Category: Interlitq

Interlitq’s Californian Poets Interview Series: Stephen Kessler, Poet, Translator, Journalist, interviewed by David Garyan

Stephen Kessler at the 2023 Santa Cruz County Artist of the Year Celebration
photo credit — SCCTV (Santa Cruz Community Television)

November 7th, 2023

Interlitq’s Californian Poets Interview Series:

Stephen Kessler, Poet, Translator, Journalist

interviewed by David Garyan

 

Stephen Kessler’s poems appear in Interlitq’s California Poets Feature

DG: Let’s begin with your translations, which include Luis Cernuda all the way to Jorge Luis Borges on the other side of the world. Apart from the vast geography, the writers you’ve translated also vary greatly in style. Can you talk about a project that you particularly enjoyed working on, along with one that posed significant challenges?

SK: Almost every translation project I’ve done has been a pleasure and a privilege and I’ve enjoyed them in different ways for different reasons, and each has presented its own significant challenges.  Probably the book that was the most fun to do, thanks to the playful and irreverent attitude of the author toward his own collection of poems, is Julio Cortázar’s Save Twilight: Selected Poems, first published in Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s City Lights Pocket Poets Series in 1997, and reissued in an expanded edition about 20 years later after Lawrence had retired and Elaine Katzenberger was editor in chief.  With many different kinds of poems and styles and voices he deployed over about 50 years, the book is completely unconventional and very funny in places, especially his cats’ editorial commentary in prose as they help him assemble the volume.  The Argentine Cortázar, who spent his most productive years in Paris, is of course best known for his short fictions and his novel Hopscotch, but like Borges thought of himself primarily as a poet.

The Spaniard Vicente Aleixandre (Nobel laureate 1977), two of whose books I’ve translated—one early, one late in his career—is in the early work (La destrucción o el amor, Destruction or Love, 1933) very baroque in style, and in the later (Poemas de la consumación, Poems of Consummation, 1968) rather gnomic, so the Spanish in both cases, but especially in the later book, is unconventional and in places agrammatical.  It’s tricky to be true to the original and not make it sound like a mistake in English.  But since this stylistic trait recurs throughout the book, the reader should pick that up and realize the fidelity of what I’m doing, even if they can’t read the facing Spanish.

Cernuda (Spain), Borges (Argentina), and Neruda (Chile) are more straightforward and traditionally lyrical or conversational in style, but I think in part because all three are influenced by English or American poets, the syntax and language are easier for the reader to get on first reading.  That doesn’t make translation any easier, but it facilitates understanding, so at least you (as a translator) know what you’re dealing with instead of being puzzled by unconventional usage, idioms or syntax.

DG: Let’s talk about the politics of translation: Do you have a different approach to the craft when tackling a writer like Borges (on the right of the political spectrum) as opposed to Neruda, for example, who was staunchly on the left?

SK: Borges was certainly conservative, and in the years of the Dirty War in Argentina (1976-83) was anti-chaos, but he was just as disgusted with the fascist generals as with the Marxist guerrillas.  In his poetry he romanticizes the physical courage of both his military ancestors and the knife-fighting hoodlums of old Buenos Aires, but none of that has anything to do with politics.  It has more to do with the reveries of a blind, bookish, physically limited man and his admiration for the “manliness” of others.

Neruda was converted to communism largely on the basis of his experience in Spain in the mid-1930s and his friendships with the poets of the Generation of 1927 (García Lorca, Aleixandre, Cernuda, Guillén, Salinas, and others) and the invasion by Franco and his fascist forces to overthrow the Spanish Republic in 1936.  Until then, Neruda was a romantic and a surrealist.  His famous poem “Explico algunas cosas” explains his conversion to political engagement.  Unfortunately, in my opinion, Neruda is at his worst and most boringly rhetorical when he puts on his Voice of the People persona and speaks as if he’s preaching to a stadium full of workers.  That said, his epic history of the Americas, Canto general, is one of the greatest works of its genre, for sure; I’ve done one of the many translations of Alturas de Machu Picchu from that work, which is a very powerful—and all but impossible to translate, which is why there are so many versions in English—long poem in homage to the anonymous (enslaved) workers who built that mysterious city.

As for differences in approach to translating such different kinds of voices, I consider myself a proponent of the Method acting school of translation.  I try to find in the deepest part of myself, no matter how different my experience or perspective is from the author’s, an identification with what they’re doing (saying, feeling, thinking) and the tone and feel of their speaking voice, and try to inhabit that persona and speak it as I think it would sound if it had been written originally in English.

In terms of “craft,” I bring the same skills and tools to every translation—like a musician so deeply practiced in the technical aspects of his instrument that he can improvise spontaneously without thinking—which are the same ones I use in my original poems: imagination, familiarity with certain traditions, knowledge of prosody, an ear for the sound of the Spanish and how that could be echoed in English, attunement to local or regional idioms, and a certain flexibility and confidence in my instincts developed over decades of practice.  More important for me than “craft” is that you must understand what you’re translating before you take it too literally.  Even native speakers sometimes don’t understand poetry—and sometimes even the poet is composing more for sound or image than “literal” meaning.  (There is some disagreement among translators as to whether there’s even such a thing as a literal translation.)  But you have an ethical obligation to be as true as possible to the original.  So those are some of the elements in play as I approach any poet regardless of their politics or personality.

DG: You came to Santa Cruz in the early ‘70s and since then have contributed greatly to the literary community. Can you speak about how SC influenced your writing, how the city itself has changed, along with the benefits of working outside the traditional LA/SF paradigm?

SK: I first arrived in Santa Cruz in 1968 on a four-year Regents Fellowship to UCSC at the dawn of their doctoral program in literature, but it didn’t take long for me to realize the academy was not where I wanted to be, and a psychic crisis at the end of 1969 (fictionalized in my novel, The Mental Traveler) was the deciding event that ended my career in graduate school.  After a year in Southern California recovering from my psychotic break in therapy, I returned to Santa Cruz and in 1972 started writing for what was then called the underground press, which evolved into the alternative press, and locally was a series of weekly community newspapers that I became more and more involved in as a writer, editor, and eventually (1986) publisher of my own independent weekly called The Sun, which was put out of business by the 1989 Loma Prieta Earthquake.

In the early ‘70s I was one among several young poets just starting out, and it was such a tight community, largely wrangled together by Morton Marcus, who taught at Cabrillo College and was the most widely published poet in town, that for a few years many friendships were formed as we egged each other on, sending poems back and forth in the mail and reading in each other’s homes and in one series or another that Mort organized at local restaurants and cafes.  This was a formative time for me; I was reading all kinds of different things and beginning to translate, and being part of a community of poets apart from any academic setting was healthy for my development as a writer after grad school.  I also brought my training as a critic to bear on my journalism, and so was an active supporter of a literary culture that, in those years, was not way out on the margins; it felt like poetry had a place of value as part of the cultural life of the city and region.

The journalism, especially in the opinion columns I started writing then, was a way of infiltrating a nonliterary medium with a poet’s sensibility, and in some ways the essays I was writing for the press were my most “experimental” form.  I also wrote features of various kinds, cultural and political, that made me feel relevant to a range of readers who’d never pick up a book of poems or a little magazine, and as the poetry world felt more and more like a small subculture where so little was at stake that the people inside it had a distorted notion of their own importance, I was more and more engaged with the role of the local press in addressing what mattered in the real world.  So I’ve been doing that, in one form or another, not just in Santa Cruz but when I lived on the Mendocino Coast in the ‘90s, ever since.  For the last 10 years or so I’ve been writing a weekly opinion column for the daily Santa Cruz Sentinel, a legacy paper started by a local family in the mid-1800s and now owned by a hedge fund in New York.  I am still a generalist and write about whatever’s on my mind ranging from personal history to cultural criticism to local and national and international affairs.  I feel it’s the best use of my writing skills as a contributor to the community.

I never thought much about “the LA/SF paradigm” except that I was connected with poetry networks in both places and gave readings and published in various magazines north and south.  I think of myself as a California poet with ties to both LA and San Francisco, as well as in the North Bay and on the North and Central coasts.  But in the intimacy of a smaller town like Santa Cruz I felt I could make much more of a difference, especially as a journalist, and I think I have.  This year the county arts commission named me their Artist of the Year for my accomplishments and contributions over the last 50 years.

As for how the town has changed through the past half century: in a word, immensely.  It’s now much more like a little city with a big arts scene with countless artists and musicians and scores or maybe hundreds of published poets and groups and networks, and in terms of population and development, it’s exploded.  UCSC has had a lot to do with this, and the Silicon Valley-fueled real estate boom since the ‘90s.  But this is a subject much too big to discuss in an interview like this.

DG: Let’s turn towards your novel, The Mental Traveler, an homage to the great Blake’s vision of a cyclical history. At the same time, the main character’s name is curiously Stephen K. and seems to be based on your early experiences. A 22-year old literature graduate student falls into a crisis, going from one psychiatric institution to the other, until, paradoxically, literature provides a revelation, and it’s Robert Bly’s poem “Anarchists Fainting.” Now, the young generation seems more lost than ever: COVID, economic instability, wars. What are some poems you turn to for guidance today?

SK: Stephen K. is caught up in the contradictions between his vocation as a poet and the demands of a respectable academic career in the midst of the tumultuous social, cultural, and political upheavals of that historical moment.  He has a flash of insight after six months in madhouses when he reads “Anarchists Fainting” in Harper’s (later published in Bly’s book Sleepers Joining Hands as “Condition of the Working Classes: 1970”) which, in his heightened awareness, sometimes called paranoia, he thinks is about him.  That is in the final chapter after many disorienting and picaresque adventures leading up to a breakthrough realization.  I’ll leave it at that, but the book is a story of artistic initiation in a supercharged historical context—which at the time, subjectively, felt fraught in much the same way that today does—but today is far worse, with many and far more serious crises than could have been imagined then.

But I didn’t then and don’t now look to any particular poems for guidance.  I read poetry for pleasure and inspiration, not instruction.  Poetry at its best can illuminate reality and show us things we never saw that way before, and for me that’s the most we can ask of it.  It’s really hard to write good, original poems, whatever the theme or subject—love, nature, justice, friendship, identity, consciousness, war, politics, etc.—and a freshly imagined poem of any kind can be helpful in getting me through the day.  But I do not have a utilitarian concept of poetry, or a Garrison Keilloresque notion that it’s necessarily good for us as readers, like eating our vegetables.  There’s so much poetry out there now, competent but generic, thanks to the creative writing industry, and not that much of it is of interest to me.  I’m still reading things from centuries past that I should’ve got around to sooner, like the ancient Greek and Roman epigrammists, or the ancient Persians or Chinese.  I think everyone individually has to find the poems that speak to them and give them what they need.  For me poetry has always been about an intimate connection between what’s on the page and the reader, and like any relationship, it’s different for different people at different times and under different conditions.

I enjoy reading poems to an audience, to hear what they sound like out loud, but my primal and most intense connection with poetry originally was reading it on the page, as in the scene with the Bly poem in The Mental Traveler.

DG: One of the last emails you received from the late Jack Hirschman was “Caro, Stephen, Understood”—in reply to your preference not to get involved in his effort to organize politically-related readings and events. Before his death, he was due to fly to Italy, where as you write, “he was far more famous than in the States.” Those who knew him know they need him more than ever now. Yet, there are still those who’ve yet to discover his work. Can you speak about your favorite pieces of his, and how his work affected your own development?

SK: Jack’s magnum opus is the three-volume 3,000+ page The Arcanes—his Cantos, or anti-Cantos, as he hated Pound—published in Italy and probably hard to find in the States.  Except for a couple of books from City Lights, the rest of his 100+ books of poems and translations were issued by very small presses—though I imagine some of his work can be found online.  But as I wrote in my postmortem appreciation of him, published online in the LA Review of Books, the most important way he inspired, moved, and encouraged people was by his generous presence as a completely unique personality and organizer of a poetry community, mainly in San Francisco.  I declined his call to organize events with a political slant because I don’t have time and I don’t think it does much good except to make the already convinced feel good about themselves for opposing capitalism, war, or whatever.  But Jack was an agitator.  His “Stalinist” politics were kind of a self-caricature, as far as I’m concerned—he was a romantic utopian more than a real communist—and his politics made him seem more ridiculous to some people than he actually was.  So if anyone wants to discover his work, I wish them the best.  But it’s less his prodigious writings than his person that I valued, first as a teacher at UCLA in 1966, and later in San Francisco as a friend and as an example of someone totally committed to poetry.  We had a lot of disagreements about what kind of poetry is of greatest value, or is any good.

DG: Let’s talk about your most recent collection, Last Call (2021). The 169-page collection is your biggest to date, covering a wide range of topics. The noted poet Joseph Stroud, said the following: “There is a wonderful term in Italian—Sprezzatura—which is the art of making the difficult appear easy, a kind of grace that cloaks a deep mastery of craft. I find this quality, this Sprezzatura, everywhere in Stephen Kessler’s work.” And yet, sprezzatura does not at all suggest a lack of effort—it merely implies the appearance of a lack of effort when the presentation takes place. Thus, in truth, to produce this aforementioned “appearance,” sprezzatura actually requires a great deal of blood, sweat, and tears behind the scenes. Can you talk about some of the most crucial aspects, with regard to this project, from start to finish?

SK: That was a very generous endorsement of my work by my old friend Joe Stroud, whom I met more than 50 years ago when we both came to Santa Cruz, and who I consider another example of someone devoted, in a completely different way from Hirschman, to the ethos and practice of poetry, and certainly among the most accomplished poets in this region (though he only spends part of the year here).  I think of Joe as a “pure poet,” committed exclusively to poetry in a way that I couldn’t be, which is why I’ve diversified my practice for all this time.  But if my writing has “sprezzatura,” I think it’s because I’ve been practicing so long—again, like a veteran jazz musician—that it comes fairly easily to me at this stage of my journey, and I’m not trying to please or impress anyone else, so I’m free to trust my own voice (as another teacher of mine, Robert Duncan, counseled) and let it rip, intuitively trusting my technical skills to make the right words land in the right places.  It’s not as if I don’t revise and refine, but I like to improvise very spontaneously and then go back and fix whatever needs improvement.  Some poems make it and some don’t, but I’m not after perfection and can accept failure when they don’t work.

I also think of myself in the lyrical vernacular tradition ranging from Wordsworth through Whitman to Williams, O’Hara, and Bukowski, writing the way I speak, or would like to speak if I could speak that precisely and musically all the time.

Except for Where Was I?, my book of prose poems about place, or places, I don’t really think of my books of poems as projects.  I write poems as they come to me, one at a time, in various moods, modes, styles and forms—I consider myself a heteroformalist—and at some point, after a few years, usually corresponding to some turning point in my life, I realize I have the makings of a book and then try to put it together in a way that the poems seem to organize themselves.  Sometimes by theme, sometimes as a journey, sometimes in roughly chronological order, sometimes in what feels like a natural progression from one poem to another.  Last Call was written between 2017, when my marriage broke up, and 2021, just after the Covid lockdowns.  It’s organized by theme or mood in seven sections and it covers a lot of ground in terms of style, tone, form, and feeling.  It’s a bigger book than most of my previous collections just because I was writing more, or more poems worth saving, and my publisher, Joe Phillips of Black Widow Press, is “not afraid of big books,” as he told me about my Cernuda volume Forbidden Pleasures, so I included everything I thought could stand up with time.  And so far, when I look at those poems, I think I made the right call in its composition; I think they hold up pretty well.

DG: Los Angeles was the city that, as you’ve said, made you a poet. How has the city changed since you were growing up, and is there perhaps anything you miss about it that’s still there?

SK: The city seems vaster than ever, with more freeways and more traffic, and the spread of suburbs, and the usual development and redevelopment.  And Covid shut down a few of my favorite things, like the big Landmark multiplex art house cinema at Pico and Westwood.  But no, I don’t miss LA at all, especially the traffic and the freeways, and when I visit there from time to time—mostly to see friends and family, or more recently to attend funerals—I’m always happy to return home to little Mediterranean Santa Cruz, though it has changed a lot, too.  My essay “The Architecture of Memory,” published in LARB, is mostly about places that no longer exist, or not in the form I knew them in the 1950s and ‘60s.  The great LA poet Wanda Coleman, who died about 10 years ago, was a good friend and an inspiration, and I miss her a lot.  There are still parts of LA I enjoy visiting, certain neighborhoods or parks or restaurants or movie theaters, but I’m really glad I got out of there when I did.

DG: Let’s return to translation, but from a different perspective. Is there a language you would love to have your work translated into?

SK: I would be honored to be translated into any language a competent translator felt I deserved to be published in.  Naturally because of my connection with Spanish, Spain and Latin America would be among my top preferences.  But my books in the States sell no more than a few hundred copies, mostly in California, so I don’t anticipate the market for what I do would be any larger elsewhere.  My translations are much more successful, in terms of sales, in part because I’ve chosen or been chosen to work with major poets who’ve proved their staying power, and partly because my translations happen to represent them very well, and have won numerous awards, which has also helped raise their profile.

DG: What are you reading and/or working on at the moment?

SK: Lately I spend more hours reading The New York Times than anything else, in part because I want to know what’s going on in the world—which of course relates to my job as a newspaper columnist—and partly because it’s such a great newspaper and I admire so many of the writers, the editing, the page design (I read it on paper), the headlines, the features, the reporting, the photographs and illustrations, the analysis, the editorials, the letters.  It’s like a daily anthology of great stories and excellent writing.  Back around 1969 the critic Seymour Krim published an essay in Evergreen Review, “The Newspaper as Literature,” a kind of manifesto that argued for literary writers to engage with the historical moment—which New Journalists like Norman Mailer and Joan Didion and others were doing—by infiltrating the nonliterary press.  Jimmy Breslin in New York (with the Daily News) was a model for Krim of a traditional reporter writing things of both immediate and lasting value.  And that has turned out to be central to my own practice, publishing my essays in newspapers as well as more strictly literary venues.  So I am, for better or worse, addicted to the Times.

Usually before bed, as an antidote to all the bad news, I pick up a book from the pile next to my chair and read a few pages.  Lately I’ve been reading Didion (nonfiction), Ben Lerner (fiction), Fernando Pessoa, Mahmoud Darwish, Hafiz (in a new translation by my old friend Gary Gach), Michel Houellebecq, Louise Glück, and somewhat randomly sampled other poets in my library.  I try to keep up with books by friends who send them to me, but I don’t follow much contemporary poetry or fiction.  I very much enjoyed Sarah Bakewell’s life of Montaigne, How to Live, one of the few books of more than 300 pages I’ve read in a while.

Unless something extraordinary comes to my attention and my inspiration, I feel I’ve pretty much retired as a translator, having fulfilled my destiny with the three Cernuda books: Written in Water, Desolation of the Chimera, and Forbidden Pleasures.  He’s one of the greatest poets in Spanish, and I think I’ve done him justice and performed a valuable service, even if the number of readers in English is limited, for now.

As for what I’m working on, the essays for the column, constantly, which range all over whatever I’m thinking about, and I have some 40 new poems since Last Call that may eventually amount to part of a book, but I don’t expect that for at least another two or three years.  At some point I’ll probably try to put together a Selected Poems, but I figure I’ll know when to do that, if I live long enough.

Author Bio:

Stephen Kessler is the author of a dozen books of original poetry, sixteen books of literary translation, three collections of essays, and a novel, The Mental Traveler (Greenhouse Review Press). He is the editor and principal translator of The Sonnets by Jorge Luis Borges (Penguin Classics) and was for sixteen years (1999-2014) the editor of The Redwood Coast Review. The poems here are from his most recent book, Last Call (Black Widow Press, 2021). A longtime resident of Santa Cruz, he writes a weekly op-ed column in the Santa Cruz Sentinel. www.stephenkessler.com

Interlitq’s Californian Poets Interview Series: Daniel Yaryan, Poet, Publisher, Poetry Promoter, interviewed by David Garyan

Daniel Yaryan

November 7th, 2023

Interlitq’s Californian Poets Interview Series:

Daniel Yaryan, Poet, Publisher, Poetry Promoter

interviewed by David Garyan

 

Daniel Yaryan’s poems appear in Interlitq’s California Poets Feature

DG: Let’s begin with your background, which doesn’t follow the typical BA-MFA-poetry prof-creative writing chair paradigm. Sci-Fi, comics books, and cinema are influences. Motorcycles are influences. In 1938, your grandfather, Big Ray Yaryan, started the Ghost Riders Motorcycle Club in the San Fernando Valley. You’re a former print journalist and advertising exec. So much going on here—and that’s only a part of it. Can you speak about how you discovered poetry, and your aesthetic has changed over the years in relation to all the new influences you encountered?

DY: In the late ‘70s, my brother and sister both managed two different local United Artists Theatres in downtown Santa Cruz, with unlimited free movie passes. This led to my lifelong interest in films and the affect they would have on my writing in the future. By age 8, I saw Akira Kurosawa’s Kagemusha; and by age 9, I watched David Lynch’s Eraserhead—both films are poetry. What I learned is that poetry is something that’s part of your internal wiring— you either possess it or you don’t and it comes out without commanding it out of the genie’s lamp. As Orson Welles put it, “a film is never really good unless the camera is an eye in the head of a poet.”

As a kid, I created my own comic storyboards, which I wrote and illustrated. I also set many of my comics to audio recordings—taped for dialogue and characterization, which I gave to my father as gifts. I was an avid collector of comic books and learned to read them at 4 years-old, with the prompting of my much older brother, Charles, who was 16 at the time.

Later, when I was in high school, I played football for the Santa Cruz High Cardinals until receiving an injury that took me out of the game. The injury was a moment of destiny that convinced me to quit the team and join the school newspaper, The Trident, where I learned to gather stories and write them with panache to land articles on the front page. This continued further in college as I became the youngest editor-in-chief in the history of The Voice at Cabrillo. This set a course that brought me into the life of a quote-unquote “newspaper man” as both journalist and, a decade later, advertising executive at the Los Angeles Times and San Francisco Chronicle. I was a freelance writer for a decade and landed a job as a Senior Editor at Daily News Los Angeles before shifting gears into advertising.

My earliest significant writing influence was poet William Everson. I saw Everson read his poetry in different Santa Cruz venues when I was in high school and was startled and amazed by his stage presence and high-caliber poetics. He was dressed in a buckskin vest, wearing a bear claw necklace and had a flowing white beard and long hair—very Whitmanesque. He really looked like a frontiersman who had distanced himself from preppy 1980s America. Although his body shook severely from Parkinson’s Disease, his mind and his poems were sturdy and stood out from anything else I’d ever heard. It contrasted greatly with the otherwise precious drivel served up in academics at the time (and even now for that matter). I later met Everson in the early 1990s at Native Images in Santa Cruz, the studio of fine artist and master printer Daniel Owen Stolpe. I was there interviewing Everson for an article for Good Times magazine. Thereafter, I became friends with Everson and Stolpe. I made many trips up the coast to visit “Bill” at his cabin in Swanton, just 15 miles north of Santa Cruz. Through him, my interest in more avant-garde writers took fruition and I learned where he came from and the types of writers and poets who influenced him – Robinson Jeffers, Henry Miller, Anaïs Nin Kenneth Patchen, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Kenneth Rexroth and the San Francisco Renaissance which Everson was a part of when he was known as the “Beat Friar” Brother Antoninus. I retraced his steps and discovered many greats who were his contemporaries.

Another influence on my writing was my grandfather, Big Ray Yaryan, founder of the aforementioned Ghosts Riders MC. Almost a decade after his death, in 1996, I researched Big Ray’s history as a pioneering motorcyclist of the 1930s, delving into family documentation and interviews to write his story. I wrote a long essay turned article for a Harley-Davidson trade magazine Thunder Press, which metamorphosed into a separate, narrative post-Beat poem. Big Ray the Ghost Rider didn’t write but haunted me to write differently and with greater verve.

DG: Wanda Coleman, the late, monumental LA poet said this of you: “one of a new generation of poetry mavens.” When did you meet her and what are aspects of her work you admire the most?

DY: I met Wanda Coleman in the early 2000s after hearing her read at a church on Los Feliz and later corresponded with her via Facebook. I immediately considered her a poetic champion of unrivalled performance abilities. When I read her poems, I heard her actual voice. This is a rare superpower that only about a handful of poets possess with an indelible lifeforce shining through the words on the page, channeling their speaking voice into your mind. Wanda Coleman was a glowing example of this level of expression. Others who come to mind, possessing this valuable trait, include Ellyn Maybe, Avotcja, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Q.R. Hand, Michael C Ford and a select few.

DG: In 2012, you were instrumental in reviving the Santa Cruz Poetry Festival, which hadn’t been held since 1981. Names like Michael C. Ford, S.A. Griffin, Jack Hirschman, and Coleman herself appeared. Mike Sonksen wrote a comprehensive article describing the happenings, with videos of the performances. I’d like, however, to focus on the behind-the-scenes effort, which is often forgotten. What was it like organizing the event? What were the challenges, rewards, and is there anyone who deserves a special mention for the help they provided?

DY: In 1994, when my brother and I published an independent newspaper in Santa Cruz called The Real World Press (RWP), we had planned to revive the Santa Cruz Poetry Festival as a fundraiser, including half the proceeds going to William Everson’s medical fund. There was a poetry section in the RWP called Footsteps of the Wind—a title named by Everson. The revival plan did not work out because of the intense amount of work involved with resurrecting something big like the original festival. The plan was left on the backburner until 2011 when I was motivated to follow through with this original goal with the momentum of the Sparring With Beatnik Ghosts series I created. I was also inspired by the original director of the 1981 festival, novelist Jerry Kamstra, who I became friends with. What I learned from The Real World Press days and any other worthwhile project or task I’ve ever been involved with is that having meetings to put together something has always been a waste of time because no one in the meetings follows through with anything. From my experience, meetings are talk without action. I chose to produce Poetry Festival Santa Cruz at the Cocoanut Grove on 2/12/12 on my own. If I needed help with anything, I would just call up individuals and ask them directly. I gathered sponsors and conducted fundraisers in my community to get the jets off the tarmac, so to speak. One of the fundraisers I did was a monthly series of Sparring With Beatnik Ghosts readings at the Santa Cruz Art League with the guidance of my friend T. Mike Walker (novelist of Voices from the Bottom of The World—A Police Journal published in 1969 by Grove Press).

Also, I talked to my friend, photographer/filmmaker Christopher Felver, about bringing his documentary on Lawrence Ferlinghetti to Santa Cruz and bringing Ferlinghetti himself to the historic Del Mar Theatre (from my early cinema upbringing) for a Q&A. I asked Mayor Coonerty to declare October 18, 2011 Lawrence Ferlinghetti Day, which was actualized. The result was the special appearance of Ferlinghetti at the Santa Cruz film premiere of Felver’s documentary. I also partnered with Nickelodeon Theatres who operated the Del Mar at that time, culminating in the largest fundraiser I had for Poetry Festival Santa Cruz with over 500 people in attendance, selling out the Del Mar’s Grand Auditorium. I spent a solid year organizing the festival and bringing poets from all over the map to Santa Cruz. There’s so much that went into it, so I’m just barely scratching the surface.

DG: Apart from the event in Santa Cruz, Sonksen has also called you “one of the West Coast’s most active promoters of poetry.” Your traveling poetry show “Sparring With Beatnik Ghosts” goes between LA and San Francisco. How did the pandemic affect the enterprise and what does the future hold for it?

DY: When I moved to Los Angeles from Santa Cruz in 2018, I had already started having the “Sparring Artists Salon” at the Kamstra Sparring Archive (aka “Sparchive”) in Toluca Lake—the last of which took place in February, 2020 on the cusp of the onset of the Coronavirus, which stopped everything everywhere from March 2020 onward into the pandemic. On the night of Friday the 13th of November, 2020, I held the outdoor Mystic Boxing Commission Festival of Sound & Vision at the Valley Relics Museum at the Van Nuys Airport (Los Angeles County). It was the only poetry festival in Los Angeles in 2020 and brought brave, masked poets to the microphone with the backdrop of the neon sign wonderland of the museum’s open airplane hangar behind us. Mystic Boxing Commission in my parent company for Sparring With Beatnik Ghosts and umbrella for most of my creative projects. In 2022, I had two “Spars” —one in Van Nuys at the Tracy Witt Poetry Garden and one at Elena Secota’s Rapp Saloon venue in Santa Monica. Those two readings were launch parties for the Sparring With Beatnik Ghosts Omnibus, which was ten years in-the-making. I also appeared with my friend Michael C Ford on Harry Northup’s show Harry’s Poetry Hour promoting the Omnibus, which is known as “The Michael C Ford Edition.” Many people since the onset of the global pandemic found comfort in the YouTube shows and Zoom meetings, which I have yet to fully embrace because I still feel the need for the communal experience, the storytelling by the campfire experience as opposed to being trapped in the “world of Tron,” as I’d call it. The September 23, 2023 launch of the Sparring Artists anthology of Sparring With Beatnik Ghosts at the Beyond Baroque literary/arts center in Venice, California, was a monumental moment in the series which had us leaping back into the slipstream of what Sparring was all about. The Beatnik Ghosts can not be conjured from computer monitors and cell phones, so it was a refreshing, mad dash back into the mystic boxing ring for the “Sparring Artists.”

DG: In 2022, you released an anthology, Sparring With Beatnik Ghosts Omnibus: Deluxe Edition, Volume 1, a monumental effort comprising 266 contributors totaling 608 pages. The mention of “Volume 1” hints at exactly that: There is a second volume in the works?

DY: I believe nothing really happens without documenting it. The Sparring With Beatnik Ghosts Omnibus is the most complete chronicling of a multi-media poetry series that I’m aware of. The thing with SWBG is it is comprised of the live, in-person series and a published anthology series—both of which have creative individuals from all over the U.S. and even internationally participating. Yet, the lion’s share of participants have been from the West Coast and predominantly California. My goal is to break out of California and take Sparring on a road adventure like my forerunners The Carma Bums—S.A. Griffin, Mike Molett, Michael Lane Bruner, the late Doug Knott and the late Scott Wannberg—those guys are my heroes. Like them, I want to travel across America and organize shows. They were different because they were a unique performance troupe, a merry band of poets. However, I want to build a footprint for Sparring that traverses every state if possible and eventually take it overseas. After the coast-to-coast plan takes affect, Volume 2 of the Sparring With Beatnik Ghosts Omnibus will materialize.

DG: Let’s talk more generally about the Beat Generation. It seems, despite the cultural movements and struggles for liberation in the ‘50s and ‘60s, young people today are more lost than ever, caught in the vicious cycle of economic uncertainty that gives them no social mobility. At the same time, social media-fueled obsession with stuff and instant gratification has further exacerbated the existential crisis of not just the youth, but also those who lived through those decades. What are some poems from that generation you turn to for guidance and clarity?

Any poem from The Coney Island of the Mind by Lawrence Ferlinghetti and any poem from Bob Kaufman’s Solitudes Crowded with Loneliness is meaningful in the way that Beat poet Diane di Prima expressed it best, “The only war that matters is the war on the imagination.”

DG: Many have called you a disciple of Brother Antoninus, or William Everson, dubbed “the beat friar,” whom you met in 1993. Can you talk about that meeting and why Everson ended up becoming such a huge influence?

DY: I am a disciple of Brother Antoninus (aka William Everson) as one of his biggest fans. After meeting Bill Everson through Stolpe, I would go to visit with Bill at his cabin in Swanton, north of Santa Cruz off the coast. My poetry has never emulated his poetic style, mostly because I really do my own thing, but he left a powerful impression on me. His work follows in the tradition of Robinson Jeffers as it relates to human flaws in relation to nature on a higher pedestal. I hold Everson in the highest regard—above all poets really—truly a master. One of his best books is Hazards of Holiness, which I strongly recommend. Another fantastic Everson book is Archetype West.

One of my highest honors was being a pallbearer at Everson’s funeral in 1994. I published a tribute to him after his death in the Robinson Jeffers Newsletter for California State University Long Beach. The special journal edition was called William Everson: Remembrances and Tributes (Editor Robert Brophy, Spring 1995) and the subsequent printing was Western American Literature, Volume 30, where I was published along with Denise Levertov, Gary Snyder, Diane Wakoski, Philip Whalen and other writers paying homage to Everson.

DG: If you had to exchange poems with one author—he/she becomes the author of yours, and you become the author of his/hers, which poem of yours would you give up and what poem would you take?

DY: I would trade my poem “The Blacksmith Knows” for Los Angeles poet Nelson Gary’s “Vulture Eye,” featured in his upcoming book Pharmacy Psalms and Half-Life Hymns for Nothing.

DG: What are you reading and/or working on at the moment?

DY: Besides designing/producing two books for other people, I’m also working on publishing my next yet-untitled book of “Cosmic Pulp.” It’s a form of poetry that harkens back to science fiction, hard-boiled noir and fantasy-based themes and narratives found in short-story magazines printed before the mid-20th-century. The illustrated pulp magazines of the bygone era published unrestricted first-draft content unaffiliated with mainstream concerns and mores. The distinction of Cosmic Pulp is its poetic form and outward, other-worldly contemplation in its content matter. The term “Cosmic Pulp” was coined by my friend Nelson Gary. He credits me for having the first full volume of Cosmic Pulp poetry published with Sorcerers: Through Dimensions Infinite In 2020 (my poetry combined with artwork by fantasy artist Fitz in an ekphrastic collaboration).

I discovered a kindred spirit in poetry with Nelson Gary. His approach to writing poetry as a spiritual action from the author as opposed to a managed response from the reader is our common bond. Our outsider poetry challenges a new tide of literary culture seemingly devoted to a fabricated consignment to readers. We aim to circumvent such à la mode poetics dictated by the tastemakers of the status quo.

Author Bio:

Daniel Yaryan is the poet-author of the illustrated volume Sorcerers: Through Dimensions Infinite, a collaboration with fantasy artist Fitz. The illuminated, large-format book is considered the first full volume of “cosmic pulp poetry,” according to poet Nelson Gary, who coined the phrase. Yaryan is the creator of the Sparring with Beatnik Ghosts series, the founder of Mystic Boxing Commission, and the curator of the Kamstra Sparchive. He is editor of the Sparring with Beatnik Ghosts Omnibus and the upcoming Sparring Artists anthology. His books are available at www.sparringartists.com.

Interlitq’s Californian Poets Interview Series: Kim Dower, Poet, Former West Hollywood Poet Laureate (2016-2018), intervie...


Kim Dower

November 7th, 2023

Interlitq’s Californian Poets Interview Series:

Kim Dower, Poet, Former West Hollywood Poet Laureate
(2016-2018)

interviewed by David Garyan

 

Kim Dower’s poems appear in Interlitq’s California Poets Feature

DG: From 2016-2018, you were the Poet Laureate of West Hollywood, a dynamic, culturally rich city. Can you talk about this period, some of the work you wrote, and also your experiences in general related to serving this city?

KD: I loved everything about being West Hollywood’s City Poet Laureate and the opportunities it afforded me, one of which was to teach a Saturday morning poetry workshop at the West Hollywood Library, a gorgeous facility facing the hills. Five years after my “service” was complete, I still teach there and I’m still grateful to know the interesting people who sign up. During my time as Poet Laureate I became aware of how many people really don’t care or know much about poetry, but if you introduce it to them in a fun and entertaining way they are immediately drawn to its magic and able to appreciate the joy poetry brings. In 2017 I took on an ambitious project. I went around the city visiting shops, parks, bars—to our wonderful bookstore, Book Soup on Sunset Blvd, to the yogurt shop, library, and collected lines from over 100 WeHo residents and visitors. (Basically, I asked strangers to answer one of three prompts). I then wove their lines together into a collaborative poem entitled, I Sing the Body West Hollywood, an homage to Walt Whitman.  he City of West Hollywood created posters of the poem which they sent to libraries and schools, and displayed them on bus shelters. They also commissioned a visual artist to create public art banners based on the poem, and it was even turned into an animated video for which I narrated!

DG: What’s one venue in West Hollywood you love to read your work in, and why? 

KD: The City of West Hollywood’s Arts Division hosts a series called WeHo Reads and many events are held at the City’s Council Chambers/Public Meeting Room downstairs from the West Hollywood Library. I’ve read there a few times, once “in conversation” with Richard Blanco and once with Eloise Klein Healy. It’s a beautiful venue—large auditorium, great acoustics, and always a receptive, engaged, enthusiastic audience.

DG: It’s been your honor to be featured on Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac ten times, most recently on July 28th, 2021, with a wonderful poem called “It’s Wednesday, Not Thursday.” What’s your personal favorite out of the ten that appeared, and why?

KD: Yes, my honor, indeed. It’s always a thrill to hear Mr. Keillor read one of my poems. I love how he interprets them. I can’t say which of the ten is my favorite because each one he chooses instantly becomes my favorite! I will say that the poems he’s selected over the years are poems I still like—and ones that show my best work. He enjoys my sense of humor! I will always be grateful to him for the attention he’s brought to my work and for introducing me to so many other incredible poems and poets. I’ve often received emails of gratitude and solicitations from editors the day he runs one of my poems. I’m most proud of this—one of the emails I received after he ran “Bottled Water:”

From an 8th grade English teacher in Michigan:

Our 8th grade Advanced English class read your poem, “Bottled Water” today, as part of our study of narrative poetry. We had a lively discussion about the poem—and whether it was intended to be comical and sarcastic or if the bottled water selection actually was intended to be stressful for the narrator. One of our students shared her own experience with anxiety and said she can relate to the feeling of too many choices. There were also questions raised about whether the poem was metaphorical. Would you be willing to respond to us and let us know what mood or tone you intended when you wrote the poem? Also, the 8th graders wonder what bottled water you prefer. 🙂

Thank you, 8th Grade poets from Hudsonville, Michigan

I cried reading that. Just the fact that my poem, written at lunch during a busy work day (though revised 100 times) was being discussed in this way by 8th graders because an inspired teacher in Michigan read The Writer’s Almanac that morning was a miracle to me. I ended up talking with her class over the phone. It’s one of the most important and special poetry experiences I’ve ever had.

DG: Let’s talk more generally. You were born in New York, studied at Emerson College, then moved to LA. To say you’ve come a long way is an understatement. What have been the biggest challenges but also the accomplishments you cherish most?

KD: Speaking only about professional/work challenges and accomplishments, rather than personal ones, I would say my ability to finally, successfully merge my business self with my poet self has been my biggest challenge and accomplishment. I’m convinced that growing up in New York City infused me with energy, clarity and ambition that carried me for decades. Leaving Boston—my college years, early poetry writing and teaching Creative Writing years—to move to Los Angeles in my twenties with no guarantees except for good weather was certainly a challenge, but didn’t feel like one. It was much easier back then. Cheap rents. Lots of jobs. No internet to make you feel “less than.” The challenge and accomplishment I cherish most is in mid-life having the stamina, desire and ability to continue earning a living as a literary publicist, (which I still do) but at the same time dive back into my life as a poet—resume the focus and commitment to write each day, go to a poetry workshop every Saturday morning (for ten years), travel to literary festivals, send my poems out, open up to the community of poets, relearn, get back to the craft, immerse myself. That was the challenge. The accomplishment was publishing five collections with one on the way and having the great pleasure of teaching again.

DG: You have an upcoming collection, What She Wants, set to be released by Red Hen Press in 2025. Red Hen has been a big supporter of your work throughout the years, having published five of your collections. Can you speak about how the press has impacted the literary scene of not only LA, but California and the nation in general? In addition, without giving anything away, what can we expect from this new collection?

KD: In this terrifying, narrowing, sad world of publishing where only the bottom line counts and the most important criteria for publishing a book is how many copies (units!) the author’s previous book has sold, what their “platform” is, how many fans do they have on Instagram, Red Hen Press remains committed to discovering “voices,” to publishing authors and poets who have something original and impactful to say, committed to unique work that readers will enjoy. Their impact on the literary scene is that Red Hen is more than just a publishing company—one that still cares about literature—but they are also a community, bringing writers and poets together to do events, readings, having conversations with one another. I’ll always be grateful to Kate Gale and Mark Cull for publishing my work and for welcoming me into a community of other writers.  Regarding the “subject” of my new collection – it’s quite different from my previous one that explored mothers and motherhood. The subtitle of What She Wants is Poems on Obsession, Desire, Despair, Euphoria. That’s what you can expect from this new collection! Obsessive love has never been so much fun!

DG: You’ve taught two fascinating workshops, Poetry and Memory, and Poetry and Dreaming. Memory and dreaming are sometimes at odds, as memory fades gradually, and dreams are often impossible to remember. Can you speak briefly about the workshops and some of the interesting pieces that participants produced?

KD: Memory may gradually fade, but you’d be amazed at which memories remain crystal clear. A family vacation, for example. Ah, those memories stuffed in the back seat of the car eating bags of Cheetos remain ripe for eternity! I always say (to myself and to my students) that one’s poems are not necessarily autobiographical though readers always want to presume they are. Take one specific memory and run with it. Embellish. Lie. But the memory (that awful car ride) is where the emotion is and it can really propel that poem. The details of a poem can be made up, but the emotion must be authentic. For Poetry & Memory, for example, I’ll ask my students to take 5 minutes of automatic writing (not lifting their pen or editing as they write) and describe a cake from childhood. The results are fascinating. A cake from childhood. We all remember one and the drama surrounding it.

For Poetry & Dreaming I ask participants to keep a sleep journal for two weeks before the class and jot down whatever images they can remember. It might just be a line or two. “I was leaning against the wall inside a dark building, trying to hide from the lion as he ran down the hall.” The students bring in their journals and read some of their lines aloud. I ask that everyone listen carefully and jot down lines that intrigue them and write a poem using the lines they’ve written down. The results are amazing! A collaborative poem using lines from other people’s dreams.

DG: One of the project dearest to you has been I Wore This Dress Today For You, Mom, an anthology of poems that The San Diego Union-Tribune has called “a brilliant, meditative examination of maternity and motherhood.” Two questions: When and how did you start thinking about the project and how has motherhood, throughout the years, affected your own writing?

KD: After publishing four collections over a period of about 13 years, I realized that some of my most memorable and meaningful poems, the ones people enjoy and relate to the most, were my poems about my own mother—growing up with her and her decline from dementia, as well as my poems about being a mother. I thought it would be interesting to pull all my “motherhood” related poems out of the various books, put them in a sequence along with the newer unpublished ones, and create one collection with a beginning, middle and end telling a story of Motherhood. I wondered if this sort of collection would bring more readers in—not just poetry lovers, but people who didn’t really read poetry regularly. It did. It resonated. Of course motherhood has affected my own writing, but the poems in this collection were written after my son left for college on the other side of the country. His leaving and my missing him was a great part of what brought me back to writing. Longing for him, filling the void of being an “everyday mother” and suddenly looking back on the years and recording them as if they were new. His leaving stirred many emotions and also freed me to write poems that had been stacking up for years. My writing was, more accurately, affected by the loss of motherhood. Though, as we all know, the time of packing lunchboxes will end, but being a mother will not.

DG: From 1996 to 2011 you worked for Larry Flynt as his personal and book publicist. Your article in The LA Times, “Appreciation: Why working with Larry Flynt was an endless adrenaline rush — and an education,” paints quite a different picture than what someone who knows nothing about him might expect. Everything worth knowing for those who read the news is in the article, except for the one burning question every poet wants to know: Did he admire poetry?

KD: Interesting association: Motherhood to Larry Flynt! Do you really think that’s the one burning question every poet wants to know? Because if so, here’s the answer: NO! Second to his passion for protecting First Amendment Rights, Larry Flynt admired money. If something didn’t make any money he pretty much didn’t admire it. No interest. I was still working with him when my first book, Air Kissing On Mars was published. I remember bringing an inscribed copy for him when I went to meet him for lunch at the Four Seasons Hotel. In pink felt tip pen I had written: Dear Mr. Flynt—read these poems and learn something! Love, Kim. He didn’t open the book. Probably never saw the inscription. I handed it to him. He held it in his shaky hand, looked at it for a long time. The cover is fabulous, by the way, very sexy and evocative. He stared at it. Put it down. This make any money? he asked me with his signature drawl. It’s poetry, Larry. No money, I told him. He put his hand on top of the book and slid it to the other side of the table.

That was it. That was all. I hope the server grabbed it and took it home. Or some famous guest staying at the hotel.

DG: What are you reading at the moment?

Re-reading Frank O’Hara’s Lunch Poems (for the 100th time), Matthew Zapruder’s wonderful Story of a Poem, and a fascinating book called The Sullivanians: Sex, Psychotherapy, and the Wild Live of an American Commune about a cult of people in the 60’s on the Upper West Side of Manhattan—exactly the time and place where I grew up. Trying to figure out if I went to school with any of those kids!

Author Bio:

Kim Dower, Former City Poet Laureate of West Hollywood, has published five highly acclaimed collections of poetry, including the Gold Ippy Award winning collection Sunbathing on Tyrone Power’s Grave. Her newest collection, the bestselling I Wore This Dress Today for You, Mom was an Eric Hoffer Book Award finalist. Red Hen Press will be publishing her upcoming book, What She Wants, in February, 2025. Widely anthologized, Kim teaches writing workshops for Antioch University, the West Hollywood Library, and the UCLA Writer’s Extension.

Interlitq’s Californian Poets Interview Series: Terry Ehret, Poet, Former Sonoma County Poet Laureate, interviewed by Davi...

Terry Ehret

November 7th, 2023

Interlitq’s Californian Poets Interview Series:

Terry Ehret, Poet, Former Sonoma County Poet Laureate
(2004-2006)

interviewed by David Garyan

 

Terry Ehret’s poems appear in Interlitq’s California Poets Feature

DG: With Valerie Berry, Margaret Kaufman, Jacqueline Kudler, Diane Sher Lutovich, Carolyn Miller, and Susan Sibbet you founded Sixteen Rivers Press in 1999, a non-profit collective that aims to give alternatives to traditional publishing platforms. Can you talk a bit about the foundational process?

TE: The idea of a San Francisco Bay Area regional publishing collective started in 1996 when I was attending the Flight of the Mind writing workshops for women in Oregon. So many writers, including myself, wondered about all the money we were spending to not get published, and I was thinking out loud about writers pooling their resources to launch a publishing venture they would run themselves. Ruth Gundle, one of the directors of Flight, pulled me aside and told me that what I was musing about was something called a publishing collective. She put me in touch with one of the founders of Alice James Books, which was at that time a regional collective in the Boston area. It took three years to gather the founding members and launch Sixteen Rivers. We imagined ourselves as a kind of West Coast Alice James. Building an all-volunteer collaborative, consensus-based collective from the ground up was exciting. We’re still excited to be producing beautiful books 24 years later. Part of our mission is to mentor other groups interested in the collective publishing process, so we’ve been able to offer the documents, contracts, timelines, and other materials (some of them years in the making) to help presses launch themselves without having to reinvent the wheel.

DG: The press must have gone through many changes since its founding in 1999. Can you speak about these changes? What is different? What has stayed the same?

TE: We continue to be a nonprofit, non-hierarchical, all-volunteer organization. The authors make very little money (they are paid in copies of their books), because all our profits go towards publishing the next year’s books. It’s an unusual business model, but it seems to work.

Our first change was one we’d always planned on: opening the press beyond the founding members through an open manuscript selection process. We don’t do contests, nor do we charge a reading fee, holding to some of the original vision we had for the press. After a few successful years of publishing women (and after much discussion), we decided to open up the press to men. Since then, we’ve worked at creating a collective with poetic voices as diverse ethnically and aesthetically as the Bay Area itself. It’s been a vital but slow transformation. Perhaps too slow. But we’re committed to this. One way we’ve succeeded in being more inclusive is through the publication of our anthologies and chapbooks, which don’t require authors to make the three-year commitment to help run the press, and which allows us to promote the work of younger authors who might not be ready to submit a full-length book manuscript.

DG: How has running a publishing house influenced your own creative work?

TE: I’m not sure I’d characterize Sixteen Rivers as a publishing house. More of a cottage industry. We don’t even have a physical location. Until COVID and zoom made online meetings possible, we met for business meetings in members’ homes. I’d always hoped that the work of running a collective would free our writer-members from the mill of manuscript contests and submissions, and maybe encourage our poets to take some risks with poetry that might not fit the mainstream publishing expectations. That has been true for me, especially the press’s support of the translation projects I’ve undertaken this past decade. I really love the creative freedom and authorial control each author has over design and production. I also think it’s empowering for writers to be their own publishers.

DG: From 2004 to 2006, you served as the Poet Laureate for Sonoma County. Can you talk about the experiences you had during those two years?

TE: When I first moved to Sonoma County from San Francisco in 1990, I was struck by how supportive and non-competitive the writing community is here. Everyone’s success is celebrated. The writers here encourage and lift each other up. So being selected Poet Laureate of Sonoma County was a tremendous honor. During my two-year term, I had quite a few projects; one was to create a literary bridge between the Spanish-speaking and English-speaking communities. I started by helping to create a bilingual Poetry of Remembrance Community Reading that has become part of my home town’s annual El Día de los Muertos celebration.  I also revived our county’s Poetry on the Bus project, placing poems on county transit buses and featuring work in Spanish and English by writers from all walks of life, both adults and teens. I also envisioned an online literary arts bulletin board called the Sonoma County Literary Update. We launched back in 2006 and the website is now an online fixture in the community. It’s where local writers go to find a monthly calendar of events, calls for submission, county-wide announcements, workshops, etc.

DG: On September 23, 2011, you read a poem called “How Fascism Will Come,” which you wrote specifically for the 100 Thousand Poets for Change reading. The beginning line of the last stanza reads: “When fascism comes to America, it will enter on the winds of our silence and indifference and complacency.” It’s been twelve years since you read the poem. What inspired the poem and how do you feel about it today?

TE: I am not a rant kind of gal, so this poem is somewhat out of character for me. I hadn’t intended to write a poem in this style. I started with the quote, sometimes attributed to Sinclair Lewis, “When fascism comes to America it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross.” With Sarah Palin on the Republican ticket, and with the political shifts to the right in our country, it was clear to me that fascism had already arrived. I guess that’s what provoked the rant. The poem is composed of images and fragments of online articles I found when I googled the Sinclair Lewis quote, and I framed it all for the 100 Thousand Poets for Change event, which brought together poets from all over the world, reading and ranting in their own countries and communities. Since then, it has made the rounds of the internet and been reprinted in many blogs and newsletters. Apparently, and unfortunately, readers still find its message relevant.

DG: Along with writing and publishing, you’ve also hosted regular poetry workshops. How have these experiences not only enriched your understanding of poetry but also what poets themselves are capable of?

TE: For most of my writing life, I’ve earned my living by teaching developmental reading and writing and basic composition. But I have also had the opportunity to teach creative writing at various local colleges and universities. In 2000, I was invited to offer private workshops on whatever topics I wanted at the Sitting Room, a community library focusing on women writers and their work. Those workshops were amazing and deeply satisfying. Many friendships were forged there, and the Sitting Room has an ever-expanding shelf of book and chapbook publications by workshop participants. Some years I would choose a particular theme, like the prose poem, poetry and mythology, prosody, silence, creative revision; other years, the focus would be on a text or author, and we’d spend months together in a deep dive into Beowulf, the Romantic poets, H.D., Ann Carson, W.B. Yeats, Dylan Thomas, Dante. I invited guest poets to talk about their creative process and read their work. Each week I’d come up with writing prompts based on the work we were reading and discussing, and we’d all write together. I love the mysterious way that writing in a group creates cross-fertilization and images that seem to leap from one poet to another. Many of my own poems were drafted in these sessions. Sometimes the workshops would be followed by a field trip—two weeks in the west of Ireland or Wales or Tuscany. How lucky I was to be able to choose my teaching topics and pursue them without the burden of grades or homework or any of the aspects of academia that can dim the natural pleasures of teaching!

DG: Apart from your own writing, translation is also a part of your repertoire. You’ve talked about discovering the “Mexican poet Ulalume González de León in a workshop on the prose poem at San Francisco State in 1982.” Can you speak a bit more about how your translation efforts have developed since then? Any chance for a full-length collection in the future?

TE: Frances Mayes’s graduate workshop used the text The Prose Poem: An International Anthology, edited by Michael Benedikt. It featured a long prose poem in fifteen parts, “Anatomy of Love,” and I was instantly enthralled by the language: richly erotic imagery blending anatomical and scientific vocabulary in an unconventional syntax. To discover just how this poem’s magic worked, I experimented with the seventh part, “a la recherche du corps perdu.” I dismantled the language, organizing the words by parts of speech; then I assembled them in new patterns, rather like the process of recombinant DNA, to create a “mutant” poem. This became “Lost Body,” the title poem of my first collection.

Thirty years later, wanting to read more of González de León’s work, I Googled the name, not knowing at the time that this mysterious poet was a “she”—a confusion she apparently didn’t mind and even courted during her life. Oddly enough, the first entry that came up was my name. I had no idea how this could be, until I realized that the one reference to her name in English on the Internet was my poem, with its epigraph referencing González de León. Immediately I wanted to rectify this and find a way to bring this poet’s life and work to a wider English-speaking audience. Working with fellow Sonoma County poets John Johnson and Nancy Morales, we set to work translating some of her poems. Our project began in the fall of 2012, and has resulted so far in two published volumes of UGL’s poetry. A third volume is in the works, and should come out in 2025. I love learning the nuances of the art of translation, and I’ve come to appreciate the responsibility my partners and I have undertaken to be the first to bring this author’s collected published poems to an English-reading audience.

A full-length collection of my own work in the future? Oh, yes! I haven’t published a book of my own work since 2011, but I have many poems waiting to be assembled into one or two manuscripts. I can’t wait to turn my focus back on these poems!

DG: Who is the one poet you turn to most often for inspiration?

TE: I am always inspired by the poetry of Tomas Tranströmer. His work is endlessly resourceful, and he so skillfully manages that balancing act of suspension between the conscious and the unconscious.  A prose writer I frequently reread is Jane Austen, and another, more contemporary is Ursula K. Le Guin, whom I was fortunate to know as both a mentor and a friend.

DG: What are you reading and/or working on at the moment?

TE: I’ve just finished reading, for the first time, Ursula Le Guin’s six Earthsea books. I knew her when she was writing the last three in the series, and I see in her characters, narratives, and dialogues so much of what she was exploring with us in our workshops at Flight of the Mind.

In addition to poetry manuscripts in the works, I have a long languishing novel (don’t we all?), which is a retelling of the story of the Trojan War, revisiting the Iliad, the Aeneid, and the Odyssey, but in order to unearth the female-centered pre-Hellenic world that can be found under the surface of those epic poems. It’s long overdue for a major revision, and I’m looking forward to getting back into that world.

I have always been interested in ekphrastic poetry—writing in response to visual art—and have enjoyed working with artists I know. In particular, I have quite a few poems inspired by the Slovakian abstract expressionist painter Andrea Smiskova Ehret (who is married to my nephew), and she has created a number of paintings in response to my poems. I’d love to bring out a volume of these collaborations.

Author Bio:

Writer, teacher, and translator, Terry Ehret has published four collections of poetry, most recently Night Sky Journey, and translated two volumes of poems by Mexican poet Ulalume González de León. She is a co-founder of Sixteen Rivers Press, and from 2004-2006 she served as poet laureate of Sonoma County. In the summers, she offers travel programs for writers.

Interlitq’s Californian Poets Interview Series: Doreen Stock, Poet, Translator, interviewed by David Garyan

Doreen Stock

November 4th, 2023

Interlitq’s Californian Poets Interview Series:

Doreen Stock, Poet, Translator

interviewed by David Garyan

 

Doreen Stocks’s poems appear in Interlitq’s California Poets Feature

DG: Let’s start with your work as a translator. You’ve brought pieces into English from Russian and Spanish—two great literary traditions. How did these endeavors start and what have been some of your favorite projects and pieces to work on?

DS: I was living in L.A. and nursing my third child. A local bookstore (Chatterton’s on Vermont. Ave., now defunct) advertised a poetry writing workshop. I walked in and there, at the back of the store, sat Paul Vangelisti at a small table with three other poets. He said he couldn’t really teach us to write poetry, but the single most important thing we could do would be to take a poet we admired in a language other than English and begin translating his/her poems. I had recently graduated from UCLA with a minor in Slavic Languages, so I began to work with a poem by Anna Akhmatova. While I was raising my three children translating from the Russian of Akhmatova & Marina Tsvetaeva, and the Spanish of Gabriela Mistral taught me how to render a poem into my language in its own voice. This work was invaluable, always returning me to my own writing with deeper awareness and possibilities.

DG: The late Jack Hirschman wrote an introduction to your 2015 collection, In Place of Me. His influence on your work is clearly present apart from this collection. When did you first discover his work?

DS: Jack Hirschman taught the novel primarily by reading aloud, mesmerizing our huge lecture class at UCLA. One day he walked into Royce Hall and announced that John F. Kennedy had been assassinated. But it wasn’t until I moved to Northern California years later and met him again at a North Beach poetry reading that I began to read him. And I realized that the voice I had associated with James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Djuna Barnes—with all the urgency and drama of the moment when he announced that assassination—was actually his own poetic voice!

DG: In addition to poetry, you also write fiction. Three Tales from the Archives of Love blends three distinct time periods and narratives which touch upon the specific plight of women in relation to the periods they lived. How did you discover these stories? Had you known about them for a long time, or did the writing process begin shortly after the discovery?

DS: In each case, the writing process began shortly after the discovery. But completion of this triptych, which involved quite some research, took much longer. I first saw the beggars’ letters at the Israel Museum. I read a NY Times article about the discovery of a stone with its epigraph in a field in Naples, and viewed the Elephantine Papyri, on loan from the Brooklyn Museum, at the Skirball Museum in Los Angeles.

DG: Your memoir, My Name is Y, explores similar themes as Three Tales From the Archives of Love. The works were published two or three years apart from each other. Would it be right to say that the memoir was, in some ways, an extension of the fiction, despite it being stylistically and thematically different?

No, not really. The memoir was written much earlier and kept in the dark! Then after I completed Three Tales from the Archives of Love I took a second look at it, revised it slightly, and sent it forth. I think you are hearing my use of the first person in some of the archival stories and perhaps that leads to your impression?

DG: In 2017, you published Talking with Marcelo, a chapbook-length interview of six questions with Argentine journalist Marcelo Holot about his arrest during Argentina’s Dirty War. It’s a unique endeavor, given the literary format for a journalistic project. Can you speak about how you met Marcelo Holot, how the interview developed, and perhaps the thought-process behind choosing/leaving out questions?

DS: I met Marcelo Holot in an elegant tango palace, the Confiteria Ideal in Buenos Aires in February, 2008. I had never been there, and he rarely came there, so the hand of fate was definitely involved. After many emails and phone conversations I invited him to the U.S. He arrived full of huge plans involving me writing his biography! “I’m not a biographer, I’m a poet,” I maintained. But he would not let go of this idea, so finally I jotted five questions down on a pad of paper. The first one: “What Happened to Your Teeth?” And I told him to think about them and when he was ready to discuss them with me, to let me know. We sat at the Café Trieste in Sausalito for hours as I transcribed his answers long-hand. At some point I added the sixth question. Marcelo is  an interesting subject. After a lot of meeting in airports, he finally emigrated, and we were married in 2021.

DG: You’ve done a great deal of traveling throughout your life. What are some trips or places that have affected your writing in a particularly strong way?

DS: The amount of travel is directly related to the number of offspring (8) my daughter and her husband produced in Paris. Each time a baby was born, I was there, then wandered off somewhere, then returned to see that baby one more time! So, Paris, but not as a subject, particularly, but as an undercurrent. In those years French Feminism was so vital, and I loved the writings of the French philosopher Hélène Cixous. Jerusalem, because I had the good fortune to meet the bookstore café owner, David Ehrlich, who introduced me to all of the wonderful writers who read at his café, and because I found their writing strong and fascinating. And Buenos Aires because—have you ever tango-ed to a live tango orchestra? It does something to your writing … as does love.

DG: Let’s return to translation, but in a different way. If you could have your own work translated by the writers you’ve translated yourself, who would that be, and why?

DS: Anna Akhmatova. Most definitely. Motherhood, Divorce. Lyrical grace. Political poetry at its most profound. I translated “Requiem” and it is the single poem I am most proud of translating. I visited her house when I was in Moscow and it seemed to be the only place where truth resided. It would be a great honor, and I would be in very high company, since she herself translated Victor Hugo, Tagore, Leopardi, Armenian, and Korean poets.

DG: The Bay Area has been a constant source of inspiration for you. Can you speak about some specific places, events, and/or people who’ve had a strong impact on your writing?

DS: North Beach in San Francisco where I re-met Jack and the many poets he loved and worked with including Stephen Kessler at that time, who has become a life-long friend; also Polk Street in San Francisco where the poet George Oppen and his wife, Mary lived. I loved to visit them there and I’m a great admirer of his work. Marin County, where I have lived for many years, because of the natural beauty that surrounds me and the many memories with my family and friends, and also the many fine poets, (including Jane Hirschfield, Cole Swenson, and Kay Ryan) I’ve met through The Marin Poetry Center—of which I was a founding member!

DG: What are you reading or working on at the moment?

DS: At the moment I am sitting here at my desk, staring at my garden and thinking, “What can I do to counter the profoundly deadly course our world is headed on? Could I read a book, write a poem, shout in the streets? I write a poem. I am trying to get a chapbook of my translations of the poetry of Gabriela Mistral published: La Cuenta Mundo, The World-Counting, poems to a newborn baby describing the things of our world. Mistral was Chile’s delegate to the UN … I think she would be advocating tirelessly for the children of the world had she been alive today. I just finished reading The Years by Annie Erneaux, and I am going to read more of her work. And in the light of the current political moment, I’ve returned to the poetry of Paul Celan.

Author Bio:

Fairfax, California poet and memoir practitioner, Doreen Stock, recently launched A Noise in the Garden, Kelsay Books, 2022 and Bye Bye Blackbird, The Poetry Box, April, 2021. Tango Man, a chapbook of love poems, was released by Finishing Line Press in August, 2020.  Other recent works include: My Name is Y, an anti-nuclear memoir, February 2019, Three Tales from the Archives of Love, 2018, and Talking with Marcelo, 2017, all from Norfolk Press, San Francisco.  In Place of Me, Poems edited and introduced by Jack Hirschman, was published in 2015 by Mine Gallery Editions. For more information please visit (doreenstock@doreenstock.com)