Laurel Ann Bogen called me this evening and said that San Diego-based poet Steve
Kowit has died. The last time I saw Steve was at the Long Beach Poetry Festival
in 2011, at which he was the featured reader in the evening program. The festival
was in a gallery space on Atlantic Blvd., the kind of venue that Steve was most
comfortable in. He did not read any new poems, but the old ones seemed as lively
as ever. Kowit was a performer who knew how to convey that his themes were chosen
out of profound necessity. One could see how he might have made a very interesting
character actor, but for one drawback. He was far too literate to remove himself
from a life devoted to the written word and too blunt to tolerate those who had
no such need.
As editor of The Maverick Poets, an anthology that included several of
the poets who came to be associated with the Stand Up School, Kowit showed that
it was possible to integrate non-academic West Coast poetry with the work being
done elsewhere in the country. Furthermore, he was one of the few editors I have
ever met who had more than a partial grasp of the common poetics that linked those
working in Southern California with those based in Northern California. He cared
about the poem, not the poet’s reputation. He spoke up for poets, such as
Kim Addonizio, long before they had achieved their current popularity. His ability
to appreciate the poets living in Northern and Southern California may well be an
outgrowth of the time he spent as a young poet in San Francisco, when he was a graduate
student at San Francisco State, before moving to San Diego.
Kowit was that rare cultural worker, an individual who could truly appreciate the
work of others without worrying unduly about whether others appreciated his work.
In part, his confidence in his poems came from years of giving poetry readings in
which he didn’t have to wonder afterwards about the sincerity of the audience’s
pleasure. It’s fashionable to mock sincerity as a virtue worth retaining in
a postmodern culture; Kowit mocked the self-indulgent, whether they were poets who
read too long or simply people unable to savor the transitory privilege of playfulness.
His sincerity had the genius of never seeming didactic. His poems taught you to
laugh at yourself. “I died & went to hell & it was nothing like L.A.”
begins one of his poems. For those of us who live here, the poem is worth posting
on the door of one’s workroom.
Along with many other poets, I will miss his ever-fermenting amusement at the foolishness
of contemporary civilization. We’ve been given a paradise to celebrate the
possession of consciousness within and we cannot resist the temptation to despoil
it. Steve, may you rest well on the long journey home, and reemerge in an enduring
garden of the ever-ripening.
An obituary has been published in the Los Angeles Times since my posting of the
above commentary. You can find that article at:
LA Times Obituaries.
—First published at billmohrpoet.com (2 April 2015); republished here
by author’s permission
Before I headed off to the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books at the University
of Southern California, I spent a few minutes working on my bookshelves at home.
I have enough new books that I simply must prune (de-accession?) the shelves! Sorting
and re-shelving, I found that treasured gifts from other poets awaited me, especially
a broadside from Steve Kowit entitled “A Whitman Portrait.” It’s
a 55-line poem with a delicious sense of humor. Kowit loved to let others hoist
themselves on their own petard, which in this case is their presumptuousness that
the butterfly poised on Whitman’s finger in a photographic portrait taken
of him in Camden in 1883 was “nothing but papier mâché.” Kowit’s
poem is the pleasure of community formation at its best. Sure it’s an “us
against them” poem, but those who have mocked the alleged artificiality of
this portrait (with the implied contempt for Whitman’s sentimentality)
deserve this rebuke, which also rebounds to us for the ultimate fate of this species.
According to Kowit,
...high-resolution spectro-
analysis proved what any fool could have guessed:
she was just what she seemed, mortal & breathing,
a carbon-molecular creature like us: Papilio
aristodemus, now all but extinct...
Kowit’s critique of contemporary poetry is already blunt and merciless. He
was a poet whose eyes partook of “that singular flight of felicitous whimsy,”
but it must also be said that he saw no reason to spare the feelings of the Great
Pretenders.
If it’s true there exist fake butterflies
cut out of paper & wire, my guess is
they belong to a later generation of poets.
I’ll leave you to figure out the ones who dedicate their lines to fake butterflies,
but I don’t think such a project deserves more than a few minutes. Better
to give yourself the pleasure of the company of Steve Kowit’s poems, which
are more than willing to alight on your fingertips.
My retrospective thanks again to Steve, for sending me a signed copy of this broadside,
dated 12-22-89. I think that may have been the year when Christmas looked fairly
bleak. I was living with my first wife, Cathay, in our apartment on Hill Street
in Ocean Park and my job as a typesetter did not pay very much. I remember that
we probably had about $50 in our bank account on December 22, just enough to
buy some basic groceries to get us through the month. We had not bought any Christmas
gifts for each other, even tiny ones. I remember standing at the bottom of the staircase
and starting to sort through a pile of old mail and assorted loose paper. I saw
an envelope from a co-worker at Radio & Records for whom I had done some free-lance
work, and I was one hundred percent certain that I had already opened it, but I
took another look regardless and there was a simple sheet of paper in it with a
notation of hours of work done and a check for well over $200. I couldn’t
believe it. I suppose that moment was a holiday butterfly. Recollections of many
holidays are a blur, but in that instance I still remember how the original expectations
for the year’s final week made the outcome all the sweeter. I keep thinking
at the present moment that there is some meaning I am missing about how one remembers
eating well and having a small tree and a few gifts. Is it just nostalgia betraying
me, another “bittersweet kaleidoscope”?
—First published at billmohrpoet.com (18 April 2015); republished here
by author’s permission
—“A Whitman Portrait” is published in Steve Kowit’s collection
The Dumbbell Nebula (Roundhouse Press, 2000), as well as in Visiting Walt:
Poems Inspired by the Life and Work of Walt Whitman, edited by Sheila Coghill
and Thom Tamarro (University of Iowa Press, 2003).
is an associate professor in the Department of English at California State University,
Long Beach. He has a Ph.D. in Literature from the University of California, San
Diego, and has taught at CSU Long Beach since 2006. His collections of poetry include
Hidden Proofs (1982); Penetralia (1984); Bittersweet Kaleidscope
(2006); and a bilingual volume published in Mexico, Pruebas Ocultas (Bonobos
Editores, 2015). A CD and cassette release of spoken word was produced by Harvey
Robert Kubernik and released by New Alliance Records in 1993.
Mohr’s poems, prose poems, and creative prose have appeared in dozens of magazines
in the past 40 years, including 5 AM, Antioch Review, Beyond Baroque, Blue Collar
Review, Blue Mesa Review, Caliban (On-line), Miramar, ONTHEBUS, OR, Santa Monica
Review, Skidrow Penthouse, Solo Nolo, Sonora Review, Spot, Upstreet, Wormwood Review,
and ZYZZYVA. His poems have also appeared in a dozen anthologies, including
all three editions of Charles Harper Webb’s Stand Up Poetry (1989,
1992, 2002) and Suzanne Lummis’s Grand Passion and Wide Awake.
He has given readings of his poetry in New York City, San Francisco, and Mexico
City, as well as Los Angeles. He was a featured poet at the Idyllwild Poetry Festival
five times and was a visiting scholar at the Getty Research Institute in 1996. His
literary history of Los Angeles poetry, Holdouts: The Los Angeles Poetry Renaissance
1948-1992, was published by the University of Iowa Press in 2011 and has gone
into a second printing. Mohr’s critical essays have appeared in such magazines
as the William Carlos Williams Review and the Journal of Beat Studies.
From 1972 to 1988, he was active in Los Angeles as the editor and publisher of Momentum
Press. Its archives can be found in the Special Collections of Geisel Library at UCSD.
Blog address: billmohrpoet.com