Wanda Coleman, a Memorial Tribute

 

Wanda Coleman 1946 – 2013

In That Other Fantasy Where We Live Forever

we were never caught

we partied the southwest, smoked it from L.A. to El Dorado

worked odd jobs between delusions of escape

drunk on the admonitions of parents, parsons & professors

driving faster than the road or law allowed.

our high-pitched laughter was young, heartless & disrespected

authority. we could be heard for miles in the night

the Grand Canyon of a new manhood.

womanhood discovered

like the first sighting of Mount Wilson

we rebelled against the southwestern wind

we got so naturally ripped, we sprouted wings,

crashed parties on the moon, and howled at the earth

we lived off love. It was all we had to eat

when you split you took all the wisdom

and left me the worry

Copyright © 2001 by Wanda Coleman. Reprinted from Mercurochrome: New Poems with the permission of Black Sparrow Press. All rights reserved.

Stephen Kessler's tribute to Wanda Coleman serves to honor her work, her life, her legacy better than my own examples of personal correspondence from her. We were introduced through Stephen, who knew her well and never hesitated to champion her work. 

Hahaha: Wanda Coleman’s Last Laugh

by Stephen Kessler

Wanda Coleman was a big woman. Physically, for sure—she was built like a linebacker, and she liked to fight. But far larger than her imposing physical presence was her prodigious accomplishment as a poet and performer. Wanda, a good friend of mine for thirty-five years who died last November 22 after a series of serious health problems, was for my money one of the major voices, in any language, of our generation. A frequently featured guest at international poetry festivals, winner of various prestigious national awards, prolific author of verse and prose who traveled widely for readings, she was first of all a Los Angeles writer who reigned as Queen of Poets in that city, a Watts-born native who stuck around to claim her turf as a vast resource for imaginative transformation. Her writing was both intensely personal and explicitly political, and LA was her ruthless yet generous muse.

At a packed memorial reading in January at the downtown branch of the LA Public Library, a diverse assortment of poets, most of them residents of Southern California, praised and thanked Wanda for inspiring them and for demonstrating by example that even such a seemingly antipoetic environment can offer great riches of resonant material to a writer with the presence of mind and the stamina to pay sustained attention. In this she had much in common with Charles Bukowski, the other, older, LA monster poet with whom she hated to be compared. But both were published by John Martin’s pioneering independent Black Sparrow Press, in beautiful editions designed by Barbara Martin, and each unleashed a different kind of LA-inflected American vernacular that took the Walt Whitman-William Carlos Williams-Frank O’Hara legacy of common, conversational yet lyrical speech in liberating new directions.

Wanda was of course both black and female, as well as much angrier than Bukowski. At her best she synthesized the most diverse traditions, from the ancient Greeks and Shakespeare to the funky earthiness of the blues and the snappy hooks of pop music, with the rhythms of freeway traffic, colloquial black English, an advanced modernist poetics and a highly sophisticated personal prosody that made optimum use of space on the page as a musical score for her carefully wrought “free” verse. Her formal control is extraordinary in the way she is able to combine what sounds like natural speech with extremely subtle poetic technique to deliver her scorching torch songs and hair-curling narratives of life and death in a very tough cityscape of racial and class conflict, sexual clashes, economic struggle and automotive aggravation, all in an atmosphere of sweet-smelling semitropical menace laced with intoxicating traces of noxious smog.

I’ve lost a lot of writer friends in recent years, but none has left as large a gap in my personal universe as Wanda Coleman. Her nonexistence seems impossible. It wasn’t just her physical size and the scale of her personality but the magnitude of her genius and her furious determination to make her mark with maximum ambition that set her apart from most of her contemporaries. Wanda’s enormous energy and talent were deployed not only (as with so many writers) in the service of her own ego—though that, too—but as a defiant refusal to be defeated by circumstance and as a model of creative resistance. Even in the most intimate expressions of personal experience she felt herself representative of an oppressed minority determined to overcome its disadvantages. While the hardness of her life surely contributed to the health crises that finally felled her, her work is a powerfully impressive record of artistic victory and spiritual transcendence.

That’s why so many other writers, in LA and beyond, regarded her with such admiration and found her to be such an encouraging, if sometimes intimidating, figure. Her live performances were incomparable (“electrifying” was the adjective most often used to describe them) in the way she dramatized her poems with virtuoso operatic passion. Her alternately and sometimes simultaneously ferocious and tender, enraged and erotic, frightening and funny readings made a huge impression on anyone who witnessed them. She overshadowed practically anyone else on any stage where she appeared, not because she was a scenery-chewer but because the natural force of her personality and the authenticity of her art just blew them out of the picture.

Because of her constant struggles to survive and to raise three kids mostly as a single mom in her twenties and thirties (before she met her third husband, the artist and poet Austin Straus, to whom she was married for more than thirty years), the fact of her tremendous literary production was even more remarkable. Working various jobs—as a men’s magazine editor, a soap opera writer (she won an Emmy for Days of Our Lives), a medical secretary, a journalist, a university professor (a job she was doomed to lose because she was fearlessly herself in all she did and took no shit from anyone, whether student, faculty or administrator)—she somehow found the time and strength to take care of her kids, read tons of books, listen to a vast range of music, watch countless movies and remember them, stay conversant with old and new art, maintain a voluminous correspondence, and still write more and better poems than pretty much anyone else I know.

With her huge dangling earrings, her fingers decked out in big rings, her colorful wardrobe inspired by and often composed of African fabrics, her big natural ’do or cornrows or dreadlocks meticulously groomed, her enthusiastic enjoyment of every sensory pleasure from food and sex (it’s in her writing) to watching tennis on television or sharing a joint with a friend, she relished life’s fleeting delights like someone who knew her days were numbered. She had a swagger and a chip on her shoulder—a persona as the baddest bitch in the hood, someone not to be messed with—yet also an enormous warmth.

Wanda’s mother had worked as a housekeeper on the Westside (Ronald Reagan was one of her employers, she told me; he loved Lewana’s macaroni and cheese), and I had been raised by such women from South LA who worked for my family in the 1950s while my folks were out building their business, and these polar opposite upbringings on different sides of town created a curious bond between us, as we were also almost exactly the same age (she was two months older). Although we were born in different hospitals, she died at Cedars Sinai, like my dad, in her case of a pulmonary embolism after a series of ailments exacerbated by years of economic insecurity, anxiety and stress. Somehow despite our radically different backgrounds we had an effortless connection, perhaps in part because we both so valued honesty in personal relations. She wasn’t afraid to tell you anything if that’s what she really thought, and this is such an unusual (and dangerous) attribute that I was refreshed (if sometimes exasperated) by her candor. She was hypersensitive and easily provoked, but you always knew where you stood.

Wanda often confided in and consulted with me about her problems—domestic, professional, economic, medical, automotive—in long letters or phone calls punctuated by black humor and parenthetical laughter at her own expense. That unforgettable laugh—a high cackle, a crazed wail, a wild howl just this side of sobs—was, I’m certain, one of the things that kept her alive for sixty-seven years despite the hardships perpetually besetting her. She had a strong sense of the pathos and absurdity of her situation combined with pride that nothing could stop her, and the tension between those attitudes seemed to trigger a wickedly ironic wit. A glance at her sweeping signature at the end of a letter revealed a forceful, confident personality; the big W in the shape of an inverted heart was a graphic representation of her bravura.

Three years ago she wrote to me, in the middle of a litany of her latest troubles, “I’m counting on you to write my obituary (hahaha).” That wasn’t necessary, as it turned out, because the Los Angeles Times, on the front page of its Sunday paper of November 24, 2013, published a long obit celebrating her as one of that city’s premier writers, its “unofficial poet laureate,” a fallen hero of local culture, an artistic warrior and a star whose light still shines. And as if to confirm her own certainty that the triple-whammy of being black, female and from LA had relegated her to the margins of mainstream literary respectability, The New York Times, which routinely publishes an obit for the most obscure TV actor, completely blacked out, so to speak, any news of her death. It was the kind of insult-by-omission she would have understood, and perhaps predicted (a scathing review she wrote of Maya Angelou some years ago had even gotten her blackballed by much of the African-American literary establishment), but it still astonishes me that the most literate newspaper in the country could be so myopic as to ignore such an important writer.

I am confident that in the years ahead, as her absence is felt in the cultural landscape and her books take their place in the historical record as the huge contributions they are to the literature of our time (the African-American Review, a journal published by Johns Hopkins University, dedicated its recent issue to “the memory of Wanda Coleman and Nelson Mandela,” in that order, which gives some idea of her stature), Wanda will be remembered with awe and gratitude for generations to come. Even now, on YouTube, you can see evidence of her enduring afterlife, and her works in print will surely outlast those of most other contemporaries. Like Mandela, Wanda Coleman is one for the ages, and she will have the last laugh.  

Some Books by Wanda Coleman

Mad Dog Black Lady (1979)

Imagoes (1983)

Heavy Daughter Blues: Poems & Stories 1968-1986 (1987)

A War of Eyes and Other Stories (1988)

African Sleeping Sickness: Stories & Poems (1990)

Hand Dance (1993)

Native in a Strange Land: Trials & Tremors (1996)

Bathwater Wine (1998)

Mercurochrome (2001)

Ostinato Vamps (2003)

The Riot Inside Me: More Trials & Tremors (2005)

Jazz and Twelve O’Clock Tales (2008)

The World Falls Away (2011)

Wanda received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Guggenheim Foundation. Born in Watts, she lived and worked and wrote about Los Angeles, and died there on November, 22, 2013 at the aged of 67, helped, as the Los Angeles Times book critic David Ulin has written, to “transform the city’s literature.”

Her writing awards include an Emmy for Daytime Drama Writing, and in 1990 her book, Bathwater Wine (Black Sparrow Press, 1998), received the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize.

Her collection, Mercurochrome: New Poems (Black Sparrow Press, 2001), was a finalist for the National Book Award in Poetry.

Below is the cover for her Selected Poems, Wicked Enchantment, edited by Terrance Hayes.

Below are You Tube links to videos of Wanda. One of them is an interview, one of them is her reading one of her stories, and the others are of her reading different poems.

Here she reads the poem, "On Speed"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ysB4mt7PN1k&ab_channel=g.i.g.worldwideentertainment

Here she is interviewed in 2013 by Mariano Zara for Poetry.LA:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F7wzNRf6mJs&ab_channel=Poetry.LA

Here she reads the poem, "I Live For My Car"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e2Zq-uTTuTM&ab_channel=g.i.g.worldwideentertainment

Here she reads the poem, "Wanda, Why Ain't You Dead?"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ALI-QlOU_ok&ab_channel=g.i.g.worldwideentertainment

Here she reads the story, "Fat Lena." The story appeared originally in her 1988 collection A War Of Eyes. The recording is from the 1990 CD High Priestess Of Word (New Alliance Records).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oP4VNlotFGA&ab_channel=g.i.g.worldwideentertainment

Above, pictured with playwright Arthur Miller. 

Below I have pasted in one of my favorites, the ISM. 

Here is a link to her Poetry Foundation page:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/wanda-coleman

Here is a link to Academy Of American Poets page:

https://poets.org/poet/wanda-coleman

KP Madonia, author

 

Kristen Pagie Madonia

Author of the YA novels, Fingerprints Of You, and Invisible Fault Lines.

“It’s our job to realistically portray the world, to be authentic about some of the darker sides of adulthood, as we’re introducing teen readers to these issues.”

The quotation above is from KP in an interview with Sharon Harrigan of Fiction Writers Review. Here is a link to the interview https://fictionwritersreview.com/interview/an-interview-with-kristen-paige-madonia/

Fingerprints Of You, KP's first YA novel.

Lemon Williams was raised buried in the shadow of her free-spirited mother, Stella, and consequently her childhood was spent on the move – dodging disasters and mastering the art of packing up apartments, of being the new kid, and of leaving the past behind.

But when Lemon begins her senior year at another new school, she realizes she’s taken an inescapable part of their last life with them: She’s pregnant. In an attempt to fill in the gaps of her history and to avoid repeating Stella’s mistakes, she decides she must set things right by going in search of the father she’s never met. So as new life grows inside her, Lemon boards a Greyhound bus and heads west to San Francisco in hopes of freeing herself from her childhood mishaps and discovering the true meaning of family.

An excerpt from Fingerprints Of You 

My mother got her third tattoo on my seventeenth birthday, a small navy hummingbird she had inked about her left shoulder blade, and though she picked it to mark my flight from childhood, it mostly had to do with her wanting to sleep with Johnny Drinko, the tattoo artist who worked in the shop outside town...

A bit about KP from her website: https://www.kristenpaigemadonia.com/

Kristen-Paige Madonia is the author of the young adult novels Invisible Fault Lines (Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers, 2016) and Fingerprints of You (Simon & Schuster BFYR, 2012). 

Her short stories have been published in various literary magazines including FiveChapters, the New Orleans Review, the Greensboro Review, and America Fiction: Best Previously Unpublished Stories by Emerging Authors. 

She has received awards or fellowships from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the Vermont Studio Center, the Juniper Summer Writing Institute, VCCA, Hedgebrook, Millay Colony for the Arts, and the Key West Literary Seminar. She was the 2012 D.H. Lawrence Fellow and was awarded the Tennessee Williams/New Orleans Literary Festival Prize in 2010. 

She holds an MFA in fiction from California State University, Long Beach and currently lives in Charlottesville, Va. She is a member of the University of Nebraska low-residency MFA Writing Program faculty and has taught creative writing at the University of Virginia, James Madison University, Goochland County High School, The Key West Literary Seminar and the non-profit organization WriterHouse.

Invisible Fault Lines is KP's second YA novel. 

In this novel, KP, hailed by Judy Blume as a "remarkable young novelist," and author of Fingerprints of You, explores how to rebuild a life after everything seems lost.

After weeks with no information, Callie decides to investigate her father’s disappearance. Maybe there was an accident at the construction site he oversaw? Maybe he doesn’t remember who he is and is lost wandering somewhere? But after seeing a familiar face in a photo from the Great San Francisco Earthquake of 1906, she wonders if the answer is something else entirely.

Continuous Present, a new book of poems

 

In this collection, I gathered and revised poems and ideas written in various notebooks kept across the span of about thirty-five years, a few of them dating back to the late 80s. What they have in common is that they examine a fleeting glimpse, notions, tricks of light, moods -- in a word, motion. I tied them, as well, to my limited knowledge of Tai-Chi Chuan, and what this ancient martial art engenders in me regarding flow, balance, adaptability and the seasonal and tidal and mutable nature of existence.

You can find the book here at Barnes & Noble: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/continuous-present-john-michael-flynn/1145239310?ean=2940179564157

Also find it here at Smashwords: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/1545115

The poem titles should give a better sense of what I'm seeking to explore. 

Table Of Contents

Expecting To Search

Pivoting On A Third Foot

Rowing, Listing And Turning

Strategizing Counter Offensives

Splicing Fault Lines

Flexing With A Maytime Stream

Raining Dosages

Digressing, Healing

Shipping Off My Vices

Fathering A Somewhere In You

Teaching English To Those Who Want It

Flying Small In Third Class

Bringing Yucca To Yucca Flats

Trending Fashions For The New Cold War

Gadding About Wonky

Steeping The Tea Of Empire

Bowling For Charity

Asking Why Not A Duck

Sliding Rule, Vanishing Trajectory

Appearing Patriotic

Rating Sharks On Algebra Farm

Waking Up Mid-Day During A Heatwave 

Skiing Asteroid Mountain

Staring Eyes Of Every Constellation

Noodling Media

Deconstructing Our Maudlin Bargain

Deriding A Lack Of Constancy

Completing Our Circle

Salting Pretzels, It’s A Living

Holding Open

Stewing Seaside Again

Seeping Into Ruin

Poring Over Deadlines

Failing Well

Growing Too Young

Fueling Rhythms

Looking There

Enduring Those Who Boast Of Their Afflictions

Catching The Children Who Catch Us

Giving More Than Attention

Moving In Harmony Again

Translating The Phrase Prenez Garde

And here is one sample poem from the collection.

Deriding A Lack Of Constancy

Whether it’s after losses or gains

the framing of slack hours resumes.

One must contend 

pulling away from doubts.

A surprising reach in one’s anguish

a deadening instinct, a vibration

heart.

Furious, stuttering

it’s easy 

to mangle imagined renewals.

There was never a furnace.

There was, indeed, a last night

a stampede of departures

a cobra within a mouth

fangs like lightning flashes.

Alyson Hagy, author

 

To her credit, and I think a reason for a large part of her success, Alyson Hagy has never been averse to taking risks in her work. In my opinion, she understands that any writer of fiction is one who traffics in the world of the imagaination, respectfully so, with a knowledge of past authors and their works about certain topics, but without the limits of excessive political correctness or any need to follow current popular trends and attitudes. I think she'd agree with me in saying that as a fiction writer, she does her best to challenge the range of her imagaination.

This is her first book, the short story collection, Madonna On Her Back, published in 1986.

She was interviewed in 2023, after contributing a short story, "Broken Crow,” to This Side of the Divide: New Lore of the American West, the second volume in an anthology series that, according to its promotional copy, attempts to “capture the newness, vastness, territoriality, and sense of transience alive in the American West.”

Speaking to students at the Brigham Young University College Of Humanities as part of its 2023 Reading Series, she explained, that “Broken Crow” takes after a real experience in which Hagy developed a relationship with an injured crow in her neighborhood. The short story captures the experience of a fictional woman living in the West who develops a similar relationship with a local crow. She communicates with the crow and begins to learn more about its world and purpose, eventually assisting the crow as it carries out one final act in its short life.

Hagy recounted that writing the short story challenged her for many reasons, one being its unfamiliar genre. Reflecting on her experience writing “Broken Crow” and other works outside of her comfort zone, she said, “I think in order to make your work honest and true, you’ve got to go toward the things that give you great joy and happiness, but also the things that create fear and despair in you.”

On this latter point, I couldn't agree more. In any allegedly open society, authors, no matter their backgrounds, should be able to write about characters from any racial, ethnic or regligious group. The arts should transcend any point of view that arouses the use of such dangerously fascistic labels as cultural appropriation. The very idea is absurd. Women should be able to write about men, and vice versa. Humans should be able to write about animals. And I don't mean only in the realm of fantasy or science fiction. 

Alyson, I think, believes this too. She writes, without fear, exceptionally well about men, parituclarly the kind of men who are often reduced to stereotypes in popular films. She fights the narrative, too often seen, that all men of Irish descent are drunks, all white sheriffs and cops in North America are corrupt and racist, as are all male white cowboys, firemen, loggers, farmers and Republicans. This is the lie in the mainstream narrative meant to keep us divided and suspicious of one another. True artists such as Alyson don't accept it. They labor to show, through their work, the shared elements of our humanity, and to transcend these oversold and overstated notions regarding our differences.  

This is her second story collection, Hardware River, published in 1991.

As part of her 2023 BYU presentation, Alyson answered questions from audience members and discussed her personal writing process and journey as an author. She offered meaningful encouragement to fellow authors, stating, “This is a great time to be a storyteller. The narrative arcs are stronger than they’ve ever been, not only in American culture, but internationally.”

Again, I agree. May artists in all genres be bold and seek to transcend the current tide of viewing all through the confining prism of race and gender. These have become sometimes absurd limitations. Imagine James Baldwin not being able to write about hipster Jewish intellectuals in 1960s New York City, the whole Greenwich Village scene at that time. Or Richard Yates not being able to write about 50s-era women suffering in the suburbs in his short stories, or his novels such as The Easter Parade, or Revolutionary Road. Even more popular novelists in past eras wrote to challenge themselves, taking risks, not following fads or political trends. For example, the pulp novelist James M. Cain writing Mildred Pierce, or the Jewish novelist Seymour Epstien writing Leah, or the Canadian Brian Moore in The Lonely Passion Of Judith Hearne, or the 2005 Pulitzer Prize winner Marilynne Robinson crossing generation of fathers and sons in her masterful novel Gilead. 

Graveyard Of The Atlantic is a collection of stories published by Graywolf in 2000.

Alyson Hagy’s stories have grit and the tang of seawater—and they sound like no one else’s. They are about men and women who live alongside great bodies of water and who are in the grip of great forces of nature, transfixed by them. These stories pulse and burn, like a rope traveling rapidly through your hands.

                                        

                            Charles Baxter, author of The Feast Of Love, First Light, and Saul And Patsy. 

Here is the publisher link to Keeneland, her first novel, from Simon & Schuster in 2002

 https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Keeneland/Alyson-Hagy/9780743242691

And here is Annie Proulx, author of The Shipping News, on Keeneland:

Hagy’s character Kerry is one of the most psychologically complex and realistic women in recent American literature. Increasingly hardened by experience, locked into a destructive pattern of wrong choices, and expecting little of others or herself, she gets out of the tough corners with an obdurate persistence that translates as survival, not only in the rough racetrack milieu but in contemporary American life and mores. Hagy is a writer on her way.

Snow, Ashes, a novel, was published in 2007.

In Ghosts Of Wyoming, published in 2010, Alyson returns to the short story form.

Sharp, mournful tales and dead-on yarns. Hagy knows Wyoming well, her stern weathers and defiant beauty and patient ruthlessness. She knows too how this land fashions and tests her ghosts, both living and long gone.

    

                             Joy Williams, author of The Quick And The Dead, and Breaking And Entering.

Boleto, a novel, was published in 2012. 

Larry Watson, author of Montana 1948, and White Crosses, had this to say about Boleto:

To produce a novel as stirring and austerely beautiful as Boleto, a writer must be fluent in the languages of horses, of men, and of the American West. Alyson Hagy has command of all three, and she uses them to masterful effect in these pages.

This is a link to a 2017 interview in which Alyson talks about writing Boleto. The interviewer is Gary Garth MacCann for the Late Last Night Books program:

https://latelastnightbooks.com/2017/06/20/interview-alyson-hagy-novel-boleto/

Scribe was published in 2018 

It received the following accolades:

Belletrist Book of the Month for October, 2018

IndieNext #1 Pick for November, 2018

IndieNext Winter Book Club Pick

Finalist for the Southern Book Prize

NPR Best Books of 2018

BBC.com 10 Best Books of 2018

Bookmarks Best Reviewed Science Fiction and Fantasy of 2018

FSG Work in Progress Favorite Books of the Year

Entropy Magazine Best Fiction of 2018

Here are Alyson’s top three reads of 2023 as listed on Shepherd, with explanations as to why she chose them: https://shepherd.com/bboy/2023/f/alyson-hagy

The following biography is from Alyson's website: https://alysonhagy.com/about/

Alyson Hagy grew up with on a farm in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia.  She is a graduate of Williams College (’82) where she twice won the Benjamin Wainwright Prize for her fiction and completed an Honors thesis under the direction of Richard Ford.  She earned an MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Michigan (’85) working with George Garrett, Alan Cheuse, and Janet Kauffman.  While at Michigan, she was awarded a Hopwood Prize in Short Fiction and a Roy Cowden Fellowship.  Early stories were published in Sewanee Review, Crescent Review, and Virginia Quarterly Review.  In 1986, Stuart Wright published her first collection of fiction, Madonna On Her Back.

 

Hagy taught at the University of Virginia, the University of Michigan, and the Stonecoast Writers Conference before moving to the Rocky Mountains and joining the faculty at the University of Wyoming in 1996.  She is the author of eight works of fiction, including Hardware River (Poseidon Press, 1991), Keeneland (Simon & Schuster, 2000), Graveyard of the Atlantic (Graywolf Press, 2000), Snow, Ashes (Graywolf Press, 2007), Ghosts of Wyoming (Graywolf Press, 2010), Boleto (Graywolf Press, 2012), and Scribe (Graywolf Press, 2018).  She has been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Christopher Isherwood Foundation.  Her work has won a Pushcart Prize, the Nelson Algren Prize, the High Plains Book Award, the Devil’s Kitchen Award, the Syndicated Fiction Award, and been included in Best American Short Stories.  Recent fiction has appeared in Drunken Boat, The Idaho Review, Kenyon Review, INCH, and Michigan Quarterly Review.

 

Hagy has been represented by Gail Hochman of Brandt & Hochman since the 1980s.  Fiona McCrae and Katie Dublinski at Graywolf Press have been her publisher and editor since the late 1990s.  Abiding interests and transgressions include hiking, fishing, tennis, cohabitating with Labrador Retrievers, college athletics, and making artist’s books.  She lives in Laramie, Wyoming with her husband Robert Southard.  They have one son, Connor.

Stephen Kessler, author

Meet Stephen Kessler

poet, essayist, novelist, translator, and editor.

Photo by Chip Scheur

I don't think Stephen would mind my saying that he's one of a dying breed, namely a man of letters committed fully to the practice of writing, reading, and translating literature. Though we've never met in person, he introduced himself to me by acknowledging a letter I wrote to The Redwood Coast Review. At the time, he was the RCR editor. Though a literary journal, it was pulbished in a newspaper format and available at no cost at the Santa Cruz library, and in other small coastal central California communities. 

My first copy came to me in New England through the mail as part of my annual subscription. Imagine that. And along with my copy came a letter from Stephen, written with care and erudtion, asking if he could publish my letter. I'd written to him as the editor commenting on my day sin Santa Cruz, and on my use of a typewriter in Moldova in 1993 and how that simple machine, a Smith Corona Silent bought for five dollars at a church sale, complete with leather case, had been worth its weight in gold at the university there where I'd been teaching. 

I think I may have piqued Stephen's abiding interest in Eastern Europe, Russia, the end of the Soviet era, and I was more than happy to say yes to his offer to print my little letter, editing out, of course, what wasn't relevant to the discussion he wanted to moderate in the journal, something he was quite skillful at, using the journal as a public forum, of sorts. 

I wrote back to him and asked if I could take a crack at writing an essay about my time working for KOMY Radio in Watsonville, not far at all from Santa Cruz. I'd never published an essay before, though I'd worked as a newspaper reporter and had seen lots of my prose get pruned, clarified and butchered by editors paid to do that sort of thing. 

Stephen said yes, by all means, I should give it a try. So, I did. Of course, the essay needed a lot of work, but Stephen was gracious in his criticism, and clear, and so I wrote a number of drafts, mailing them out to him across the country, waiting for his reply, until I'd fashioned an essay, Radio Days: Me And My Dad In The Theatre Of The Mind, he could then further improve and publish. I've included it in my collection, The Golden Staircase. I've also included a second essay which Stephen published, Without Papers. This one was about my mother, and a response to what Stephen had been writing about in RCR, taking on the touchy subject of immigration and assimilation. A subject that over 20 years later is still as touchy as it was then, if not more so. 

I kept renewing my subscription to RCR, and I kept buying and reading Stephen's books. I should note that though we never met, I did attend one reading in Santa Cruz in which he, along with the poet William Everson, and Maude Meehan were the featured poets. I did meet Maude Meehan that night and got along with her extremely well. 

What a remarkable woman she was. At the time, I was young enough to be her son, but that didn't matter. She treated me with the utmost courtesy and respect and interest. I need to create a post about Maude. She's a poet who, having died in 2007 at the age of 86, though she achieved some recognition, didn't receive the kind of attention and respect outside of California, in my opinion, that her work deserves.

Here is a link to Stephen's memorial article about Maude published shortly her death in the Santa Cruz Metro: https://www.goodtimes.sc/archives/metro-santa-cruz/08.29.07/arts2-0735.html

I suppose the same could be said for William Everson, aka Brother Antoninus, who when I saw him read was nearing the end of his life, battling Parkinson's while he read and struggling to control his body as he shared a short story based on his childhood. The man wore a long white beard and long shocks of thinning chaotic white hair. He stood tall, but age and his infirmity kept him hunched over, gripping the podium to keep himself from trembling, and he kept on reading, defiantly so, fully invested, and there was a dimension to this experience that marked it as a reading that I've never forgotten. 

I could say, and I do so respectfully, that the man knew he was going to die soon, and that he knew this was probably one of his last opportunities to read in public. All of this was on display, though unspoken, because he was there to share, not to promote himself, not to boast or sell a book. But to tell a story, with dignity and fire and passion. I remember thinking to myself that I was watching one of the unheralded greats. 

Later, Maude Meehan and I talked about Mr. Everson's reading, and she told me it was sad that for someone like myself I hadn't been around to experience the man reading his poems in public when he was younger and known as Brother Antoninus and wore long monastic robes in town and to his readings, a man in his prime, flinty-eyed, self-possessed, deidicated to poetry and our shared spiritual life. "One of a kind" is how I remember Maude describing him. It's only decades later that I realize how correct her simple assessment had been.

  

Mr. Everson may still be read in some quarters, as he should be, but I think he stands apart and shouldn't be lumped in with the West Coast Beats such as Gregory Corso and Michael McClure. In my opinion he's not really a beat poet, and pre-dates them to a degree, in much the same way that Kenneth Rexroth did. But why quibble over such trivialities.

And here is another link, this one to Stephen memorializing the poet, Wanda Coleman, known by some as the Great Poet Of Los Angeles. This appeared originally in Poetry Flash, and can also be found on Stephen's web page: https://poetryflash.org/features/?p=KESSLER-Hahaha_Wanda_Colemans_Last_Laugh

I share these because I want to celebrate these poets, and to celebrate Stephen's respect and adroit use of language when writing about them. I believe he views them more as just his fellow poets, but as his friends. He also believes, as I do, these poets need not be forgotten. It's up to us, the living, to keep their work alive. The Internet is not going to do this work for us. We the living must spread the word, as always. 

I wrote to Wanda Coleman from New England, having been given her address in a letter to me from Stephen. Wanda wrote back to me and was ever so gracious and supportive. I was just a young tyro who didn't know much and was seeking advice from poets whose work I admired. 

At the time, I was working on a long poem about Los Angeles that would become eventually a chapbook of LA poems titled, A Dozen Lemons In Autotroplis. A lot of what inspired me to keep writing the poems in that chap came from Wanda's encouraging me to speak what I believed in, and had experienced, and to trust my senses. I cannot say that every poet I've ever written to has been as generous and supportive, taking the time to respond to a complete stranger. 

Here is Wanda's brief capsule review for Stephen's book of poetry, After Modigliani.

"Widely acclaimed as a translator, essayist, critic, editor, and journalist, Stephen Kessler is first of all a poet, whose work has appeared in small press publications across the U.S. since the late 1960s. AFTER MODIGLIANI is his fifteenth book and his first collection of poems to be published in twenty years. Its sixty poems generously display the author's lyric intensity, ironic wit, clarity of vision, and range of imagination. Urban and natural landscapes, social and political realities, sexual love, memory, mortality, and consciousness itself are explored here with a sharp eye, a musical ear, and a crisply contemporary voice. These soul-deep, introspective songs by Stephen Kessler wax strongly of the philosophical, the nostalgic, and an acceptance of life's complexities tingled with a quiet rag -- this book is an 'alchemical' work of passion." 

Stephen's poems, like Wanda's, like Everson's, share a renegade spirit. These are not written as poems to enhance teaching careers, or establish a brand, or to prove the poet attended the proper academies. 

I like to think of it as the California spirit, embodied in Muir, in Robinson Jeffers, Rexroth, and in a novel such as If He Hollers Let Him Go by Chester Himes. This latter novel paints an incredible picutre of what the conditions were like for young black men employed in the munitions plants of southern California prior and during the second world war. This is an early work by Himes, long before he found success writing his more commercial Cotton novels, and it captures with a rough brilliance the tension and stress, all of it economic and racially motivated, that a young black man endures inside the plant from his white co-workers. I'd like to think we don't live in that world any longer. I know that in the factories I've worked in, I shared various lines with people of all races and religions. Tension exists everywhere in everything, to be sure, but thank God, we are all still trying to move on from baiting and outright hatred. The novel has an unmistakenly lived feel to it, and as a study in working class conditions, overt racism, and a specific era -- not as a tract or a lecture or a thesis, but as a story -- it's an undervalued masterpiece.   

The cover below more or less says it all. It's the 40s and one of the uneducated white female factory workers says the black man did it to her, whether he's innocent or not (he's innocent), and all the white men gang up on him. Are we still living this way? I don't think so. Let's hope not. But we did live this way, no doubt, and one way to address racism in real terms to examine the works of those who lived it and survived it and have told about it. 

Not every maverick, and not everything raw and edgy comes out of or is shaped by Manhattan. Not hardly. There is nothing worse in literary matters, especially, than East Coast snobbery. I think Stephen would agree with this.

Here is a link to his website, where you'll find an archive of the Redwood Coast Review, and Stephen's books, and a few complete versions of his published essays. https://www.stephenkessler.com/

The Architecture Of Memory: How Los Angeles Made Me A Poet, originally in the Los Angeles Review Of Books https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-architecture-of-memory-how-los-angeles-made-me-a-poet/#!

The Discreet Charm Of Luis Bunuel https://www.stephenkessler.com/essays/bunuel.html

Stephen is a maven when it comes to Spanish language and culture, and he's fluent in Spanish and has translated Cortazar, Neruda, Alexandre, Celan, and others.

This is a link to a You Tube video of him discussing literary translation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jzWjfNw8RjY&ab_channel=LiteraryTranslation

Machu Picchu, the famed Inca site in Peru high in the Andes, is one of those talismanic places that everyone dreams of visiting. The beauty of this extraordinary place is celebrated here in the striking photography of Barry Brukoff whose images evoke the mystery and spiritual atmosphere of this sacred lost city. Interwoven with the images is the epic poem by Pablo Neruda entitled The Heights of Machu Picchu which has been described as one of his greatest works. In addition, novelist Isabel Allende contributes a prologue. The book is a bilingual edition and translator Stephen Kessler has created an English translation of Neruda's Spanish poem.

The following is taken verbatim from his website:

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.  He is also the editor and principal translator of The Sonnets by Jorge Luis Borges.

The Redwood Coast Review, which he founded and edited for sixteen years (1999-2014), was four times recipient of the PR Excellence Award of the California Library Association.

His translations of the Spanish poet Luis Cernuda have received the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award (Academy of American Poets), the PEN Center USA Translation Award, a Lambda Literary Award, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship.  His version of Save Twilight: Selected Poems by Julio Cortázar received a Northern California Book Award.

He lives in Santa Cruz, where his op-ed column appears on Saturdays in the Santa Cruz Sentinel.

His papers are collected at the Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana.

On October 1, 2008, he published Moving Targets, and as an essayist for more than thirty years in Northern California, he presents a selection of his deeply informed and informative writings on poets, poetry, and translation. Rooted in the literary culture of the west coast (Kenneth Rexroth, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Charles Bukowski) and radiating outward across the United States (Denise Levertov, W. S. Merwin, Frank O'Hara) to Latin America and beyond (Ernesto Cardenal, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Yehuda Amichai), he speaks to both the knowledgeable and the newcomer. His concluding essays on the art of translation, "antiwarism," radio as a poetic medium, and inspiration also offer provocative insights into the process of writing, reading, and appreciating poetry.

His essays in RCR never disappointed. Many of them are collected in The Tolstoy Of The Zulus. He labored earnestly to keep up with and comment on what was happening not only in California but the world. I savored every copy of the RCR that came my way, reading the book reviews, the local California news, the guest essayists, and Stephen's columns and articles. I was really sad to learn that like so many journals, thousands of them, it was more or less deleted, vanquished by the Internet. I'm still not sure we who like to read printed text have benefitted by this sea change. Though I read articles online, and I listen to podcasts, I no longer trust anything. There seems to me to be an utter lack of any balance or restraint. There are camps and disunity, and those in power like and prefer this. 

What follows below are excerpts from personal letters to Stephen on his essays. I have taken them directly from his website:

“Thanks very much for the clipping. I thought it was great.” —Henry Miller

“You are an Ace.” —Charles Bukowski

“I know that writers are supposed to ignore what is written about them. I am practicing, and can ignore praise and blame fairly well. But I can’t ignore intelligent understanding that doesn’t oversimplify. Jack [Shoemaker] sent me your article…and I would be ashamed not to tell you how deeply grateful I am for it.” —Wendell Berry

“It’s a wonderful feeling for an author—and a rare one—to know that he has been completely understood by a reviewer. Thanks for a most lucid and intelligent reading” [of When Nietzsche Wept]. —Irvin Yalom

“I just got around to reading the essay [‘How Marijuana Ruined My Life’], which was thoroughly delightful….Louis Armstrong smoked several joints a day throughout his adult life, which suggests that weed is not necessarily incompatible with success, hard work, or creativity.” —Hendrik Hertzberg

“Thanks for sending your fine article on Bellow. I thought your critical assessments were just right, and you gave a very good account of the success of Herzog. Nice work!” —James Atlas

“What a wonderful piece of writing [‘The Integrated Man: Harry Belafonte’s Cultural Politics’]! You do justice to the man. Obviously we have both experienced the innumerable ways in which Belafonte is an excellent subject for contemplating race, music, and American life and culture.” —Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

“I’m directing this to you via Poetry Flash so that the editors will also be complimented for publishing what is probably the most acute and wonderful critique of James Laughlin’s life and work that he will ever receive. Bravo!” —Lawrence Ferlinghetti

“I am honored by your writing, its range and care, its considered perception and the concern that has gone into the background of it. It clearly comes from years of reading and thinking about the poems and I am honored by your attention….it is a summary that bespeaks the kind of reader we all hope exists, and I am grateful to you.” —W. S. Merwin

 "A love poet of sensitive memory, he constructs his poems as bastions of feeling amid crumbling values and collapsing affirmations"--Jack Hirschman.

Born in Los Angeles in 1947, he received his BA in languages and literature from Bard College and an MA in literature from the University of California, Santa Cruz. He published his first essays and criticism in the early 1970s, and his reviews, columns, articles, features and interviews have appeared steadily since then in dozens of magazines and newspapers, chiefly in Northern California. He was the founding editor and publisher of the international journal Alcatraz (1979-1985) and of the Santa Cruz newsweekly The Sun (1986-1989). He has received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Lambda Literary Award, and the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award from the Academy of American Poets for his translations of Luis Cernuda, and is the editor and principal translator of The Sonnets by Jorge Luis Borges. 

His books include NEED I SAY MORE? (El León Literary Arts, 2015), 

WHERE WAS I? (Greenhouse Review Press, 2015), 

TELL IT TO THE RABBIS, and Other Poems, 1977-2000 (Creative Arts Book Co., 2001)

SCRATCH PEGASUS (Swan Scythe Press, 2013), 

THE TOLSTOY OF THE ZULUS (El León Literary Arts, 2011), 

THE MENTAL TRAVELER (Greenhouse Review Press, 2010).

WRITTEN IN WATER: THE COLLECTED PROSE POEMS of Luis Cernuda

A new poetry collection now available, Elsewhere A While

 

The poems in this collection look outward toward whatever I may have learned from some places I may have been a long time ago. Each was written spontaneously, scribbled down, and now I have taken them from many old notebooks that I've accumulated over the decades. 

They reflect immediate impressions, and they address questions of motion and travel and who I and others with me may have been at a particular time. 

This collection is meant to be a companion to my last one, It Must Be, which is a collection of inward-looking poems that were also compiled from random notes that go all the way back to the late 1980s.

The cover is from a photograph I shot in the city of Trabzon on the Black Sea in Turkey. This is from one wall of the Hagia Sophia there (not the one in Istanbul). Hagia Sophia, in English, means Holy Wisdom. It was built as a Greek Orthodox church, and in 1461,when Mehmed II conquered Trabzon, it was converted into a mosque . 

Here is a link to some history of the Hagia Sophia in Trabzon. https://www.historyhit.com/locations/hagia-sophia-trabzon/

There are no poems in this collection about Turkey. These poems and the impressions that engendered them come from a much earlier period in my life. 

The geographic areas are Europe and North America, with one numbered translation of a Ghazal from the Farsi of the great Persian poet, Hafez.

Table Of Contents

I.

Waputaki Cinnabar

With Teresa In Santa Fe

The Mission Bells Are Softly Ringing

Border Problem

The 10, The 5, The 405

Two For David Strohm

Interlude, Manzanar

Soaking Up Marconi Beach

Once Late Fall At Plum Island

First Baptist Church Of North Oxford Annual Rummage Sale

In Grafton Village

Six East Coast Rivers

The Dead Find Us In Mississippi

A Champagne Socialist, 2008

Detroit Vermont Cucamonga

II.

Ghazal 374

Dreamers Get Off At Dusseldorf

Alexanderplatz Chrysalis

Amsterdam Tailored

Mascara And Puritan

Toward Gravesend

Colors On The Fringe Of Galway Bay

Ambidextrous Asthmatic Cowboy

Driver, Passenger, Pedestrian

Time Is Both Burden And Salvation

Stars Speak In Quasi Haikus

Dishwasher Days

Animal, Vegetable, Irrational

Rumors Of Plummeting Space Junk

Here is a sample. This is Ghazal 374 by Hafez, translated with a generous amount of assistance from Baha Sadr, a native speaker of Farsi originally from Tehran who is now an American citizen.

 Ghazal 374

translated from the Ghazaliyat of Hafez

by Baha Sadr and John Michael Flynn

Pull from the earth the petals of a flower

and pour out a glass full of dark red wine

Horizon wide open we will rent you asunder

and create in your stead a new master plan

If the armies of despair begin to riot

and slay each lover through the heart

then with all the lovers I will certainly join

and by every root take those armies down

One man among us sings vainly of his wisdom

another spins yarns about beauty and charm

but for truth in these tales and bold suppositions

let’s before them place a judge’s decision

Come with us, come to the wine cellar

if Paradise be the medicine you require

From the bottom of your dipper full of wine

spills each eternal drop of Paradise divine

Proper speech and the music of the cosmos

are what no one wants here in the city of Shiraz

Let us seek the wines of another land

where we can rise with the sun, enlightened

where we can rise with the sun, enlightened

There was a brief period when Baha Sadr and I travelled about giving readings together. I wrote short poems that I sometimes attempted to sing as a way to accompany his playing of the Persian setar, and various percussion instruments, including a rain stick. 

We enjoyed our experiment in the cross-pollination of cultures and, as I recall, those in attendance appeared to enjoy what we had to offer. 

Above is a photo of Baha I shot either in 1988 or '89.   

Below are links to more information.

This is about Hafez. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/hafez 

This is about the ghazal as a cultural staple and form of poetry. https://www.ipassio.com/blog/ghazal