paying for the printing of it yourself or calling in favors from the local theater owner and the town weekly? In the face of rejection from the establishment industry you should just nod and accept their wise judgment? Yeah, that’s the idea. Letting your ambitions exceed your capabilities is crazy! You should leave music to the professionals. You should leave painting and dancing and poetry to the professionals — people who know how to do it, people who know how it’s really to be done. Which is … ?

source: Neither of Us Can Break the Other’s Hold: poems for my father

by John Oliver Simon

1981. Shameless Hussy Press, Berkeley CA

David Trinidad dishes on my teachers

I had three poet-teachers at UC Berkeley back in the early 90s: Robert Hass, Lyn Hejinian, and John Ash. David Trinidad in his Notes on a Past Life works through a lot of grief and resentment over his life in New York City. He names names and exposes his feelings: sometimes overwhelmed, sometimes jealous, wounded, hopeful, shy, ambitious, proud. Among the names who get unfriendly mentions are two of my Cal teachers. 

From “Lost Illusions”:

“John Ash (who Tim [Dlugos] detests),

… is so plastered

he falls out of his chair

onto the floor, spilling his drink

on himself. Unfazed, he keeps

talking, cigarette hand 

waving in my direction.”

From “Susan takes me to the Academy of American Poets”:

“I remember it as a series

of flashes, each more grim

than the last. …

… John Ash. I smile

expecting recognition (we’ve

met on several occasions),

but he just glowers at me.”

John Ash was the visiting Holloway Lecturer in 1993 when I was a student at Cal. Do I remember him drinking? I guess I do. We had a class get-together off campus and I do remember John getting rather sloshed. He was hardly the only drinker I knew. I enjoyed having him as a teacher. I loved his poetry, and, as a young gay man, it was pretty cool having a gay poet as a mentor.

In researching this blog post I discovered that John Ash died in December. Oh! Six months ago. That set me back. 

From “Joe”:

“… when Eileen [Myles] was directing

the Poetry Project, she paired me

with Lyn Hejinian (something

perverse there). That was a tough

reading. …

My usually crowd-pleasing Supremes

poem was met with stony indifference.”

Lyn Hejinian was the Holloway Lecturer the year before John Ash. I liked her, too! While I wish I had kept some connection with John, I have managed a friendly, if infrequent, acquaintance with Lyn. It helps that Lyn lives in Berkeley — a mere block away from the Berkeley Public Library’s Claremont Branch, where I work. In my experience Lyn is generous and open, even if she does have definite opinions. I find her work sharp and engaging. I would have been thrilled to attend that Poetry Project reading. 

What can you say?   

source: Notes on a Past Life

by David Trinidad

2016. BlazeVOX Books, Buffalo NY

Scott Lipanovich

The ex-coworker and writer who recommended Michael Chabon was named Scott Lipanovich. Scott also recommended Robert Stone’s Dog Soldiers and Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine. I read and liked both books. (I do remember being annoyed by the publisher calling Love Medicine a novel as it was clearly a book of short stories.) Now & then over the years I’ve popped Scott’s name into a search engine in hopes of seeing his writing or a publication announcement or something. You see, I never did get a chance to read Scott’s work and I’ve always been curious. My latest search results provide some Lipanovich news. According to an article in SonomaCounty.com Scott has curated an art collection for the eight year old Doyle library. (The Doyle replaced the Plover Library where I worked as a student employee):

[T]he Doyle Library now houses The Doyle Collection, a clutch of 80 artworks by 52 artists, all of who[m] worked either as staff or faculty at the JC since the college’s art department was established in 1950.

Covering 1.5 acres of wall space on the third and fourth floors, these artworks — there are two sculptures, the rest [are] framed — represent the output of the cream of Sonoma County artists for the past 60-plus years and include such surprising names as California funk artist Robert Arneson, painter Maurice Lapp, and the great North Coast naturalist Larry Thomas.

The Doyle Collection is a labor of love curated by library technician Scott Lipanovich, who amassed the donated art works solely at his own expense and during his own volunteer time over the course of two-and-a-half years.

“We have this great building, great natural light, and abundance of flat spaces on the walls,” Lipanovich explains. “It seems only natural to create a great art collection.”

The bohemian.com has another article on Scott’s project:

All the art had to have been made by SRJC faculty and staff who were at the college from 1950 or later. As there was no budget for the project, the work had to be donated. If the artist was alive, he or she would bear the cost of framing; if the artist was not, Lipanovich invariably ended up paying for it himself.

…

He has also been happy to spend Friday through Sunday for nearly three years visiting artists, spending full days viewing their life's work, and coaxing donations. "We only had about seven donation-donations," Lipanovich estimates. "Usually," he smiles, "it was a pursuit."

Such pursuits normally included food and conversation, and perhaps a new friendship. Not a bad way to spend one's long weekends, actually.

"The best part of doing this was the donors," Lipanovich says, referring to the artists he met. "Spending time with the donors and just having lunch. Hanging out. The donors are great."

I have not visited the Doyle Library. The Plover Library must have been torn down in favor of the Doyle. So there’s that you-can’t-go-home-again. I wonder if you can still find the VHS tape of my graduation speech in the collection.

Oh, and Scott? Nice arms!

photo credit: Sara Sanger / Bohemian.com

“Boundaries” by D.L. Emblen

Boundaries


The old telephone stand in the corner
takes me away, behind the wheel again:
all the way across the continent
when we came West,
the car loaded to the gunnels
and the spindly little stand
tied upsidedown on the front bumper,
its turned legs sticking up like antlers.
Day after day, I saw the new lands
through the opening between those legs.
Even now, I know that Iowa is very square,
bounded on the north and south by mahogany
and open to the sky.


-- D.L. Emblen


#

Don’s books have only ever been small editions. And he rarely has poems in magazines. I wanted there to be a Don Emblen poem on the web somewhere. Just so someone could see one who might want to.

“Boundaries” is from Notes from Travels.