Professional Documents
Culture Documents
43
berkeley poet ry review
43
Berkeley Poetry Review Issue 43
Berkeley Poetry Review is published annually with grants and support from the
Associated Students of the U niversity of California and private donations.
Email: bpreditors@gmail.com
Website: http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~bpr
Berkeley Poetry Review
Extending the understanding: just as one might hear ?in Berkeley? in two
ways, so might one hear this phrase. Extending the understanding could
amount to simply adding to its contents? lengthening the list of known
propositions, putting more jars on the shelf. O r it might amount, on a more
literal interpretation, to stretching it further into real and imagined space,
widening the boundaries of the map of what can be known. In the T heatetus,
Socrates proposes an analogy between the mind and an aviary. T he idea is that
there are different senses in which one can retain an article of knowledge, or of
ignorance; if an article resides in the mind as a bird does in the aviary, then it
seems possible that one could enter the aviary to retrieve a particular article but
emerge, mistakenly, with another. H e eventually discards the analogy, but it
seems fitting as a means to describe a collection of disparate literary works
from a diverse, and commanding, group of writers. T hese poems, whether
they say true or false things or simply furnish sensations, form a rambunctious
zoo of thought inside what might be described as a hive mind. T his is not true
of every collection of poems: there are plenty of inert and unthinking poems
out there, too. But I stand behind each of these poems for their continuation of
the editorial mission of the Experimental Review, which seems to have lingered
in the air at Berkeley. Whatever their topics and tones, they succeed, I think, at
extending the understanding: adding birds to the cage, or enlarging it.
Sometimes, too, they rend it; other times, they seek its destruction.
T his issue includes, serendipitously, a glimpse into the history of this
particular cage. Berkeley Poetry Review founder Rob Sean W ilson and I have
curated a small selection of archival documents from the journal's early days.
T hey are presented with prefatory comments by us both. I should point out
that this issue's very first page is a facsimile of the title page of the journal's first
issue, modified and signed by W ilson for this issue. Beyond these explanatory
notes, I will let the documents speak for themselves; besides being of ?mere?
historical interest they will, I hope, give some insight into the energies that
brought the journal into existence.
Also noteworthy about this edition is its several longer pieces. When I
first toyed with the idea of including more such pieces than might usually
appear in a journal like this one, I noticed in myself a little resistance? an
editor's tic, unremarkable in itself, of worrying that this or that thing will take
ii
up too much space. But now that I have undone some of my acquired myopia
it seems to me strange? puzzling, even? that longer poems, poems that
require their readers to think beyond the space of a page or a few pages, do not
appear more frequently in mainstream publications. A few explanations of
competing simplicity are available: they are not being written; they are not
being published; when they are written and published, they are not read, or, at
any rate, not read as often as their briefer counterparts. I suspect that a
combination of all of these causes has conspired to exclude the long poem
from the everyday conception of what a poem is; but I also suspect that
something of the climate of reductionism, wittingly and unwittingly cynical,
that hankers for what contributor Lyn H ejinian has described as small, perfect
?gems? of poems has contributed to the scarcity of a practice that asks, in
general (though certainly not necessarily), for more sustained thought and
attention from readers and for more argumentative and aesthetic risks taken by
writers. A few important qualifications are in order. T he first is that longer
poems do not, solely in virtue of being longer, avoid the pitfalls of their shorter
counterparts; some do succumb to them. T he second is that the longest poems
included here are dwarfed by the hallmark ?long poems? of the English verse
tradition? so they might be seen, then, not as examples of vanguards of the
form but as movements away from the reigning standard of the poem as gem,
origami crane, or cut rose. All of this is not to say that a poem may not be any
of these things, that there is anything wrong with gems, origami cranes, and
cut roses. T hese may be valuable aesthetic objects. But the concept of the
poem ought not to be exhausted by them.
Robert Pinsky once wrote, somewhat self-deprecatingly, that he was
drawn to poetry rather than other written forms because he got bored more
easily than most people. ?T hat is why I like poetry,? he writes in the
introduction to his poem ?Impossible to Tell? in the anthology T his Is My
Best, ?because it moves so quickly: one second you are talking to the Western
W ind and thinking about the small rain, then suddenly it's 'Christ!' and then
immediately after that it's wanting to be in bed with my love again.? Poems
swap incisors for the molars of novels; they puncture and tear rather than mill
and grind. Ars longa, vita brevis: one wants to get to the heart of things while
there is still time. Yet the idea that poems offer condensed what novels offer
sprawling should, I think, be tempered with the caveat that the comparative
incisiveness of poems and novels is not strictly a matter of length or form but of
the quality of a work's attention, of its intensity. T hink of a novel like To the
Lighthouse, its pages lit throughout by lightning-strikes of social and
psychological insight, many as seemingly capricious to the characters whose
thoughts they are as to the readers who receive Woolf's charged reports of
them.
T here may yet be a difference between the prose of To the Lighthouse
and properly ?poetic? writing (the latter, one might suggest, is in principle
more preoccupied with the machinery of language as such, even if it also cares
to describe experience), but the point here is that the lumens of a focused
attention need not be more at home in a poem than in a novel, or vice versa.
T his leads to another, albeit roundabout, reason for my inclusion of several
iii
longer series in the journal. I have endeavored to choose poems that justify
themselves? that, to stick with the ?lumens? metaphor, keep the bulbs lit? at
every point in traversing them, that tend to produce beautiful or provocative
figurations not only for their own sakes or for pleasure, that engage in poetry
not as pastime or frivolity but as part and parcel of the activity of
understanding. Pleasure seems an important goal of art, but I suspect that not a
little sap is taken out of the defense of the worth of artistic pursuits if no other
goal can be found to supplement it. I have done my best to select poems that
do not take up the resources of poetry as mere accessories to understanding,
but which see that some problems and questions? many having to do with
giving an accurate phenomenology of experience, including the experience of
confronting what are often taken to be strictly ?intellectual? questions? call
for, maybe even necessitate, those resources in order to even begin to be
adequately dealt with. T his is what I understand by the work that poetry can
do to ?extend the understanding.?
And yet this work will often fail, or produce imperfect fruit, or
otherwise disappoint. In T he Long Schoolroom, Allen Grossman, the
recently-deceased giant of American poetics whose poem ?T he Piano Player
Explains H imself? is reprinted here, tells of reading one morning in a public
library to discover ?how poetry comes to be.? T his leads him to Bede's story of
Caedmon, ?the first poet in English who has a name.? T hen he says: ?M y
intuition was then, as it is now, that valid poetry comes to be only when the
man or woman with work to do has exhausted all means other than poetic for
doing the work that needs to be done.? I agree; and I suspect that what
Grossman describes as ?the bitter logic of the poetic principle?? the fact, if it
is one, that any poem will inevitably betray the impulse that gave rise to it by
distorting it through the structures and institutions (one thinks here of
N ietzsche's ?prison house?) of language, the very medium the poem depends
on for its actualization? is an apt characterization of the fate of aesthetic aims
more generally. While this is a saddening state of affairs, I also suspect that its
inescapability is less a reason to abandon those aims, or to relinquish in
frustration what incomplete understanding they do give us, than to knuckle
down and forge ahead. T his struggle may actually be a mark of sublimity. As
H elen Vendler writes of Stevens's later poems, ?effort, undone by fate and
successful only in fantasy, is finally the quintessential definition of life as art,
and the product, the poem, in order to be sublime, must remind us always of
the effortful process that gave it birth.? Bitter principles need not lead only to
embitterment.
While addressing (?recovering? is too decisive a word; ?addressing?
has all the right connotations of speech and transcription) the illnesses that
caused the release of this issue to be delayed for several years, I not infrequently
found myself turning to poetry. T here is something about venturing into the
world again after an episode of illness that causes even the trappings of ordinary
life to appear alien, absurd, not to be trusted: one's self, one's home, the public
sphere. And there is something about poetry that, in its reproductions and
reconfigurations, combats that alienness, something that shores up the
intelligibility of the world as a whole. It seems intellectually unfashionable to
iv
talk of art as therapy; but therapy, it is worth noting, has its intellectual
projects, one of which is the project of self-understanding. Like Pinsky, I
admit I found myself sometimes attracted to poetry because it seemed to offer a
speedier, if more haphazard, route to understanding? especially on those
occasions when I felt that the uncertainty of the future made it wise to invest
in what could be more quickly obtained. O n other occasions, when the
waning of time was less of a concern (though it was never more than
something I temporarily wrestled to the back of my mind), poetry offered
another cabinet of balms: within it, the satisfaction of an aesthetic experience
that borrowed from any area of life or study, without compunction, whenever
it saw fit. T he conception of art as therapy is not unique. T herapeutic
conceptions of philosophy, in one sense or other, can be found at least as far
back as Epicurus and as recently as W ittgenstein. By ?therapy? I do not mean
simply the provision of comfort, nor by ?comfort? simply a feeling of security.
By ?therapy? I mean the endeavor to make some sense, however vague or
piecemeal, of where we are now, at this moment, in this world; by ?comfort? I
mean only the notion that, wherever we are, we are not quite as lost as before.
We have a better sense of how to go on, of how to write the next line.
I am as grateful to my contributors for their patience and kindness as
the issue was brought to publication as I am for their pieces. For support and
advice I thank M ike Cassady, April Chan, Danni Gorden, K atie H indenlang,
Bryce T hornburg, and Rob Sean W ilson; I also thank Yaul Perez-Stable and
Andrew Reyes. For assistance with correspondence pertaining to the issue I
thank R achel Feldman, Samantha N ichols, and Jules Wood; for his editorial
input, I thank Chiang M an H in. And I thank my family, without whom I
would be nothing.
Editor-in-Chief
Berkeley, Aptos, and Hayward, California
April 2016
v
dedicated to the memoriesof
Leonard J. Cirino
&
Allen Grossman
Table of Contents
Editor'snote i
[a selection of artworks] 67
Temblor
1
Corey M esler
2
Wesleigh Anderson
Autostadt
Rest assured that every precaution has been taken to ensure the safety of you
and your children,
from the first step you took inside the boundaries of the mini electric car
course at LernPark,
such as this eclectic selection of vibrantly painted but otherwise identical
electric cars,
the colors of which it is strongly recommended that parents and guardians take
careful note,
so that you will know where and who your children are at all times while they
are on the track,
because at great distances children are like colors that bleed and become
indistinguishable,
and are also like colors that have a tendency to escape the eye when even
briefly disregarded,
and only watchfulness can keep you safe from all of these undesirable fears,
which children will tell you are like colors that become real only when they are
believed in,
for although care has been taken to protect your children from the drab and
colorless outside world,
and although all available resources have been employed to make LernPark a
place of stimulation and exploration,
it is possible to lose sight of the brightness of these colored cars and the bright
electric blue sky above them,
and to fall prey instead to frantic delusions of conspiratorial grey factories and
achromatic machineries,
somehow imperceptible except from obscure angles and an uncontrollable
imagination,
which purport to expose some truth about the superficiality of the color of
these cars,
but while the utter implausibility of these inventions is self-evident to all
attentive parents,
and LernPark's promotional materials clearly show that no such factory is
present,
and there is nothing in these photographs that contradicts your children's
colorful electric cars,
and therefore such imaginings are no more than an incredible and childlike
fancy,
3
being alerted to these possibilities will assist you in maintaining caution,
for even the most vigilant may be seduced into occasional inattentiveness,
when even the smallest and most unwarranted unease may become just real
enough to threaten.
4
[redacted at author's request]
5
[redacted at author's request]
6
[redacted at author's request]
7
Angel Dominguez
Vestibule 1a
8
Dwellprints#1
9
Allen Grossman
Oh the PlacesYou'll Go
Popeyes, Boston M arket, Starbucks, Arby?s,
Panera, Cinnabon, and Au Bon Pain.
Q uiznos, Togo?s, Subway, Blimpie, H ardee?s
(Carl?s Jr.), Papa M urphy?s, Auntie Anne?s.
Taco Bell, Del Taco, Taco M ayo,
Baskin Robbins, Ben and Jerry?s, Dairy Q ueen.
Taco John?s, Chipotle, Taco Bueno,
Whataburger, Burger Chef, and Burger K ing.
Benihana, Denny?s, Wendy?s, Baja Fresh.
Sizzler, Chevys, Chili?s, Church?s Chicken.
Little Caesar?s, KFC, Seattle?s Best.
Cold Stone, California Pizza K itchen.
W ingstop, I H OP, Checkers, In-N -O ut.
Weinerschnitzel, Wetzel?s Pretzels, Waffle H ouse.
11
Mark Me
12
Robert H ass
Second Person
T hat summer, after your friend had shot herself the previous N ovember in her
backyard garden? it was the morning after T hanksgiving?
And after the sudden death from cancer of another friend, a prose writer, who
had been living in Italy with his fourth wife
And seemed after a long struggle to be working suddenly at the top of his
form, you had left off writing a tribute to be read at the memorial service
For the one friend in order to go to the hospital to visit the writer, who was
also your wife?s first husband
And who, it was clear, his family gathered around him, his new Italian wife
and children from two marriages,
Cancer was finishing off, a fact which he seemed to regard with bitter clarity,
almost with contempt.
H e?d had a gift for expecting the worst, and here was the thing itself, he was
leaving behind a beautiful woman and an unfinished book
And the silver green of wheat fields in the U mbrian dusk. H e had liked coffee,
fussed over its preparation, loved the high gloss of the leather on Italian shoes.
You did get your brief memorial talk written, and delivered it, mourning in a
room full of mourners, mostly her friends,
M ostly people in middle age and late middle age and so getting newly
accustomed to the frequency of memorial services,
And, yourself new also to this experience? not of death? but of a subtle,
though not that day that subtle, acceleration in the occasions for mourning,
You felt death there in the wood-paneled room with its elegant, coffered
ceiling, its busts of authors and composers, its bookshelves where,
13
You saw suddenly, the dead were sleeping like the princess in the fairy tale, and
could be awakened and set speaking by the caress of attention,
Someone opening a book, felt death, that is, to be a somber and dignified
presence, a figure of some authority, not a funeral director exactly,
M ore like the respected principal of an honorable but famously formal school,
or even a valet, a gentleman?s gentleman
Who was older than you and wiser and understood all the forms of the world?s
etiquettes and had acquired the habit of waiting patiently
While people experienced themselves, because they were, after all, living and
death wasn?t,
So it also occurred to you that death must watch the living live the way some
dogs watch humans at their feasts,
And afterwards your own life continued according to its various contingencies
And you found yourself in Paris in the O deon neighborhood on a little street
near the medical school with its loud, late cafes and bars
For the students and interns getting off work at the hospital, so you did not
sleep well but woke anyway to fulfill the promise you had made
Reviewing his fleet. And this is why you needed the second person singular, to
describe the mornings walking up R ue de Q uatre Vents to the Café M airé
O f tropical flowers, to your coffee and the view onto Saint-Sulpice, and, a line
at a time, N eruda?s poem. You could have said, ?T hat summer
After my friend had shot herself? or ?T hat summer after his friend had shot
herself,? but it was you who walked the streets those mornings,
14
Wavering a bit among the other grammatical propositions as you woke to the
early summer coolness in the air,
You studying the piles of fruit in the little markets and the gilded Empire
sewing chairs in the antique shops,
You lingering over the shop specializing in anthropological texts with its
sheets, torn probably from old books, to be sold separately, of cannibals from
Borneo
And high-necked, barebreasted N ubian queens, because you had the strong
sense that death was tending it all,
Where Gertrude Stein had spent her days writing sentences like ?Tea towels
aren?t necessarily?,
Past the small hotel across the square from Saint-Sulpice where Stein put up
T horton W ilder when he visited and where, now,
T he young woman brought her green wooden wagon piled high with white
and blue irises to sell separately or in bunches?
What is it about irises that makes you want to describe a sheaf of them as
?lithe,?as if they were longlegged young women bathing together
After a round of golf or tennis? you were in that sort of neighborhood, and
wondered briefly how the day
M ight have been different, been colored differently, were the woman at the
wagon old and M orroccan with dark brown, well-worn hands
And you did not have a Spanish dictionary, so after you had done a morning?s
work, had written in long hand
N ext to the Spanish text, ?its incessant red waters would come to flood, and it
would ring out with shadows, ring out like death?,
15
You would gather up your books and walk back down R ue Valmont to Q uatre
Vents and then to R ue Princesse and the Village Voice bookshop
Where you knew O dile and M ichael would not mind if you went upstairs into
the alcove of foreign language dictionaries
And began, as you walked, to notice the young men from the suburbs ,
M artiniquean or Senegalese, Arabic-looking, perhaps Algerian or Tunisian,
And the young Vietnamese, sweeping the street in front of the restaurants that
catered to the well-off folk of the arrondissement and to visitors like you,
T hat the children of the proprietors didn?t want to cook anymore, and you
thought of the young black men in your country,
Shot by police in a train station after a scuffle, or shot coming home from a late
trip to an all-night convenience store
And you wondered about the mothers in the Parisian suburbs, in what
uniforms or regalia death appeared to them when their sons went out into the
night,
And you felt mildly sick, thinking about the courtesies of death and the sense
of propriety with which it distributed its presence in the world, social class
By social class, war zone by war zone, brutal here, gentle there, as if you were
being wakened again by and to an unfairness
As labyrinthine as the city itself, whose districts, whose boulevards and alleys,
gardens and arcades, you wandered in the afternoons
And so you came more and more to look forward to the quiet mornings with
the poems,
Looking up different words each day, taking N eruda a line at a time? ?with a
sound like dreams or branches or the rain?,
16
?and the great wings of the sea would wheel round you.? By the middle of July
it was hot and you walked long hours in the city
And by eight o?clock? you had begun living in time? when you came back to
the neighborhood of Saint-Germaine-de-Prè,
And you would sit at one of the outdoor tables and the proprietor would set
down in front of you, with a delicate glassy sound,
A chilled glass of Lillet, the proprietor was not death, nor was the Lillet, nor
the handsome couple at the next table ordering grilled river fish.
17
Yaul Perez-Stable H usni
Self-Portrait
18
rob mclennan
1.
2.
3.
19
K aren An-hwei Lee
Breath of Spiracles
in their abdomens.
20
Songof Black Sage
I am wild sage
soothing
ravenous bees
21
Janis Butler H olm
Sound Poems
Q uantify the stillness of the grackle and the cubbyhole. M ust she hustle
citronella for their appliqué? Fugitive percussionists have ravaged all the booster
seats. R arely does our urban curry disrespect his verse. Enter holographic
O ne could safely postulate a sea of forks and engine blocks. Which of these
22
II
23
III
24
IV
25
V
repurpose her mystique. From the get-go, wedding planners cradled our
26
M ary-Catherine Jones
T he longdrive
We weren?t looking for apples / not in the market for orbs / we were more
the line types / unmeasured, a snore in rewind / we weren?t looking for apples.
T he orb? think gold / Grand Central clock stirring / energy, the stories
around her? backscatter. T hen the curious / yes: face to folded clothes / in
suitcase, your own: to discover that personal / smell that everyone but you / can
smell. Recall / the hitting of the sack, slaking / the fisherman star? / we the
lines, discussed / unscripted, all texture? there are pros and cons you
know? / and until the apples we weren?t / looking for? persimmon, pear, the
sting / of sonnet 18? the fruit softening.
27
Peony
28
A Short Essay on Priestsand Kissing
Iconographers didn?t
sign their work. T hey
created in the service
of the church. M aybe
they didn?t want
anyone to know they
could inhabit deadpan.
M aybe they preferred
the pierced organ,
sanguine, or they,
maybe the cathedral of
Chartres, one stroke
at a time.
T he priest?s passion
was infectious. H e spit
like a baby first
learning plosives. T he
projector, his backlit
saliva? this brought us
back from slides
hypnotic in round
29
darkness... the magic
remote? clicking
casually through
history? he, like a
hungry young man
at a jukebox.
Caravaggio?s Doubting
T homasis a literary
work he said. We
wanted Caravaggio?
anyone? to also be
present. N ot just
Christ alone. God no.
We stared into scores
of poker-faced
M adonnas
and Emmanuels. H e
spoke of the Person
we were invited to
encounter urging us to
Look closely.
30
Robert Peake
ReadingJamesJoyce At T he Berkeley
Marina
31
R aúl Z urita
What isParadise?
32
¿Qué esel Paraíso?
34
¿Q ué es entonces el Paraíso?
El cielo ha sido desde siempre el lugar que hemos ido llenando con las
carencias de la vida. Como tantos, despojado, el año 1975 inicié mi trabajo
entendido como una práctica para el Paraíso, no para el cielo vacío. El inicio de
su camino se abre con el acto de haber quemado mi cara porque todavía no era
posible marcar el cielo con el hecho corregido de nuestras vidas, pero en el
documento de esa quemada se relaciona este acto con las estrellas de la noche.
Yo sé (y mis amigos también) que cuando podamos rediseñar nuestros trabajos
y por ende romper con cualquier obligación al servilismo físico o mental,
todos? muertos y vivos? podremos por fin revertir nuestras carencias y por
ende corregir el cielo. Ese es el camino de mi vida, como uno más repetido, el
Inferno, el Purgatorio y el Paradiso del M ein K ampf de R aúl Z urita (y este
título es apenas una pequeña, ínfima metáfora del Inferno). Allí también se
menciona el amor, aunque creo que es mejor no insistir en esa palabra, al
menos por ahora.
Pero la nueva marca en el cielo, no en la cara, ese será el Paraíso.
35
D. A. Powell
T he Sundial
36
N a H ui-Dok
City Treasury
We have no land
Where can I meet you? Every moment, see the buried graves
38
?? ????
???
??? ??? ???
-? ??? ??? ????
???? ?? ??
??? ??? ?? ??? ????
???? ??? ?? ??
?? ???? ? ?? ????
??? ?? ? ??,
??? ??? ?? ???? ??? ??
??? ?? ?? ??? ??? ??
? ? ? ? ,? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?
???? ??
??? ??? ???
??? ???? ???? ???
??? ?? ?? ????? ???
?? ?? ?? ?? ?????
? ? ? ? ? , 4.19? ? ? ?
?? ???? ??? ? ????
??? ? ??? ?? ?? ?? ??? ? ???
???? ?? ??
?? ??? ?? ? ?? ????
??? ??? ???
39
David M offat
Gopher Wood
40
Daniel W.K. Lee
Beginnings
By SM S, an angel withdrew?
41
M argaret R hee
THE
U N I V ER SI T Y
D R EA M S
T here are whispers, shouts. Cuts will be made. N ow, heads roll.
42
I.
II.
Students are at the building. T hey stand on the building?s rooftop between
heaven and hell. M ore important than midterm essays. M ore important than
?campus life.? T he U niversity is not a machine, he reminds the other. T he
U niversity is unclean, she responds.
III.
T he U niversity?s Dean picks up the phone. Before it all, she asks her staff
member, what is the bastard department and where is it located? She gets the
number and the location but not the history. Phone in her hand, she asks her
assistant, have you been dieting? She sets down a bowl of chocolate sweets with
her other. T hen she dials, and after a few seconds, cordially says hello.
I V.
V.
VI.
T he U niversity lives on. So all the staff gets cut and goes. T he U niversity lives
on as the number of email announcements grows. T he first time T he
U niversity really reaches out for the purpose of, well, reaching in. T hen T he
43
U niversity whispers. H aunts. N o sweet nothings. T he U niversity is not a baby
doll nor soft like cotton candy. T he U niversity is not a tulip blossom nor sweet
as a lollipop. Does T he U niversity dream?
VII.
T he activists hear of the news. T hey know T he U niversity has strayed from
T he School of Dreams. T he U niversity trembles when the activists meet, even
when T he U niversity with all her power, doesn?t know where where. O r
there there.
VIII.
T he activists collectively agree that they will not protest with just one
bullhorn, but together, a singular voice. T hey are the waste. Even if they
don?t desire to be. T he queers, colored, the poor, the undocumented, the
gendered. All around and in between.
I_N _T _E_R _S_E_C_T _I_O _N _A_L_I_T _Y
IX .
T he activists agree they will not protest in front of the building. But agree
they will partner with Anonymous and make virtual waste. I know you.
You?re goingto do some crazy technological stuff to make a point! T he waste
gathers in the room. For a moment all stop talking organizing hope into
action? it?s a natural lull. In this moment of time and space, two of them kiss.
It is true. Student-activists also fall in love.
X.
X I.
X II.
T he activists will set up tents. T hey will stay there until they die. U ntil T he
U niversity saves them. W ill T he U niversity?
X III.
T he U niversity does not bleed. It does not shit. It does not do anything that it
says it will. It pulls professor?s hair, jabs students in the ribs, holds janitors
without pay. T he U niversity scares the undocumented students to never bear
their hearts. U niversity, you promised to be good to me? You promised to be
kind, till death do us part. Till death do us part.
X I V.
X V.
X VI.
T he U niversity has a space of refuge, around the corner, in the margins of the
lined paper. Come here, come to my breast, T he U niversity sighs, let me hold you for
a minute, dear child. T he U niversity heaves knowing what she had done. And
we huddle in because there is no one else around.
45
X VII.
X VIII.
Education spending:
Prison spending:
Do the math.
X IX .
XX.
T he student-activists land in jail. No, she says, they don?t belonghere. We must
beat them to teach them. H ow dare they try to realize a university that is free?
T he U niversity and T he Prison are illicit lovers. In the night they whisper
together. T hey are one. And they make one another tick tock tick.
X X I.
But activists also love. T his love feels good. Make a banner together, raise those
fists. Let me paint your fist red so our banner can bear your imprint. We?re goingto make
a banner together. We?re goingto make it good. So good.
X X II.
T he student-activists ran when the police came. T his will be a problem. But
the real problem and solution is when they came to stay. T he U niversity smiles
but only when it gets fat. T he U niversity I loved, T he U niversity I hated. You
dichotomousdevil, you. T he U niversity groans again and again at this very word,
characterization. T his stanza.
46
* & ^%$
T he student-activists are made of flesh. T heir hearts are all ventricles and
pump. In comparison, T he U niversity feels envy. Like the strawman, the
tinman, the lion; T he U niversity wants a brain, a heart, and courage. T he
U niversity desperately wants to fall in love.
OLP.
POL .
To qualify, within T he U niversity there are good ones. Good professors, good
students, good janitors, who all want to make it better. But T he U niversity has
the tendency to forget them once they?re in. H ow can you make up with T he
U niversity, whose terms are so impossible? I tried and I tried, the
student-activist shares, I really did everything I could. T he U niversity seems to
disagree. T he therapist tsked with her tongue. Inside her head, she?s thinking,
this is a really mismatched pairing. And later in private, even though she?s not
supposed to, she says to the student-activist, don?t worry you?ll be fine when
this is all done.
LLL .
Ethnic Studies
47
IIK I.
When T he U niversity woke up this morning, she felt really depressed. When
T he U niversity gets depressed she drinks a lot of coffee and wine and eats a lot
of sugar filled things. Why was T he U niversity so depressed, she asked
himself, and her therapist shook her head inside. Why are they all so angry at
me? Why doesn't anyone like me?
M .O.T.H .E.R . Poor U niversity. You want to resist, but it?s almost like you
don?t know how.
48
49
50
51
52
53
Chris Carosi
by naming you
the power?s out
54
Sun Grass
55
Linda N orton
56
Feminine
Last night when I said I was king
57
Street
58
T hree Gardens
A figurine and a bell. Parcels on the stoop, surrounded by bushes the color
of parcels. A broken pencil (gnawed) and a shiny chestnut on the sidewalk.
Irish bachelors used to live here with their mothers. Costello, Croker,
Christian, Shields. T he one with half an arm had been a hobo who?d got
caught under the track in the Depression.
T his leaning trellis, a lesson in splinters? it was white when I lived here.
Puddles the color of the sea in funnies? Superfund teal. Salt air and
aquamarine sky over the garden . O r is this now a vacant lot?
59
What if all poetry, all gardens, were distilled to swatches, numbers on a
chart? N uance and memory? you wouldn?t even need words? the
shorthand of intimacy and color, the ease of a wedding registry.
Even hard-nosed consumers would overrule the numbered colors with the
poetry of chestnut, bubble gum, Fudgsicle, forsythia.
T here are M exicans all over the roof and Salvadorans are mowing the
grass and a guy who looks like Kerouac is tiling a path. It?s going to be
beautiful.
She chooses the colors of her garden from the Pantone scale (she has an
app) and the horticulturalist finds plants to match. N ative plants, whenever
possible.
And forsythia, though it?s not native and won?t grow here.
But she wants it. So she tells her Z en gardener to try to force it.
I carried my apple for a long time without eating it. I think I thought I was
saving it for an emergency.
T his emergency.
You are? they tell me, and now I see? a ?Jamesian character??
60
Am I one, too?
Which one?
A boy of four was walking with his mother on a path in a painting. T here
were cypresses in the distance. We too were in the painting.
61
In My Girlish Days
It took the 8-year-old female [shark] 21 hours to eat the 5-year-old male
inside a tank at the COEX Aquarium. According to video of the
consumption, the female shark started with the male's head and slowly went
about consuming the rest of his body.
T his act of shark cannibalism likely was the result of the sharks bumping into
one another. "Sharks have their own territories," an aquarium official
told Reuters. "Sometimes, when they bump into each other, they bite out of
astonishment."
Twenty-one hours?
to every song
Small H ours?
so I ate you.?
(O r something.)
62
from the ?Disambitious? section of
W ite-O ut
M ake coconut cake for him. Send cookies. Send money. (T hough he will tell
me he is ?not impressed? with the amount.)
At second-hand bookstore on Piedmont Ave: ?Do you have any books by bell
hooks??
?Who??
?bell hooks.?
?Who is she??
?So the loss keeps changing its shape? - H ilary M antel in N YT profile
63
*
At flea market:
?I don?t know, but it?s from India, where people do all kinds of outrageous
things by hand.?
Daniel in meditation class: anecdote about his road rage, dissipated when he
realized the driver was a beautiful woman.
Remembering Elaine K aufman suddenly. I hardly knew her, haven?t seen her
since 1993, but I have never forgotten her. She grew up in N ew O rleans.
H er mother kept candy in a locked cabinet, bottom shelf, behind the couch.
She also kept a book of H olocaust photos in there. Elaine used to unlock the
cabinet, sit behind the couch, and eat candy and look at horrifying pictures
while her mother was out.
In Walden Pond African American guy is trying to sell used books. Piles of all
the ?for Dummies? books and also a beautiful old book with embossed covers.
?Would you take something like this?? Seller holds up the holy book.
Rear window smashed in last night on San Pablo. N othing taken from the car,
not even T he Communist M anifesto or the sneakers in the trunk. M aybe my
sweaty gym clothes made them run away.
64
I was scared. I was alone and it was late. I didn?t know who to call or what to
do. Who cares?
I called A.
Downloaded images from the Library of Congress web site. All the outtakes
from the WPA/FSA series. Roy Stryker punched holes in the ones he didn?t
like. N ow the archivists have scanned the negatives and posted the images,
hundreds of them, with the holes punched in them. Fascinating. Gonna make
good use of them.
Tweets amputations
Googles slaughter
65
Putting on my makeup, my foundation at the counter at the gym, looks like
I?m rubbing whiteface onto my face.
Searching the online archives of the Library of Congress, looking for public
domain images of women, Boston, children, I type the word Irish into the
search engine and I find a picture of a naked woman coyly holding a shamrock
over her crotch. Oh, a St. Patrick?s Day card. T his is part of a collection of
soft-core porn stereographic cards from the late 1920s, when my Irish
grandmother first arrived in Boston.
T here?s one image of a dark-haired women bent over, displaying her back. T he
look of abjection on her face. Who was she, why was she posing?
I pull out my files about my father?s mother, Christie Sullivan and her mother,
M ary K issane Sullivan. I find the social worker?s report from 1932, an
astounding document that tells a fascinatingly sad, judgmental story about
Christie and her illegitimate child, her financial woes, her sexual aura, her
abandonment of her baby.
I print the picture of the nameless naked girl. I scan the social worker?s report,
enlarge it, and print it out. I dig out the book about the insane asylum in
K illarney where M ary K issane Sullivan died. T hen I cut and paste and paint
late into the night, dipping my brush into my wine more than a few times.
66
Linda N orton
U ntitled works, 2014
Cut paper, Sharpie, acrylicpaint on canvaspanels; originalsin color
From ?Dark White? series
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
81
82
83
84
Linda N orton
?Ain't,? 2007
Cut paper; original in color
From ?T he Great Depression and Me? series 85
John Ashbery
Strange Reaction
86
M ichael Ives
87
*
while drought
cancels out the absence of a divine face
or else powerful orifices must open up in the land
ripe and electric
with a proof of having navigated through
to the center of the corn?s rage
88
*
in an overgrowth of tendrils
the afternoon wears like an armlet
according to his Lord?s fleet of water clocks
with whom the H eavenly M andate seduces
autumn?s step-daughter
inside the medallion of total surveillance
89
*
90
*
91
*
92
*
93
*
94
*
*
95
Peter Adam N ash
Tel Aviv
for Annie
96
Heartsand Queens
97
Lyn H ejinian
A cow goes off and with it three crows in a sycamore tree cawing ?awe,?
?ha-ha,? ?off,? ?ah!?
I apologize, dearest one, that was my dream, yours was different
T he present king of California is tall, long-lived, and she bounces on her bed
Shocking
Why blame oneself for one?s virtues
Two sacks, sails slack, sadness sinks into the inland saga
R ibaldry comes to mind, ten guys descending, pigeons escaping
Tessellated battlements rise, frazzled
Crickets are chirking the frogs ribbet, the owls howl, and the snakes? ?
T hat is what the censor stole
After that duration picks up speed again
Seven fruits are simmering and their jam will be done just in time for the toast
now on the hearth and a bit too close to the flames for comfort
Inconceivably Flagstaff, unlikely Boise, never Garberville
O ne of two good eagles has taken a cat
Everyone stopped
Somewhere unsullied by my thoughts exist pure memories, entirely free of
what I?d make of them, wholly unremembered
If you can write a tragedy you can write a comedy
Perhaps we are the victims of false recognition taken by an acquaintance to be
a tree
Vice versa ditto
Sweetness spilling over sour is essential to the sensational flow that
characterizes the continuum we call chocolate
W ith rapid eye movements I follow the hummingbird over the horse
I don?t have much capacity for nonchalance, indifference is a poor substitute
H eel, Fido; fetch, Pal
Time brings whole pieces to the puzzle but not the whole puzzle, the whole
picture
It?s really her! It?s really him!
98
What color is the item that is three-cornered and made of wood
Together with the sun she goes off into the border zone like the middle note of
a chord
Is love the product of judgment?
Silently
Bring, buy, catch, seek, teach, and think, unrhyming in the present but
rhyming in the past
I?ve just gone out for a good laugh at sunset
L is for language, P is for baked alaska
T he middle of a sonnet? that which holds its parts and holds it apart? will be
found at its end
Along comes a boy skating on the ice with a hundred-and-four degree fever
T here?s a statue in the little park that I revisit to circle, go back to chastise,
return to admire? it is said to love solitude
Let?s bring two things together that don?t seem to have anything to do with
each other? a wet windowsill, say, and a white tiger? and see what
they have in common
M y eyes have filled
For example, a cormorant cannot? and should not? be said to have any point
at all
T hat?s a bushel of wheat; that?s a secretary; that?s a night flight to
Bangkok? but which one?
I don?t much like epigraphs: they tend to offer false promises in the guise of
false conclusions
Very slowly with my eyes I follow the lines between boards that link the
bedroom floor to the equator
53 degrees Fahrenheit near dark at midnight, the curtains hanging still, no
birdsongs, nothing defies gravity, only occasional street sounds break
up the lack of experience, the failed attempt, the infinity of possible
degrees at whose center stands the imaginary pole toward which the
dipper dips
99
*
T houghtsound, background
For the painter had grown wild, the dead girl: how murdered
Let?s sleep out on the porch on this moonless night and barely glimpse the
Pleiades
M usic of delicate arrivals, pluralities predicted in a statistician?s handbook
Living an unstraight chain, she? , or I? , and we? ., they? , then she, he? ,
she, you, ? but she
We utilize the valorizing conditioner, the volumizing shampoo, the volatizing
mousse
T here once was a woman with assurance and wit who considered all isms
counterfeit
Portage, voltage, cartilage, wiggle-room
T he male turkey with the raging battle wattle and gaping mouth whose
outspread sprawling tail feathers he turns to us we name Bad Beggar
and his every expression is an angry supplication
And she?s never ever won?t
T he saint in question, the baroque saint fiddling in the heraldic painting, is
ungovernable life itself
Scrambled is the logosphere, perpetuous is the contrasphere
I am a rhino and the grass is gray, the prairie undulates as if there were only a
single mind to which one goes for one?s thoughts
Is that ever irreverent?
A dream is a poor location for memories of things one hasn?t noticed, things
scarcely worth noticing
Whew? my head is like a chrysanthemum held upright on my neck
U nderwriting the stick figure with its stock-still demeanor is its caption:
?Another M inute H as Gone By?
Figs on a spot
In due course anti-lions and anti-asps will befriend wandering humans on
sailing ships propelled by calm1
Enter two guinea pigs, one black and one white, gender of each only to be
imagined
1 See Walter Benjamin, T he ArcadesProject (W1a, 622).
100
It?s impossible to discontinue
O nce there were four children and their great-grandmother was the duchess of
a distant island known for its berries, sail-makers, sullen lice, bears, and
a dark shepherd whose name was Daisy
H ow very like pickles the leaves on the beautiful branches hang in the rain
?Today is today is today yet again?
I cannot play the instrument of lamentation, it?s impossible to tune
H istory comes upon a clutch of dog?s eggs in a ditch that?s plastered over and
painted green as the grass whose insects sting
I have not left yet, she says? I have not yet made that distinction
All dusty begonias continue to frolic
101
K ayla Krut
Consenting
for PQ
102
2
103
3
104
4
105
5
106
Jenny M ary Brown
Tuna
107
Daniel Aristi
108
SoCal Tattoo Poem N. 14
It?s arching all across his upper back, first word on the left shoulder blade and
last word on the right one:
AlSolNoLoPodemosMirar
(?WeCannotStareAtT heSun?)
Fact. Oye
al Sol nadie lo mira a la cara, cholo.
N ext, wonderment: T he only thing in N ature
we're forbidden to look at, think about it ?
Who's design this is that we burn our eyes on
El Rostro de Dios?
109
Alex Taitague
110
Everyday Poem
111
Study No. 30
112
Tricia Asklar
113
Charles Bernstein
ArsImpotens
114
Autobiography of an Ex-Kike
I am so
tired of arguing.
Time to cross
over. But they
just won?t let
me. Fuck ?em.
115
Charles Bernstein & R ichard Tuttle
Sanguinesque
116
Blessed
fortunate to toil
close to soil
far from armies
117
Rest
118
Rob Sean W ilson
119
Because the Snow Which Falls
??????? ?
??????
?? ? ? ?? ??
?? ??????
?? ? ? ?? ?
? ? ??
?? ??????
? -? -? ?- ? ?
??? ?? O ?? ?? ? ?
????????
?? ? ? ?? ? ?
? ????
? ? ? ? ? ? ?? ?
? ??? ? ? ? ?? ??? ? ? ?
? ???? ?? ?
?? ?? ??? ? ? ???
??? ???? ?
?????
?? ?? ? ????
? ? ?? ?? ????
?? ? ? ???? ?
?? ?????
??? ????
???? ?
? ? ?? ???
??? ??
120
??????
? ? ? ? ? ??
? ? ??????? ?
??? ? ?? ?
? ? ??? ? ?
121
Naugatuck River Flow
1.
Church music played along the polluted river,
the day was born. It was time to tap maple trees for syrup.
Wrestling teams wrestled, Sacred H eart hoop games went on.
M oon R iver flowed and skank. A wigged woman held up
the bank in Stop & Shop.
Sidewalks went on being repaired. T he futures were coming.
Drunken down or stoned sober, life went on death went on I.
2.
Cyberblue writing years later love letters in digital sands
tracing the N augatuck R iver flow years and years away
greeny homeland is waning astray, dank flow of estray:
wanhope by the Chase Brass & Copper, oceans
3.
born by the river in a little tent/
just like the river I?ve been running/
ever since?
In the same way, a truly holy person does not live for himself
can become eternal can achieve anything.
returning to the muck source as translated into Leo Tolstoi
sure as tomorrow morning comes
amongst come-back-again things
sudden shift or atmosphere above the churches
and factories that pockmark working hearts
of wind and light attack
122
waiting for some
4.
Flowers of Evil fly up
gull-like at Bolinas estuary
put a gun to the head
melt a fat shadow into the dead wood
then sails away
5.
R ude street hurling noise, brown skins and
long, mincing, glacial he or she comes; dolorous passers-by:
fastidious solvency walks in sage veils, balancing centuries into sin.
6.
T he M use hovers over the N augatuck that flows to South Korea: pudgy,
wearing an old lumberjack shirt, smiling with Jack wings
O r, years later, coursing down slow Pacific highway through coastal fogs
early morning Saturday upon waking, or breaking, it was always Easter?
hic non est?
the way of life isby abandonment.
123
7.
?Buddha of the rock? over the N augatuck flowing
to the Red R ivers and N ikita M oon of China coheres at some deep
level now if the world will only come around to Four Fold blessing
8.
H is muse to Ozymandias, say:
I?d sleep and forget it, mon; I had my own one life,
my own sad and ragged life, forever.
9.
Stars fell on Alabama drinking too much into the Love R iver
in K aohsiung, where a tree speaker blares out Broadway love songs
over a new mass of darkest German beer down from China: so weave
a songa songof riverlove a water flow back flowingto the land
10.
Blood flow of the riverine muse, she
comes with the cleanly rain that rages up with the rubbertown air
with storms of tin-soldier Brits or Chinese acrobats declaiming.
Across dark fields of O ctober, sutras
flow into the long O not my
gods indifferent to cannons inside canons.
To sleep in the ague of a red song, a red riverine musing
dangerous plants, falling cups, plangent magus rings of a Saturn--
knight tempest potentate him who tempers into grief, or rage.
124
11.
As he looked up the clouds assumed, as assumed, faces of hermits
faces of hermits becoming like Lew Welch
becoming Sierra cloud-assumptions, Lenore K andell the scent:
Ti Shan, Cold M ountain, Ti Jean drinking in heaven, havened.
12.
Adrift across rainy morninga in my monk?s moan cell
composing a song or two or a river or three
letting a ghost in letting another ghost
out with the window, seventy times seven frenemy angles,
airs and lights, ponds
when these waves of the Red R iver flow in, no longer reckoninglost time
13.
O f twentieth largest container ports in the world,
thirteen are on the Pacific R im, ocean
O ne of them abuts outside my window, ocean
O ne of them is in the crazed taxi driver?s pocket
Six of them are in my battered luggage
Seven of them are laden on the fragrant road, ocean
transit besides the warm green waters of the moneyed harbor
125
14.
Who threw out the H ollywood shirt I wore here,
who felt so worn out
under sweater
our bags are so heavy
Kyoto
15.
T houghts tangled into black hair, stare, back at lair
the Lamb of God who takes away the night riding mare.
126
Buddhist statues covered in leaves, temples inside temple.
But I am always in a hurry, try to leave.
127
bang against the walls, bounce against pillows,
the melancholy Dane has gone M ellow yellow.
16.
?Jaywalking leads to Regretting? on the river street
romanticcity dazzling
remains
reminders
reprimanders
17.
Illusion that we were ever together, Tim
Fell into the river drunk, that time, wrote poems like the boss
Courting young lovelies. Illusion that Saved
Was playing in the background as sign, that you wore white
kid gloves to the Andong wedding in a town of ancient K ims
as if she ever loved the monkey dancing on a saint stick.
18.
T houghts tangled in the black hair, stare,
Lamb of god like a nightriding day mare.
19.
Combustible dust in the air of Ipads made in Sichuan
cadmium leaking from chemical factories
into rivers of H unan
20.
Empty room
empty town
Hicnon est
129
God born in a manger in the mangy comprise
compromise you
stranger what tear you weep for the angel stars, stare
O phelia jumps into an ice
R iver, Detroit
First winter K
R ice offering
face brook down, face first
her thirst booked
for Eternity, spurned
child spread-eagle tearing river,
effortless turn of the car key
you forgot to write
21.
Posited against bare H omer streets polluted rivers of an industrial town, proud
of it, that Catholic schoolboy quest, want just to help save writing to beatitude
N othing special about this day except the prose poems a friend wrote.
N othing special about this day except the passage of air through lungs that
feeds and renews a million cells, that the H oly Ghost leads to create.
N othing special about this day but where the avocado came from.
N othing special about this day but the radio that brings news from the world,
that brings in the white station from Santa Cruz and the M exican soccer news
from Watsonville.
N othing special about this day except like Emerson you are writing a way
forward.
130
N othing special about this day except like D ylan you are turning out another
version of an old song with the help of the Grateful Dead.
N othing special about this day except you have forgiven it all, including
yourself, for blockages and let downs and states of getting lost.
N othing special about this day except the glowing cover of a road across.
N othing special about this day except the details in which the spirit moves and
takes place.
N othing special about this day except it keeps happening as a day like the sun
turning across the sky.
N othing special about this day except your breakfast has turning into the
energy to write words, to know thoughts, to spell a few words, to forget a few
names like that of David M eltzer last night.
N othing special except the will to let go, to fall into the ground, to recall high
heavens.
N othing special about this day except the ripe avocado on the window sill.
N othing special about this day except the sheer fact of language being
exchanged for things.
N othing special about this day except the digestive system workings.
N othing special about this day except three thousand years of prosody.
N othing special about this day except the culture that invented glass and Glad
Bags.
N othing special about this day except the emails coming in as I write.
N othing special about this day except the coffee beans from R wanda.
N othing special about this day except the mood lifting up, the possibility of an
influx of grace and care and good will to all, Easter promises.
131
N othing special about this day except a poem may come.
N othing special about this day except the walk through M anresa fields of
flowering blue manzanitas and daisy golds.
N othing special about this day except the doctoral degree, the black box full of
D ylan recordings, the writing desk, the sun coming through windows.
N othing special about this day except the freedom to think and to write, the
gladness of that, the privacy of a laptop, the moving forward.
N othing special except the moon over the Pacific on its way to China.
N othing special about these M onterey Bay clams except they breathe.
N othing special about this morning except sleep lifting from the brain.
22.
O n a clear day I can see forever cut
into 62 years cast out runes
wandering across days of light
132
memory of other houses
other needs
like motherhood seeds
133
Ben M azer
134
Look, and see where these images of ourselves
beautifully depict with utmost sensitivity
our hopes for a better life, which lives in us,
which is the spirit at its essential and most transparent,
like Chaplin and the orphan peering around any ordinary brick corner,
not smiling, though we must smile when we meet each other
over a distance, heading in one direction
because humour is our great joyous clue in life,
happy to be heedless, hearing music in the acceptance of chaos,
where music is an appreciation of the aesthetic sense
that burns in us, delicate, discerning, and unique.
Fall not into the sea of total evaporation
that threatens to undermine us with its undertow
of doubt without reason, of reason without doubt,
knowing full well that even the living angels
must suffer a seachange only to remain constant
to that which they must be, even the dead in life,
that the highest reaches of our possible understanding
must attain to an iconry that will live without us,
because we have been on earth, and have truly loved.
135
and that is the music of earth, and proper to angels.
It is haunting, this beauty, and returns us to us.
We are the visible windows of a darkened shop at night time
mirroring back to us images of ourselves.
136
O r by the dying light's resemblances,
memory evaporated like a pool . . .
we swum the fever, too dark to see warpaint,
but know the pain, dissolving of resolve . . .
137
N ick Admussen
Anchorite
138
Parable of Old Swedes
T he upright elderly clustered around the supine elderly, they were all
Swedes, they smelled like their alchemical kitchens, smoked meat and urine
and smear of lard. I don't know why I was there, but that sensation is
near-constant. I was born from gather ye rosebuds. I was born in a hammock
on W illiam Duffy's farm. T hese people were far from me on each possible axis,
x (mouth distance), y (snow distance), z (toughness distance). T hey could
therefore only be metaphors, distant little horizon metaphor dots, and
obediently they moved with the jerking grace of metaphor and leaned over the
dying man with the inexorability of metaphor. T hey knew it would come to
this both in fact and in my conception of fact, which is to say that we were
starting to have the togetherness of metaphor as well. T he dying man had
seemingly every blockage, I wanted to reach down his throat and scoop the
mucus out, but it was clear that the burble was way down in there, now, and
nothing to do about it.
T he elderly Swedes just watched. T hey put their jerky hands, their pee
hands, their Crisco hands on the man who laid down. T hey were talking in a
language I didn't understand, but there was a pattern in it and so I had to
accept that it was real. T hen they were talking in a language that I did
understand, they were looking right at me and waving their frondlike lips, but
there was no pattern in it and it felt dreamlike. T hey wanted towels or sheets
or something made of fabric. T hey wanted living water in great quantities, or if
that was unavailable they wanted stilled snowwater or bitter water which I had
survived drinking or water from which I had cast the demons out. If there was
no water I was to rub leaf-fragrant dirt into their skin. T his took years to
understand, probably I have invented it, regardless they looked directly at me
and made such requests as they could.
T he man on his back made the bow of the keel of a ship, as if snapping
back to his natural shape. I leaned in unconsciously, and a man in a low hat
and a fury of white hair turned to block my approach. H e spread out his hands
as if casting two fistfuls of dice. H e said "You are only for the provision of
waters or dirts." Part of his translation problem was that all my generosity came
from the sensation that I had never given anything to anyone. "Stand back," he
said. T he disc of the old man's hat was perfectly still and the circumference was
parallel to the floor. H e said, "we give to him the air."
139
Still Plum
140
A selection of archival documentsfrom
Berkeley Poetry Review'shistory
a special feature
141
Lyn H ejinian and others have stressed that the year 1974 impacted
Berkeley/Iowa/Berlin as some kind of crucial ?constellation? of elements,
forces, and forms, thus indicating a shift or turning point towards something
different and new. Coming in the wake of the liberating energies of Free
Speech and the mongrel plenitudes of Golden Gate Park, 1974 was also the
date the Berkeley Poetry Review was published on the campus of U C Berkeley as
a ?journal of emergent poetics? as it came to be called, standing (then and
now) for a multiplicity of forms and voices and embodying a push towards
representing a fuller sense of student voices and an emergent multiculturalism.
T his was what Josephine M iles had been supporting inside ?the English
Department of the soul? (as Jack Spicer notoriously troped it) by long
advocating a more pluralist poetics as voiced in figures as diverse as Arthur Sze,
David M elnick, M organ W ines, Rochelle N ameroff et al. and as posited
against what we felt to be the N ew York-turned style hegemony of the campus
literary journal Occident.
I had a column in the Daily Californian called ?Berkeley Inscapes? at
the time and came to Jo with the student-based review idea for the BPR, and
she got me put on some chancellor?s committee to get funding and an editorial
room in the publications space of the Pelican Building as it was called.
Anyway, that the journal is still going close over 40 years later is testament to
the social institutional fact that we opened a "worlding" space and form for
something that needed to be supported ?in progress [process]? however
unknown, under-theorized, or half-baked and mongrel it all was etc. T he
other thing at U CB in 1974 I would point to stand for those place-based
energies of emergence and difference is that T heresa H ak Kyung Cha (whose
Dictee would come to transform Asian Pacific studies) was giving some of her
ethereally estranged and Korean uncanny art space performances in the Art
Department building, which has to be considered a part of some left-coast
?avant-garde? as much as was happening in Iowa or N ew York City, in the
impact as space, form, and language it would have on generations in the
emergence of multiple ethnically inflected forms and languages. Josephine
M iles was a driving force in Bay Area poetics and was way ahead of her time in
embodying the interactive energies of poet and scholar, wholeness of theory
and practice, in the American sublime tradition of Emerson, Whitman, and
R ich. T hat the BPR still lives on, under the able editorship of changing
generations of students, from myself to A.D. K ing, is testament to such deeply
rooted pedagogy and vision of radical democratic emergence.
H ere are a few comments on these ?semi-ancient? documents that
track the founding of Berkeley Poetry Review and some of the early trajectories
from Berkeley to H awai?i and into the American and Pacific-Asia poetry scene.
John Gage [pgs. 158-160] was a learned doctoral student in the U CB R hetoric
Department and a fine poet himself in the Leonard N athan formalist tradition
of skeptical wit which was an important part of the Berkeley scene, if avowedly
on the conservative end of the student pluralism. ?Inscape? [pgs. 156-160] was
a weekly column on poetry and poetics that appeared in the Daily Californian
and was avowedly pluralist in its portrayal of the existing poetry scene; it was
edited by the artistically deft Christine Taylor, a medievalist Ph.D. candidate in
142
the English Department who was an important ally of all the work I was doing
in poetry and poetics at U CB and in the Bay Area as was her partner Leroy
W ilsted who designed the first two issues of the BPR, covers and all. David
Linn [p. 155] was a contributor unknown to me or others on the editorial staff.
David H enderson [pgs. 156-157] was a much respected N ew York city poet in
the Afro American musicality and U mbra tradition who had moved to
Berkeley and became a cultural force there with Ishmael Reed et al.; David
had been a doo-wop singer at one time (perhaps with the Dells), and later
wrote a book on Jimmy H endrix, edited Bob K aufman?s poetry, and much
else. I wrote an article on H enderson?s poetry for the ?Inscapes? column.
H enry N ash Smith [p. 164] was a venerable senior professor in the English
Department at U CB, one of the founding fathers of American civilizational
studies in the U SA in the myth and symbol tradition. H enry N ash Smith was
on my doctoral exam committee and the professor who introduced me to
Professor M asao M iyoshi who was looking for a research assistant interested in
American relations to Asian cultures, especially Japan, so I did 19th-century
American literature research for him on the book that became As We Saw
T hem, a book still in print and influential in Japan and U S cultural studies in
the pre-Said ?orientalist? moment on mutual interaction on the Pacific R im. I
kept in touch with people in Berkeley via mail, in the pre-internet and
pre-email days, and would bring writers to read in H awai?i like Robert H ass
and Leonard M ichaels et al. M iyoshi would always visit on his trips to East
Asia, and he would ?debrief? me on my own stay in South Korea when I
would go back to Berkeley where my daughter Sarah was attending schools
there. Robin M agowan [pgs. 162-163] was a crucial beloved undergraduate
mentor to me at U C Berkeley in English: the last class he taught at Cal in the
summer of 1969 included my classmate, N ancy Ling Perry, who later played a
key role in the rise of Symbionese Liberation Army attacks and died in a
shootout with the police in Los Angeles as my family watched it on television
at 2641 Forest Avenue. Robin was a surrealist poet in the visionary mystical
tradition from a prominent San Francisco family who was well connected to
writers and artists from James M errill (his uncle Jimmy) to Larry R ivers and
Kenneth Koch, all of whom he would try to connect Bay Area people via
wonderful parties at his home in the Berkeley hills behind M emorial Stadium.
I remain eternally grateful; he is still my friend and mentor, and lives in my
home state of Connecticut now and is a gardener and a poet still. John Ashbery
[p. 166] is John Ashbery, just becoming world famous then. W.S. M erwin [p.
161] is always W.S. M erwin in H aiku, M aui, or anywhere, and he shared the
Z en influence of Roshi Robert Aitken from his zendo in M aui where I used
to talk about American poets like Stevens and Whitman with him, and took
the poet Louis Simpson for a cordial funny visit once. O f course Josephine
M iles [p. 165] was my key mentor as a graduate student in English at U CB and
way ahead of her time as she embodied the interactive energies of being a
scholar and a poet in the American sublime tradition of Emerson and
Whitman; she was poetic mentor to generations in the department including
Duncan, Spicer, Ginsberg, A.R . Ammons, T hom Gunn, Sze, and, well,
me? hers are the praises forever. I might add here that M erwin and Ashbery,
143
along with Robert Creeley who was the poet?s poet then in the Bay Area, were
the key poets I was drawn to then: tactics of elision and minimal syntax and
anti-rhetoric (as in M erwin and Creeley) warred against the more maximalist
geo and surreal forms of expansive vision in Charles Olson, Creeley, and the
ever-present Walt Whitman. In her work Eras and Modes in English Poetry,
Josephine M iles was an acute scholar of the ?American sublime? which she
singularly elaborated as a prosody of phrasal accumulation and expansive
visions of the spirit drenched cosmos in biggish forms of poetry. I was drawn
to that, and would write a book on it with W isconsin U P, my first book,
American Sublime: T he Genealogy of a Poetic Genre, before I turned to fuller ties
to the local and international ties to the cultural poetics of Pacific and Asian
sites based on my 24 years of teaching at the U niversity of H awai?i at M anoa as
well as visits to teach at universities in Korea, Taiwan, H ong Kong, and
California.
144
Covers of the first (front) and second (front and back) issues of the
Berkeley Poetry Review
145
Flyer for the Berkeley Student Review, which soon after became the Berkeley Poetry Review
Page 1 of 2 (page 2 facing)
M ay 28, 1974
146
147
Berkeley Poetry Review application for official recognition from the O ffice of Student Activities
N ovember 21, 1974
148
Berkeley Poetry Review subscription form
c. 1974
149
Guidelines for the Committee on Literary Publications, from the O ffice of
Student Activities
Page 1 of 2 (page 2 facing)
June 7, 1974 150
151
Flyer for the Berkeley Poetry Review
c. 1974
152
Financial and staff-related notes
c. 1974
153
Letter from Lynne S. W iepert of U C Berkeley's General Library Acquisition Department
to Rob Sean W ilson
M arch 14, 1975
154
Letter from contributor Dave Linn to Rob Sean W ilson
August 5, 1974
155
Letter from David H enderson, a founder of the Black Arts M ovement, to Rob Sean W ilson
c. N ovember 6, 1973
156
Proposal for an anthology of black avant-garde artists and writers by David H enderson,
enclosed in letter to Rob Sean W ilson reproduced on facing page
157
Returned Berkeley Inscapessurvey from poet and R hetoric doctoral student John Gage to
Rob Sean W ilson
c. N ovember 2, 1973
158
Poem by John Gage included with correspondence to Rob Sean W ilson reproduced on
facing page
159
Draft of Berkeley Inscapescolumn on John Gage by Rob Sean W ilson
c. N ovember 1973
160
Letter from Rob Sean W ilson to W. S. M erwin
July 19, 1980
161
Letter from Rob Sean W ilson to Robin M agowan
Page 1 of 2 (page 2 facing)
August 22, 1980
162
163
Letter from Rob Sean W ilson to H enry N ash Smith
June 25, 1980
164
Letter from Rob Sean W ilson to Josephine M iles
June 30, 1980
165
Letter from Rob Sean W ilson to John Ashbery
July 20, 1980
166
M ajor Jackson
Canon of Proportions
167
M ax Goudie Pujals
Abandoned
I.
II.
168
G. C. Waldrep
169
Aerial archaeology, cropmarks & hut rings,
ditches, enclosures? we place
our fingers in the grooved photograph &
the mind says Almost, the mind says
It ispleasurable to know where men have been.
170
Porter?s seat?s small theater
of foxglove & rust. I almost wrote ?trust,?
as in vowel, something even mortal
pain & grief believe in.
Along with the best gods, the other gods.
We study architecture
because we want to believe the material world
is more literate than this one,
the council estates with their tiny shops & cottages
& the great houses
slope-farmed into children preparing
for some future bewilderment, or something
more than future, involving glass & more styptic
chemicals. A rushing wind, renewable.
171
Dried husk of an abandoned station?
see, you can tell by the steps
leading up to what would have been
the platform, now vanished in a tangle of fox-
172
A choice: the castle, the chapel,
or else the exploded gunpowder manufactory.
(It?s not much of a choice, you demur.)
173
T he moral imagination, you said.
It?s like some sort of kitchen gossip, isn?t it,
only nobody knows which kitchen she?s in.
Predicate, not to build but to have built.
So pretty, this little Latin
in its porcelain dressing gown.
Blink once for yes, blink twice for no.
174
I said, one of my few natural virtues
is loyalty. ? M eaning you?re trustworthy,
you elaborated. Which caught me off guard:
H istory is an exercise in narrative,
in distinguishing between loyalty & trust.
175
It is not, or not only, a function
of H istory (Faith. Language. Light).
We step into the dark, cramped
shop where the Bangladeshi woman
sells stationery, & we find it charming
but we don?t say so, not there, not then.
176
A bridal texture, something suffering wears
when capitalism calls gender out
& says ?H ey, let?s go grab some dinner.?
You can record this in language or
you can ignore it without benefit
of language, without resorting to language.
Capitalism swaggers
outside of language in the shadow of
something like an enormous, gleaming motorcycle
we aren?t sufficiently afraid of. N ot yet.
177
I no longer know who I?m talking to,
I no longer know to whom I am talking.
178
It is not about love. ? T hat might help,
though, you tell me.
I mean, if it were about love.
179
Waves of sound, images
of explosions, ripe fruit & pornography
are streaming through our bodies
right now, at dizzying speeds. Surely something
in each cell registers these frequencies
180
We eat the ripe cherries from the arbor
& they are ripe, but also
incredibly sour, so we talk about
what we could make with them
if we were far away, i.e. at home: pie, strudel.
181
First you make the tools
out of nothing. And from the tools,
you must make nothing. T hen, out of nothing,
you must remake the tools.
Somebody asks me
whether I keep a garden at home.
I lie & say I do. I have no idea why I?m lying.
182
T he city presents light as an interruption of light
which is why we go there.
And for the food, & for the cooing of pigeons
which reminds us what it would be like
to be wingèd after all, i.e. Icarus
was not the scared, ambitious boy we like to think
but rather some ancient concinnity,
a bit of skin caught in the projector, electric.
183
M y tongue, an ignorance. Little orchard
of brute senses. Starlings
fly through it & no, they are not like
the mind, mind?s hand grasping & ungrasping, rather
an artist?s conception of graphite
as a gas, something that expands to fill
any available volume.
(Light. Language. Faith. H istory.)
184
A trick of oxygen, this snuffing of candles
with one?s bare fingertips.
We believe what the scientists tell us
about the members of our bodies, their elemental
faiths, & then we use them.
In a separate development,
a visiting Egyptian novelist explains
that the reason there are no good
Egyptian restaurants in N ew York City
is the peculiar Egyptian genius
for failing (or refusing) to self-promote.
185
Viral, this severance.
As if all the planes had returned safely
from the mission except one
& we were waiting for it,
half-angry & half-terrified & trying hard
to talk about something else.
Toadflax embroidering
a crown on the lip of an ancient well.
Is it art(ful) to see it this way.
T he poetry of money
is only one source of detailed revenue
language audits. We say it
& then it?s true, presto change-o.
186
H otels built especially for constellations.
T hat is what he said. & lived as if it were so.
187
O r: consider the exquisite geometry
of the calfskin glove.
You want it to stand outside H istory, but
somehow it keeps obtruding
into the story, a magic lantern
not meant for us. FI VE CEN T S, PLEASE.
188
If invisible hand, then invisible glove.
If invisible gym, then invisible
weights, the body?s capacity
for leverage. T he cone of night spindling
inland, this far north of the equator.
189
At the prom we had no time to test
whether all bodies fall at the same rate of speed,
so instead there was a lot of
drunkenness & dancing, & trying to figure out
which parked car was yours, vs.
somebody else?s. Various urban legends accrued.
190
Later, many monographs on Bonnard
& some stencils we kept dubbing.
A mannerist ecology, Lisa Robertson proclaimed,
& we believed her, in spite of
191
T he flare of a match is produced
by the rapid oxidation of its chemical
outer coating, its pericarp
& we know we have to do something
quickly, communicate the process to some
other medium, some uninvited guest.
192
In the museum, we encountered
a pair of human forms, anatomically correct,
sculpted entirely from telephone wire,
red yellow pink green & blue.
Slightly larger than life-size, which somehow
made us even more uncomfortable
193
H ow to tell a remnant from a ruin,
for example. Built on absence
as residence, permitted by updraft & the kindness
of certain fungi, certain spores:
N O STOPPIN G OR STAN DIN G H ER E.
194
It was spring, & my friend asked me
(& others) over to his farm for a work frolic.
H e wanted to tear down an old shed in his pasture.
It had been well-built, this shed. H e should have
put a new roof on it & left it
where it was. It took us the better part of the day
to clean it out & remove as much tin
& other metal from the exterior as we could.
195
Jessica R ae Bergamino
Sylvia
196
Changming Yuan
197
[y]
198
Y
200
T here are no harmless motives, thinking
detached from all consequence,
it was guttered and channeled and sluices
like a gnarled moccasin or
some squat ungainly bird
201
All prologue, backwash, and stray rounds
stumbling around inside the notion
202
full of pent up resentment, imagined slights,
a scalpel, scattered shovels
velvety brown with oxidation
bound to a different set of restrictions
203
Try squeezing a sponge under water
hide the habits and purchases, fit the key into the lock
204
T hat feeling special is the worst kind of cage
like poison or north or zero
205
It?s a posture difficult to unbend, a momentary blur
outside the window of a car
or ridge of eroded particles, future pastoral
misstepping the logical ear
206
from Stratal Geometries
Being
212
213
Holy Words
214
215
I'm Nobody
216
217
Longing
218
219
Madness
220
221
If You're Not in Love
222
223
W illiam Dow
i.
made it clear.
225
Outtakes
227
Saint Jeanne, rue Saint Marcel (1985)
228
3
229
5
230
7
illuminated nakedness.
231
9
232
Larry R uth
Happy Hour
233
Two or T hree Stanzason Salvation
235
R ainer M aria R ilke
T he Square
Furnes
236
Der Platz
Furnes
237
Sappho to Eranna
238
Sappho an Eranna
239
Giuseppe Ungaretti
Canzone
240
Canzone
242
E se, tuttora fuoco d'avventura,
Tornati gli attimi da angoscia a brama,
D'Itaca varco le fuggenti mura,
So, ultima metamorfosi all'aurora,
O ramai so che il filo della trama
U mana, pare rompersi in quell'ora.
243
Aaron Shurin
T he Exchange
244
T he Part Unseen
Is this the something else, the part unseen, the antidote of clouds, the sculptural
path revealed, the winding staircase tucked behind a maple door? ? Is there a
person crouching in the foreground, among the rocks and reeds, or jumping in
the background ? up into the pogo sky with arms akimbo or folded like a
chair, daring the bourgeois clouds or of them? I think he can?t decide whether
to fly or die? T he toreador pants grip his shins ? or are those plum trees
athwart the Plain of Jars? ? Is this his lonesome cataract, the last bushwhack,
the foxed and spotted contract, the raison d?être welling up, the parallax? ? I
think he isn?t really there, couldn?t see the door, didn?t need to cure himself of
clouds? Is this an alphabet of blood, or disappearing ink? I saw the river
peacock-blue mirror from the slowing train in the blue dusk. I think there was
a seagull streaking at the bend. It may have been a person in a boat, hauling up
his oar to float the curve?
245
Lawrence Eby
2.
246
42.
the station
?s bathroom
locked shut
in the crosshairs.
247
43.
When thinking of flight, the body emerges a wing. Its feathers transparent
against the blue-gray, those subtle tones roof tones wall tones
a checkered floor with a layer of dust, a hand-trail cleared black and
white squares with a corner tugged up. T he underneath on the cusp
248
Laura M ullen
Eye Exam
But that milk white milky way was all stars in fact
M emory m
I write down what you are saying I forget I make a mess a black splotch
enlarging a spill of inky what there is is a smear or ear here where there would
distance
T hose dark marks are hints we?re taught to take diminishing the choice of one
who assiduously follows foregone lines to find out what already exists
constellation of the dog in place all right a child?s face look who found what he
fixed
Away
Disconnects closed
Eyes recalled as counted on correct
Away w
With thisn
Negative space
T hose numbered stops at last let loose use another sense to sketch a quicker
picture
U nexpected curious
a collection of free translationsfrom the German of West-oestlicher Divan (1819/1827 2nd ed.)
by Samuel Garrett Z eitlin
Freed T hought
252
Freysinn
253
Songand Creation
But it is winsome to us
In the Euphrates to grasp
And in the flowing element
Back and forth to roam.
254
Lied und Gebilde
255
Elements
256
Elemente
Aus wie vielen Elementen
Soll ein echtes Lied sich nähren,
Daß es Laien gern empfinden,
M eister es mit Freuden hören?
257
Else Lasker-Schüler
My blue piano
T he keyboard is broken? ..
I bewhine the blue dead.
258
Mein BlauesKlavier
259
Karma
260
Karma
261
Eros
262
Eros
263
[Dedication]
To my unforgettable male and female friendsin the citiesof Germany? and to those who, like me,
were driven out and are now spread out in the world, In Solidarity!
To My Friends
In my parents?house now
T he angel Gabriel dwells.....
I desire deeply there with you
Blessed rest to celebrate in a fest?
Love mixes itself with our Word.
264
[Widmung]
Meinen unvergeßlichen Freunden und Freundinnen in den Städten Deutschlands? und denen, die
wie ich vertrieben und nun zerstreut in der Welt, In Treue!
An Meine Freunde
265
O ut of manifold farewell
Ascend nestled in one another the threads of golden ash,
And not a day remains unsweetened
Between the wistful kiss
And reunion!
266
Aus mannigfaltigem Abschied
Steigen aneinandergeschmiegt die goldenen Staubfäden,
U nd nicht ein Tag ungesüsst bleibt
Zwischen wehmütigem Kuss
U nd W iedersehen!
267
We three
268
Wir drei
269
So longisit since.....
270
So lange ist esher.....
271
H enry Wei Leung
1.
272
2.
273
John Olivares Espinoza
274
ComingSoon To A T heater Near You
? I want to take the job from that lady. I want to fly to Chicago.
I got to have the work. I do a better job than anyone else.
I can be ready tonight. You won?t be sorry.
I want to be legal.
275
Leonard J. Cirino
A Parallel Universe
after María Negroni
1
Even if it's prison we love the places we leave behind. M emory
moves forward and back, bewilders us. O ne smell gathers like
a barnyard or crushed straw, another leads to sores on our
cheeks, even boils on our backs. We treat them secretly, as if
hours had passed in their making. In truth, it was an entire
century of terror. Back then it all seemed normal. O ne could
stand on a street-corner and whistle at girls, go to the movies
and watch horror shows, even a day at the park seemed like
casual fun. What happened? All the films got spliced and
slashed, long shots became portraits. Even the match that
Lawrence struck ignited so much fear we couldn't look. In the
still, black and white newspaper photos, the stubborn eyes of
an actor hailed ensuing genocide. People applauded and
wanted to be like him. Far away, on an island named after a
holiday, the tribal chief laid his head on a stone and slept. It
was his downfall. N o more weekdays gathering coconuts, no
more beautiful women.
2
N o, the world had encroached on space and his space.
Everything became as small as a seed. T he seed was buried for
several generations. T hen it sprouted and came back to haunt
us like a dead sibling. Destroyed towns were mired in dry
riverbeds, there was no protection against evil, the wind
became a prison. O ur senses left us as beauty darkened at
dawn, the moon betrayed us at noon, and the heat and storms
became insurmountable.
276
Brendan Ian Cohn-Sheehy
To J
ON E
Is music is jazz
to jabber to jive
babbling in five
take five take ten beats
and it?s half a phrase
from the chorus, Dave
Brubeck springlike comps
to twenty repeats
ready to jump the
sax breathes into the
T WO
T H R EE
277
pass with Tatum?s tact.
Art is blind tripping
over keys over
black over white keys
faceless keys springing
through uncharted space.
Solitary Art.
FOU R
M onk,
T helonious, blue monk
threw new hue R uby
from flailing fingers
at blue note
bursting into be-
FI VE
278
SIX
is to John Taggart
is to giant steps
is to slow tempo
is to subdivide
is intonation
is sonic contour
is heard as giant
stepsis spoken once
and then too is sung:
isisisisis
SEVEN
EIGH T
waves
Dublin-dirtied
ship jolts Patrick John
Sheehy, John Patrick
left father left church
for jazz, for M arie
279
to grandfather
N IN E
to grandfatherless
juxtaposition
unjust position
of Jacob, identi
-fication; just
-ification
Jew
a jarred skull width
singing
T EN
to appreciate the
counting to the
tenth letter
to O ctober born nine past January
to return to the hooked
tenor sax bend
returned to jump to join
Johns Jacks James Jacobs
to jump sax, to jazz
280
Andrew R idker
I am shrinking
but my garden isn?t. It?s shameful
really, the spillage of stems.
R ichard is a bowl.
M y life is lined with brass.
I have wheels, birdhouses,
281
water pumps, placed strategically
about the overgrowth.
I leave out vegetables
282
Gerald N icosia
O n July 24, 2009, Judge George Greer, known as ?the toughest judge
in Florida,? ruled the unthinkable? at least unthinkable for the Sampas/
Viking Penguin literary empire? that the will of Gabrielle Kerouac, giving the
Sampas family the right to exploit Jack Kerouac?s works, image, belongings,
and even his gravesite, was a forgery. Greer couldn?t have been more forceful
in what he said about that crime.
?She [Gabrielle Kerouac] could only move her hand and scribble her
name,? Greer wrote in his landmark ruling.1 ?She would have lacked the
coordination to affix that signature. T he [probate] court is required by law to
use a clear and convincing standard in determining these matters. H owever,
even if the criminal standard of beyond all reasonable doubt was the
requirement, the result would certainly be the same. Clearly, Gabrielle
Kerouac was physically unable to sign the document dated February 13, 1973
and, more importantly, that which appears on the W ill dated that date is not
her signature.?
M any people like myself, who were familiar with the dynamics of Jack
Kerouac?s last years had long suspected that something was wrong about that
will? even if we weren?t sure it was a case of forgery.2 I used to think that
there was undue influence? perhaps the old lady was just ?out of it? when the
will was signed. But it was a well-known fact that Gabrielle Kerouac loved her
grandson, Paul Blake, Jr. T he Blakes and the Kerouacs lived together for long
stretches of time? on Long Island; in Rocky M ount, N orth Carolina; in
O rlando, among other places. Gabrielle taught her grandson Paul to sing
French songs and she cooked French treats for him. Gabrielle was absolutely
devastated by the early death of her daughter Ti N in, Paul?s mother, in
1964? after being devastated by the death of her first child Gerard 38 years
earlier. It was inconceivable that she would then, in her right mind, write Ti
N in?s child, the grandson she loved so much, completely out of her will.
Jack died in 1969, leaving everything to his mother in his will? which
also said that if his mother wasn?t around to inherit his estate, he wanted his
nephew Paul Blake, Jr., to get it. Gabrielle, ?M emere,? outlived Jack by four
years, and when she died the will leaving everything to Stella Sampas Kerouac
was suddenly filed in the Pinellas County Courthouse. O nce Jan Kerouac
filed her lawsuit against the Sampases, challenging her grandmother?s will as a
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forgery, the Sampases responded in the media that they had had nothing to do
with the drafting of Gabrielle?s will, but there are many facts that suggest
otherwise, including the fact that Stella?s own personal lawyer, George
Saltsman, was the lawyer who drafted Gabrielle?s will. In addition, Saltsman
never witnessed Gabrielle signing the will; in fact, he stated in sworn
testimony that he never saw her again. H e simply mailed the unsigned will to
Stella for her to take care of.3 H ow the Sampases managed to hide the theft for
so long is a long story. It involves the fact that neither of Gabrielle?s
grandchildren, Jan Kerouac nor Paul Blake, Jr., was notified of her death,
though the Sampases had the addresses of both.
In one of Jan?s notebooks, now on deposit at the Bancroft Library in
Berkeley, she scribbled at the top of a blank page: ?T he Greeks Who Stole
Kerouac.? She never lived to write the story.
T he Sampases were banking on the fact that the victims they were
robbing were two dysfunctional kids. Jan had grown up on the streets of the
Lower East Side in the drug-ridden Sixties? with no dad, and a marginally
effective mom. H er veins were filled with methedrine and LSD, and at 13 she
was working the streets to pay for drugs and parasitical boyfriends. T hat this
kid had any chance of discovering a forged will was virtually nil. As for Paul
Blake, Jr., he came home from high school at sixteen to find his mother dead
on the couch? having starved herself to death to punish herself, a good
Catholic woman, for losing her husband to another woman. H e rambled
through Alaska and elsewhere, working as a carpenter and losing job after job,
as well as two wives, because hitting the bottle was the only way to quiet his
ghosts. Again: no chance this deeply troubled kid was going to start probing
courts for an answer to his disinheritance.
W ithin weeks of Jack?s death, the Sampases had scooped up his
manuscripts and papers and spirited them to a small apartment above N icky
Sampas?s bar in Lowell. A close friend recalls Tony Sampas tapping on one of
the cardboard boxes of Kerouac files, saying, ?T hese things will be worth
millions? not now, but some day.?4
After Jack?s widow Stella died in 1990, her youngest brother John was
elected by the Sampas brothers and sisters as their literary representative, and
he took off selling Kerouac papers and belongings as quick as he could. But
apparently, rich collectors like Johnny Depp were a little uncertain about
dropping 50,000 bucks for items they weren?t sure Sampas had a right to sell.
So Sampas began handing out copies of Gabrielle?s will to his best customers.
O ne such customer sent me a copy of the will a few weeks before Jan Kerouac
and her lawyer Tom Brill arrived at my home in January 1994, planning to talk
about her problems getting royalties from the Sampases.
284
Instead, Jan took one look at the will on my kitchen table and yelled,
?T his thing is a forgery!? H er grandmother?s signature was way too strong to
have been made by an old lady who?d been lifted on and off a bedside potty for
seven years. You could see where the lines started and stopped, and the last
name was misspelled ?Keriouac.?
T he Sampases fought for fifteen years to keep that case from going to
trial. When Jan died in 1996 and made me her literary executor to carry the
case to trial, the Sampases made a deal with her heirs, John Lash and David
Bowers, to dismiss the case? and when I refused to dismiss it, the Sampases
and Jan?s heirs fought together to get me thrown out, succeeding in 1999. But
Judge T homas Penick in Florida refused to let Lash dismiss Jan?s entire lawsuit.
H e let Lash dismiss Jan?spart of the lawsuit. Penick pointed out that there was
another potential heir, if Gabrielle had died intestate: Jack?s nephew. Paul
Blake Jr.?s lawyers Bill and Alan Wagner finally won that forgery verdict from
Judge Greer on July 24, 2009.
T he Sampas family, the brothers and sisters of Stella who had inherited
the Kerouac Estate from her when she died in 1990, immediately took an
appeal of Judge Greer?s decision. Co-heir and Literary Executor for the family,
John Sampas, told British journalist Stephen M aughan ?We do not believe the
W ill of Gabrielle Kerouac was forged and do believe the Judge based his ruling
on fictitious accounts by a doctor who never met Gabrielle Kerouac.? Sampas
also lamented that a strong defense of the will had not been put on before
Judge Greer. Why he and his family did not mount such a strong defense, he
did not explain. ?O ur lawyers,? Sampas claimed to M aughan, ?would have
demolished Alan Wagner and his corrupt father Bill Wagner.?5
While the appeals process continued, Paul Blake, Jr.?s lawyers were
prevented from going after assets of the Kerouac Estate, and even from getting
any sort of accounting of those assets. All that is now changed. O n August 10,
2011, the District Court of Appeal of Florida, Second District, ruled against
the Sampas family and affirmed Judge Greer?s ruling that Kerouac?s mother?s
will was a forgery. T he way the decision was written ensures it cannot be
appealed further. It is therefore considered a final decision. T hat means it is
now in the history books that the Kerouac Estate, arguably the most valuable
literary estate in recent history, was stolen. As things now stand, however, the
Sampas brothers and sisters are still sheltering under the protection of a Florida
?non-claim statute? that allows people to inherit stolen property, and keep it,
so long as no one complains within two years.6 Since Jan did not see the forged
will until 1994, the two-year waiting period after the filing of Stella?s will (in
1990) had expired; and unless Paul Blake, Jr., can find a federal law to go
around the Florida state law, the Sampases will get to keep all their literary
loot.
285
Notes
1 George Greer, O rder, July 24, 2009, ?In the Circuit Court of the Sixth
Judicial Circuit in and for Pinellas County, Florida, Probate Division, Case
N o. 73-4767-ES-003, In Re: T he Estate of Gabrielle Kerouac.?
2 From the very beginning of my research for M emory Babe, talking with
people who knew the Kerouac family both in Lowell and outside of Lowell, I
began to hear many expressions of wonder and puzzlement about why
Gabrielle Kerouac would have left her entire estate to Stella Sampas, a woman
whom she was known to dislike enormously. It was also very clear, from
letters and personal testimony, how much Gabrielle had loved her grandson
Paul Blake, Jr., and there was simply no way to explain why Gabrielle, if she
were still in her right mind, would have disinherited her sole and much
beloved grandchild. T he same perplexity over the contents of Gabrielle?s will
was expressed to me by other Kerouac scholars and chroniclers, including both
Larry Lee and John M ontgomery.
3 BillWagner, ?T he Estate of Gabrielle Kerouac, the M other of Jack Kerouac:
Effects of W ill Being Forged? (privately circulated document), August 2009.
4My source is confidential. H e was one of the inner circle of Tony Sampas?s
friends at N icky?s Bar in Lowell.
5 John Sampas to Stephen M aughan, undated email, circa August 2009.
6 Florida Statute, Sec. 733.710 (1989).
286
Jan Kerouac and Paul Blake, Jr., at Gerald N icosia's Corte M adera residence, April 1995
Photograph by Gerald N icosia
287
Noteson contributors
288
Directors of the M iddle East Studies Association of N orth America, the
Executive Council of the Society for Iranian Studies, and as Vice President of
the American Association of Iranian Studies.
Jessica R ae Bergam ino is the author of T he Desiring Object or Voyager Two
Explains to the Gathering of Stars How She Came to Glow Among T hem (Sundress
Publications, 2016), T he Mermaid, Singing (dancing girl press, 2015), and Blue
in All T hings: a Ghost Story (dancing girl press, 2015). Individual poems have
recently appeared or are forthcoming in Gulf Coast, Willow Springs, West Branch,
Crab Orchard Review, T he Journal, and elsewhere. She is a doctoral student in
Creative Writing and Literature at the U niversity of U tah, where she serves as
poetry editor for Quarterly West.
Charles Ber nstein?s Pitch of Poetry, new essays, will be out this Spring from
U niversity of Chicago Press. H is most recent book of poems is Recalculating
(Chicago, 2013). H e is Regan Professor of English and Comparative Literature
at the U niversity of Pennsylvania. M ore info at epc.buffalo.edu.
Jenny M ary Brow n?s work has either been featured in or is forthcoming from
T he Monarch Review, Tipton Poetry Journal, and Sugar House, among others. She
is currently the poetry editor at T he M ondegreen. She lives in Arcata, CA,
where she reads comics, plays the piano, and teaches at H umboldt State
U niversity.
Chr is Carosi is from Pittsburgh and then escaped to study at the U niversity of
San Francisco Creative Writing Program between 2009 and 2011. H e is the
author of two chapbooks, bright veil (N ew Fraktur Press, 2011) and FICT IONS
(T he Gorilla Press, 2015). O ther work has appeared in Spring Gun, Switchback
(where he was nominated for a Pushcart Prize), Your Impossible Voice, and a few
others. H e lives in San Francisco with Rebecca where he?s worked as a copy
editor, sportswriter, bookseller, proctor, and file clerk and now works for City
Lights Booksellers and Publishers as a publicist and digital marketing
coordinator.
L eonard J. Cir ino (1943-2012) was the author of more than twenty
chapbooks and fourteen full-length collections of poetry since 1987 from
numerous small presses. Towards the end of his life, he lived in Springfield,
O regon, where he cared for his elderly mother and worked full-time as a poet.
H is 104-page collection, Omphalos: Poems 2007, was published by Pygmy
Forest Press? Leo's own press? in 2010. A 64-page selection, Tenebrion: Poems
2008, was published by Cedar H ill Publications in summer 2010. H is
full-length collection, Chinese Masters, came out with Street Press in 2009. H e
was the featured poet at the O utsiders? Art Festival, Lincoln, N E, in August
2010. H e is remembered by his friends and fellow poets for his generosity of
time and spirit. ?A Parallel U niverse? was originally published as a broadsheet
by Pygmy Forest Press. [Editor's note: Leo was one of the first people to correspond
with me (and send me books, drafts, revisions, etc.) as a clueless young poet looking for
guidance almost a decade ago, something for which I'll always be grateful. - Andrew
David King]
289
Brendan I an Cohn- Sheehy is a U C Berkeley alum and U C Davis M D/PhD
student studying medicine and neuroscience who maintains his passions for
words and music daily in the Sacramento-Davis sprawl.
N a H ui- D ok was born in N onsan (South Ch?ungch?ong Province), South
Korea, in 1966. She has published several collections of poetry. She was
awarded the 1998 K im Su-yong Literary Award. She favors a style marked by
aphorism and suggestive turns of phrase.
A ngel D om inguez is a Latinx Los Angeles born writer and performance
artist forming Dzonots with notebooks along the California coast. H e is the
author of Black Lavender Milk (Timeless Infinite Light, 2015), an experimental
lyric-novel that functions as an extended meditation on writing in relation to
the body, time, loss, ancestry, ritual, and dreaming. H is work can be found in
Berkeley Poetry Review, Bombay Gin, and online at Open House and
spiralorb.com, with work forthcoming in Fence. H e was the co-founding
editor of Tract/Trace: an investigative journal, and presently curates the ongoing
series: Bodies/Pages. Along with H annah Kezema, he co-founded the
performance art collaborative: Dream Tigers.
W illiam D ow is Professor of American Literature at the U niversité Paris-Est
(U PEM ) and Professor of English at T he American U niversity of Paris. H e is
an Associate Editor of Literary Journalism Studies (N orthwestern U niversity
Press) and has published articles in such journals as Publications of the Modern
Language Association, T he Emily Dickinson Journal, Twentieth-Century Literature,
ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance, Critique, T he Hemingway Review,
MELUS, Revue Française D'Etudes Américaines, Actes Sud, Prose Studies, and
EtudesAnglaises. H e is the author of the book, NarratingClassin American Fiction
(Palgrave M acmillan, 2009), co-editor of Richard Wright: New Readings in the
21st Century (Palgrave M acmillan, 2011) and Richard Wright in a Post-Racial
Imaginary (Bloomsbury, 2014). H e is currently completing a book- length study
on American M odernism and radicalism entitled Reinventing Persuasion: Literary
Journalism and the American Radical Tradition, 1900-2000 and is co-editor of the
forthcoming Routledge Companion to American Literary Journalism.
L aw rence Eby is the author of two books of poetry, Flight of August, winner
of the 2014 Louise Bogan Award from Trio H ouse Press, and Machinist in the
Snow, ELJ Publications 2015. H is work can be found in Forklift, Passages North,
Fourteen Hills, T hrush Poetry Journal, and others. H e is the editor in chief of
O range M onkey Publishing, a poetry press in California.
John O livares Espinoza?s poetry has appeared in T he American Poetry Review,
East Bay Review, Miramar, New Letters, and Z YZ Z YVA. H e lives with his wife
and two children in San Jose, California.
D anni Gorden is a social worker in Portland, O regon.
A llen Grossm an (1932-2014) was an American writer, literary critic, and
academic. A noted poet? his sizable catalogue beginning with A Harlot's Hire
(1959) and ending with Descartes's Loneliness (2007)? he also made inestimable
contributions to criticism and the study of poetry, including T he Sighted
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Singer: Two Works on Poetry for Readers and Writers (with M ark H alliday, 1991)
and T he Long Schoolroom: Lessonsin the Bitter Logicof the PoeticPrinciple (1997). A
professor first at Brandeis U niversity and then at T he Johns H opkins
U niversity, he received the Bollingen Prize, the Pushcart Prize, and
Guggenheim and M acArthur Fellowships, among many other awards. H is
poem in this issue, ?T he Piano Player Explains H imself,? appeared in T he
Ether Dome and Other Poems: New and Selected (1979-1991) (N ew Directions,
1991), and is reprinted here with the kind permission of his wife, Judith
Grossman.
Rober t H ass teaches in the English department at U C Berkeley. H is most
recent book is What Light Can Do (Ecco), a collection of essays.
Lyn H ejinian is a poet, essayist, teacher, and translator. H er academic work is
addressed principally to modernist, postmodern, and contemporary poetry and
poetics, with a particular interest in avant-garde movements and the social
practices they entail. H er most recent book is T he Unfollowing (O mnidawn
Books, 2016). O ther volumes include T he Book of a T housand Eyes(O mnidawn
Books, 2012) and T he Wide Road, written in collaboration with Carla
H arryman (Belladonna, 2010). And in fall 2013 Wesleyan republished her
best-known book, My Life, in an edition that includes her related work, My
Life in the Nineties. Wesleyan is also the publisher of A Guide to Poetics Journal:
Writing in the Expanded Field 1982-1998, and the related Poetics Journal Digital
Archive, both co-edited by H ejinian and Barrett Watten. She is currently the
co-director (with Travis O rtiz) of Atelos, a literary project commissioning and
publishing cross-genre work by poets, and the co-editor (with Jane Gregory
and Claire M arie Stancek) of N ion Editions, a chapbook press.
Janis Butler H olm lives in Athens, Ohio, where she has served as Associate
Editor for Wide Angle, the film journal. H er prose, poems, and performance
pieces have appeared in small-press, national, and international magazines. H er
sound poems have been featured in the inaugural edition of Best American
Experimental Writing, edited by Cole Swensen.
Y aul Perez- St able H usni lives, reads, and writes in San Francisco. H e
graduated from U C Berkeley in 2015 with a B.A. in Comparative Literature.
H is favorite words include "still," "of," and "perhaps."
M ichael Ives is a writer, musician, and sound/text performer whose poetry
and fiction have appeared in numerous magazines and journals in the U nited
States and abroad. H e cofounded the sound/text performance trio, F?loom, in
1995. H e is the author of T he External Combustion Engine, (Futurepoem, 2005),
and wavetable, (forthcoming from Dr. Cicero Books) and has taught in the
Written Arts Program at Bard College since 2003.
M ajor Jackson is the author of four books of poetry, most recently Roll Deep
(N orton: 2015). A recent Guggenheim Fellow, he is the editor of the Library
of America's Countee Cullen: Collected Poems. H e is the R ichard Dennis Green
& Gold Professor at the U niversity of Vermont.
291
M ary- Cather ine Jones was born and raised in the south and now divides her
time between working in M anhattan and raising a family in N ew H ampshire,
where she and her husband live on the Contoocook river with two children,
one dog, and seven chickens. H er poetry has appeared in Poetry International,
elimae, Cultural Society, Scapegoat Review, Z one 3 and others. H er photography
has been featured on N PR ?s All T hingsConsidered and TedX . She?s the founder
and director of the Datum:Earth reading series in Peterborough, N H , now in
its fifth year of programming.
L en K r isak's latest books (both translations) are Ovid's Erotic Poems and
Catullus's Carmina. W ith work in the Hudson, Sewanee, PN , Antioch, and
Southwest Reviews, he is the recipient of the Robert Penn Warren, R ichard
W ilbur, and Robert Frost Prizes, and a four-time champion on Jeopardy!
K ayla K r ut is an M FA candidate at the H elen Z ell Writers' Program at the
U niversity of M ichigan. H er work has appeared most recently in Contemporary
Verse 2, White Stag, and American Chordata. www.kaylakrut.blogspot.com.
A nthony A . L ee, Ph.D., is a lecturer of history at U CLA and at West Los
Angeles College, specializing in African American history, African history,
and the African Diaspora in Iran. H e was awarded the N at Turner Poetry
Award (Cross Keys Press) for 2003. H e received the N aomi Long M adgett
Poetry Award (Lotus Press) for 2005, and the M erton Institute?s ?Poetry of the
Sacred? Award in 2012. H is first volume of poems, T his Poem Means (Lotus
Press), was published in 2005. H e collaborated with Jascha Kessler (U CLA)
and Amin Banani (U CLA) to translate the volume Tahirih: A Portrait in Poetry:
Selected Poems of Qurratu?l-?Ayn (K alimát Press, 2005). H is translation with
Amin Banani, Rumi: 53 Secretsfrom the Tavern of Love: Poemsfrom the Rubiayat of
Mevlana Rumi (Islamic Encounter Series) is forthcoming (2014). H is poems
have been published in various journals in the U nited States and Europe,
including: ON THEBUS, Warpland, T he Homestead Review, Härter, Beyond the
Valley of the Contemporary Poets: 2003 Anthology, and Knocking at the Door: Poems
about Approachingthe Other (Birch Bench Press, 2011).
K aren A n- hwei L ee is the author of Phyla of Joy (Tupelo 2012), Ardor (Tupelo
2008) and In Medias Res (Sarabande 2004), winner of the N orma Farber First
Book Award. Lee also wrote two chapbooks, God?s One Hundred Promises
(Swan Scythe 2002) and What the Sea Earnsfor a Living (Q uaci Press 2014). H er
book of literary criticism, Anglophone Literatures in the Asian Diaspora: Literary
Transnationalism and Translingual Migrations (Cambria 2013), was selected for the
Cambria Sinophone World Series. She earned an M .F.A. from Brown
U niversity and Ph.D. in English from the U niversity of California, Berkeley.
T he recipient of a N ational Endowment for the Arts Grant, Lee is a voting
member of the N ational Book Critics Circle.
M onica L ee was born in Seoul, Korea and has lived in California since 1979.
She has two daughters. Currently, she resides in Southern California.
D aniel W.K . L ee is a Seattle-based writer whose work has been seen in
various online and print publications. H e is also a cultural critic,
sex-relationship advice writer, and puppy-daddy to an insanely beautiful
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whippet puppy known formally as H is Lordship, the Earl Camden. Daniel and
Camden can be reached at strongplum@yahoo.com.
H enry Wei L eung is the author of a chapbook, Paradise Hunger (Swan Scythe
2012), and the recipient of Kundiman, Soros, Fulbright, and other fellowships.
H e is now at U H M anoa working toward a PhD.
Ben M azer was born in N ew York City in 1964, and was educated at
H arvard, where he studied with Seamus H eaney and W illiam Alfred, and at
the Editorial Institute, Boston U niversity, where his advisors were Christopher
R icks and Archie Burnett. H is most recent collections of poems are T he Glass
Piano (M adH at Press) and December Poems, out this spring from Pen & Anvil
Press. H e has recently edited a critical edition of T he Collected Poems of John
Crowe Ransom (U n-Gyve Press, 2015). H e also discovered the forgotten
Berkeley Renaissance poet, Landis Everson, and edited his Everything Preserved:
Poems 1955-2005 (Graywolf Press, 2006). H e lives in Cambridge,
M assachusetts, and is the Editor of T he Battersea Review.
Born in O ttawa, Canada?s glorious capital city, rob m clennan currently lives
in O ttawa. T he author of nearly thirty trade books of poetry, fiction and
non-fiction, he won the John N ewlove Poetry Award in 2010, the Council for
the Arts in O ttawa M id-Career Award in 2014, and was longlisted for the
CBC Poetry Prize in 2012. H is most recent titles include notes and dispatches:
essays (Insomniac press, 2014), T he Uncertainty Principle: stories, (Chaudiere
Books, 2014) and the poetry collection If suppose we are a
fragment(BuschekBooks, 2014). An editor and publisher, he runs above/ground
press, Chaudiere Books, T he Garneau Review (ottawater.com/garneaureview),
seventeen seconds: a journal of poetry and poetics (ottawater.com/), Touch the Donkey
(touchthedonkey.blogspot.com) and the O ttawa poetry pdf annualottawater
(ottawater.com). H e spent the 2007-8 academic year in Edmonton as
writer-in-residence at the U niversity of Alberta, and regularly posts reviews,
essays, interviews and other notices atrobmclennan.blogspot.com
Corey M esler has been published in numerous anthologies and journals
including Poetry, Gargoyle, Five Points, Good Poems American Places, and
Esquire/Narrative. H e has published 8 novels, 4 short story collections, and 5
full-length poetry collections. H is new novel, Memphis Movie, is from
Counterpoint Press. H e?s been nominated for the Pushcart many times, and 2
of his poems were chosen for Garrison Keillor?s Writer?s Almanac. W ith his
wife he runs a 145 year-old bookstore in M emphis. H e can be found at
https://coreymesler.wordpress.com.
D avid M offat is a writer and historian who works at T he H ouse of the Seven
Gables. H e studied English with a concentration in Creative Writing at
Bucknell U niversity, and has published poetry in journals such as T he Berkeley
Poetry Review and Spillway. In 2015, he coauthored A Gracious Host: Visiting the
Gables through the Years, an exhibit and companion book on T he H ouse of the
Seven Gables as a tourist destination. H e has lectured locally on the lives and
work of Joseph Priestley, Samuel Johnson, N athaniel H awthorne, and Charles
Dickens, as well as the history of American U nitarianism. H e is a member of
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the Board of Directors for the Salem H istorical Society and the
Editor-in-Chief of the Essex Genealogist.
L aura M ullen is the author of eight books, most recently Complicated Grief.
Recognitions for her poetry include a N ational Endowment for the Arts
Fellowship and a Rona Jaffe Award. She lives and works in Louisiana.
Peter A dam N ash is the author of a recently published biography called T he
Life and Times of Moses Jacob Ezekiel: American Sculptor, Arcadian Knight and of a
novel called Parsimony, soon to be published by Fomite Press (2016).
Additionally, he has published poems and stories in Desideratum, T he Avalon
Literary Review, and T he Minetta Review. In 2012, he co-founded and now
writes a bi-weekly post for a literary blog called Talented Reader:
http://talentedreader.blogspot.com/. H e lives in N ew M exico with his wife
and two sons.
Born and schooled in Chicago, Gerald N icosia is a biographer, historian,
playwright, and novelist, whose work has been closely associated with the Beat
M ovement as well as the 1960?s. H e came to prominence with the publication
of Memory Babe: A Critical Biography of Jack Kerouacin 1983, a book that earned
him the Distinguished Young Writer Award from the N ational Society of Arts
and Letters while it was still a work-in-progress. It was highly praised by
writers as diverse as John Rechy, Irving Stone, W illiam Burroughs, Bruce
Cook, and Allen Ginsberg, who called it a ?great book.? N icosia spent several
decades in both the Chicago and San Francisco literary scenes, making a name
for himself as both a post-Beat poet himself and an organizer of marathon
literary events, often in conjunction with the San Francisco Public Library and
the Friends of the Library. H e edited major poetry collections by both Bob
K aufman (Cranial Guitar) and Ted Joans (Teducation). H e was also involved in
several video and film projects, including the public television documentary
West Coast: Beat and Beyond, directed by Chris Felver, and the movie version of
On the Road, directed by Walter Salles. A lifelong friend of peace activist Ron
Kovic, N icosia spent decades studying, working with, and writing about
Vietnam veterans in their long process of healing from that war. H is definitive
work on that subject, Home to War: A History of the Vietnam Veterans?Movement,
was picked by the Los Angeles Times as one of the ?Best Books of 2001,? and
has been praised by notable Vietnam veterans like John Kerry and Oliver Stone
and also by veterans of America?s later wars, such as Anthony Swofford, author
of Jarhead, and leaders of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans Against the War.
Among his other books on a Beat theme, he has published Jan Kerouac: A Life
in Memory and One and Only: the Untold Story of On the Road. H e has taught
Beat literature, the Sixties, and the Vietnam War literally around the world,
including in China, where he adopted his daughter Wu Ji. H is experiences in
China have found their way into a forthcoming book of poetry, Night Train to
Shanghai, which was published by Grizzly Peak Press in 2013. H e is also
working on a book about racism and the death penalty in America, Blackness
T hrough the Land, as well as a biography of N tozake Shange called Beautiful,
Colored, and Alive, which will be published by St. M artin?s Press. H e spoke at
the First International Beat Conference in the N etherlands, September 5-7,
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2012; and more recently, he organized and M C-ed a marathon Beat poetry
reading at Bob Weir?s Sweetwater M usic H all in M ill Valley, California, on
January 8, 2013, which went on for almost four hours with over twenty poets
and musicians. In June 2009, he was given an Acker Award ?for avant-garde
excellence? in his writing.
L inda N or ton?s first book, T he Public Gardens: Poems and History (Pressed
Wafer, 2011; introduction by Fanny H owe) was a finalist for a LosAngelesTimes
Book Prize. She lives in O akland and works at the Bancroft Library at U C
Berkeley. In 2014 she received a Creative Work Fund grant and the Phillip
Dickey Fellowship from SFSU . T he poems published here are from a new
manuscript called Wite-Out. O ther work from the manuscript has appeared in
Z en Monster, Eleven Eleven, New American Writing, and is forthcoming in
Amerarcana, Hanging Loose, OccuPoetry, and Fourteen Hills. She appends the
following notes to her work in this issue:
?In M y Girlish Days?: ?All of my playmates is now surprised / I had to
travel before I got wise. / I didn?t know no better / Oh boy / In my
girlish days.? ? M emphis M innie.
?I eat men like air.? ? Sylvia Plath.
?Disambitious? ? John Berryman
Rober t Peake (English, ?99) is an American-born poet living near London.
H e created the Transatlantic Poetry series, bringing poets together from
around the world for live online poetry readings and conversations. H e also
collaborates with other artists on film-poems, and his work has been widely
screened in the U S and Europe. H is newest collection T he Knowledge is now
available from N ine Arches Press.
D . A . Powell is the Tin H ouse Writer-in-Residence at Portland State
U niversity and a 2016 Civitella R anieri fellow in Italy. H is most recent books
are Repast (Graywolf, 2014) and UselessLandscape, or A Guide for Boys(Graywolf,
2012), recipient of the N ational Book Critics Circle award in Poetry.
Born in M iami, Florida, M ax Goudie Pujals earned his B.A. in English at
U niversity of California Berkeley in 2013 where he took an interest in
translating Spanish Caribbean poems hoping to improve the perception of
writers who are important to the education of American immigrant culture.
H is experiments in inversions of form take their cue from attempts to invoke
art with the same energy as nature. H e has gone on to direct his writing to
communities of cooperative farmers in Latin America.
A ndrew R eyes likes grammar and etymology. H e has a B.A. in Comparative
Literature and Philosophy from U C Berkeley, which perhaps helps qualify him
for his current job of teaching English and Spanish things to kids in his
hometown of Chino, CA.
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M argaret R hee is the author of chapbooks Yellow (Tinfish Press, 2011) and
Radio Heart; or, How Robots Fall Out of Love (Finishing Line Press, 2015).
Literary fellowships include positions as a Kundiman Fellow, Squaw Valley
Poetry Fellow, and the K athy Acker Fellow at Les Figues Press. She holds a
Ph.D. from U C Berkeley in ethnic and new media studies, and a BA in
creative writing and English from the U niversity of Southern California.
Currently, she is a visiting assistant professor in Women and Gender Studies
Department at the U niversity of O regon. A portion of ?T he U niversity
Dreams? appeared as ?Lecture Poems? in the June 2013 issue of comma, poetry.
A ndrew R idker is the editor of Privacy Policy: T he Anthology of Surveillance
Poetics. H is work has appeared in Guernica, Boston Review, T he Believer Logger,
St. LouisMagazine, SmokeLongQuarterly, and elsewhere.
At fourteen, L ar ry Ruth and a friend set out from Yosemite and hiked the
John M uir Trail. T hey spent the last night on M ount Whitney in a snowstorm
in July. Larry now works as consultant in natural resource and environmental
policy. For many years he taught, conducted research and handled
programmatic responsibilities at the U niversity of California. Recent research
focuses on wildland fire, environmental assessment and the sustainability of
natural resources and ecosystems. Publications include articles of federal
wildland fire policy, ecosystem management, forest policy in the Sierra
N evada, and adaptive management.
A aron Shur in is Professor Emeritus and former Director of the M FA
program at the U niversity of San Francisco. H e is the author of more than a
dozen books, including T he Skin of Meaning: Collected Literary Essays and Talks
(U niversity of M ichigan, 2016) andCitizen (City Lights, 2011). H is honors
include the Gertrude Stein Award, the Bay Area Art Award, the Gerbode
Poetry Award, and fellowships from the N ational Endowment for the Arts and
the California Arts Council.
A lex Tait ague is a poet and resident of the East Bay who graduated from U C
Berkeley in 2013. T hough continuing to write, he now works in San
Francisco in the field of advertising and analysis and enjoys working with the
precision of numbers that writing often eludes.
M ark Tardi is the author of the books Euclid Shudders and Airport music. A
former Fulbright scholar, he earned his M FA from Brown U niversity.
Previously on faculty at the Department of American Literature and Culture at
the U niversity of Lodz, Poland, he is currently a lecturer in the Department of
Foreign Languages at the U niversity of N izwa, O man. H is newest book, T he
Circusof Trust, is forthcoming from Dalkey Archive Press in 2017.
Bryce T hor nburg is a recent graduate of the Iowa Writer's Workshop. H e
currently teaches creative writing at the U niversity of Iowa.
T EE K im Tong [Z hang Jinzhong in pinyin romanization system] has
published a number of fiction and non-fiction books in the Chinese language.
H e lives in K aohsiung, Taiwan RO C, where he teaches at the N ational Sun
Yat-sen U niversity and directs the Center for the H umanities.
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R ichard Tuttle's art is represented by the Pace Gallery in N ew York. M ajor
exhibitions of his work have taken place, recently at the Fabric Workshop &
M useum, Philadelphia, and the Tate M odern, London. A retrospective of his
work was presented in 2005 at the Whitney M useum of American Art, N ew
York.
G.C. Waldrep is the author most recently of Testament (BO A Editions, 2015)
and a chapbook, Susquehanna (O mnidawn, 2013). H e lives in Lewisburg, Pa.,
where he teaches at Bucknell U niversity, edits the journal West Branch, and
serves as Editor-at-Large for T he Kenyon Review.
Rob Sean W ilson has published poems and reviews in Bamboo Ridge journal
since 1979, and in various other journals from Tinfish, Taxi, Manoa, and Central
Park to New Republic, Ploughshares, Partisan Review and Poetry. H e is a western
Connecticut native who was educated at the U niversity of California at
Berkeley, where he was founding editor of the Berkeley Poetry Review. H e is at
work on two forthcoming collections of poetry: Ananda Air: American Pacific
Lines of Flight; and Automat: Un/American Poetics, and still plays basketball, pool,
and meditates (prays), each day, in the great void of being and creative bliss. As
Jack Kerouac put it in Dharma Bums, "Equally holy, equally to be loved, equally
a coming Buddha!"
Changm ing Y uan is a 9-time Pushcart nominee and author of 7 chapbooks.
Growing up in a remote village, Yuan began to learn English at 19 and
published monographs on translation before moving out of China. W ith a
PhD in English, Yuan currently edits Poetry Pacific with Allen Yuan in
Vancouver, and has poetry appearing in Best Canadian Poetry,
BestNewPoemsOnline, T hreepenny Review and 1159 others across 38 countries.
M atthew Z apr uder is the author most recently of Sun Bear, Copper Canyon,
2014. Why Poetry, a book of prose, is forthcoming from Ecco Press. An
Associate Professor in the English Department and Director of the M FA
Program in Creative Writing at Saint M ary?s College of California, he is also
Editor at Large at Wave Books. H e lives in O akland, CA. ?Poem on the
O ccasion of a Weekly Staff M eeting? originally appeared in Faultline and
?Little Demon of K iss? in T he Rumpus.
Sam uel Gar rett Z eitlin is a PhD candidate in Political Science and a student
member of the Designated Emphasis in Renaissance and Early M odern
Studies at U C-Berkeley. H e has published translations of R ilke and Brecht
and a recent translation and edition (co-edited with R .A. Berman) of Land and
Sea: A World-historical Meditation (Candor, N Y: Telos Press Publishing, 2015).
R aúl Z ur it a, Chilean poet and recipient of the Premio N acional de Literatura
in 2000, published his first works under the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet,
which lasted from 1973 to 1990. In the tradition of Dante, Z urita?s poetry
seeks Paradise, but finds it out of reach. H is works include Purgatorio,
Anteparaíso, La vida nueva, and IN RI.
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