Spring 2014
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Editor's Note
Our vision is to publish the highest quality of poetry online in succeeding issues from the many talented poets in Monterey and Santa Cruz Counties, as well as from poets anywhere with a connection to the Monterey Peninsula.
Please note that we are no longer a tax-deductible organization as before, and although we welcome donations to pay the renewal fees of about $200.00 for the website each year, our financial needs are much smaller than when we were a print publication. The Monterey Poetrey Review is made possible by the following volunteers: Megan Lee – Founder and Editor John Laue – Editor Nicole Henares – Consultant Jennifer Lagier – Webmaster Belen Arellano – Graphic Web Design Learn more about us and how to submit: Click here. NEW CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS! We are accepting new submissions until June 15, 2014. Please click the above link for guidelines. |
3. Interview of John Laue by John Dotson
This Interview of John Laue, Editor of Monterey Poetry Review, by John Dotson first appeared in The Seventh Quarry, a literary magazine based in Swansea, Wales.
l. Can you recall when poetry first thrilled you?
One of my earliest memories is of being snug in bed at four years old while my father read poetry to me, especially Alfred Noyes’ wonderful narrative poem, “The Highwayman” (“The highwayman came riding, came riding, came riding, the highwayman came riding up to the old inn door.”) In addition I had a children’s book that featured colorful pictures of samurai and cherry trees accompanied by haiku in English. Both of these influenced my writing.
My father was also principal of the New Jersey grammar school I attended where we had to memorize poems. I remember with pleasure, Longfellow’s “The Village Blacksmith” (“Under a spreading chestnut tree the village smithy stands”. )
I loved these and other poems encountered early in my childhood and believe my rhythmic sense stems from them. Poetry still reminds me of my father and the loving preparations for life I acquired through his tutelage---although my family was often in crisis because of my mother’s problems (She entered a state mental institution when I was eight years old and died there 23 years later).
2. An epigram in your latest book, A Confluence of Voices, offers these words of Stephen Dunn, “The more poets are able to give a home to what is contradictory, ambiguous, and unruly, the more I would trust their sincerity, if by sincerity we also mean fidelity to the complexities of experience.” I expect, then, that your poetry provides such a home. Am I right that you are drawn to complexities more than to simplicities?
In colleges I’ve been an actor, a newspaper editor, a football player, a literary magazine editor, a student of psychology, literature, creative writing, education, philosophy, counseling, and many other things. I’ve joined numerous non-college groups---softball teams (I was a professional level softball pitcher), group therapy, improvisational drama, tai chi, yoga, and meditation groups. I still attend seminars in several disciplines.
I’ve worked for pay as a dishwasher, liquor store clerk, rhythm, blues, and jazz musician, newspaper columnist, soldier, driving instructor, county research planner, accounts receivable bookkeeper, delivery truck driver, janitor, floater in a boiler factory, plant nursery worker, flower delivery man, toy factory assembly line worker, newspaper writer, college teacher, high school teacher 20 years (English, Peer Counseling and Driver Education). I even did short stints at the Department of Motor Vehicles and Post Office.
Non-paying things I’ve done---Editor of Transfer, Associate Editor of a national literary magazine, San Francisco Review; Performer(San Francisco Improvisational Theater Group); widely published poet and prose writer (a little pay but not much—usually only when I’ve won prizes): Board member of two mental health organizations; twenty year coordinator of poetry series and benefit readings; 4 years Coordinator of national poetry contest (Writers’ Union);producer of local TV programs. (Jazz/poetry readings, Poets for Mental Health), Member Musicians’ Union, Driving Instructors’ Guild (Founding Member), Teachers’ Union, Writers’ Union (Steering Committee).
I believe you will agree that my life has been full of contradictions, ambiguous, and unruly. In the book you refer to I adopted several masks, or personas, some of which don’t totally agree with others. That’s in the tradition of Eliot and Browning, but doesn’t happen to fit the prevailing poetry esthetic: nowadays most American poets seek to write with one stable voice; it’s the age of “Oprah” and “Reality TV” the products of which can be even more contrived and false than products entirely of the imagination. I believe to live fully one has to embrace contradictions: for instance I am diagnosed as “gravely mentally ill” but still function quite effectively in society.
3. When do you experience poetry at its best?
It happens when I experience “flow”. I originally became familiar with this when I soloed on clarinet and saxophone as a jazz player. I was able to let notes emerge without consciously controlling them. Then when I took up poetry and studied improvisational theater the same thing happened. Allen Ginsburg, the famous American poet, went by the motto, “First thought; best thought” and kept his first drafts intact. Most of my best poems were written in this state (although I believe rewriting is sometimes necessary). The method allows one’s symbolic right brain thoughts to merge with the more verbal left brain. Recent research has validated the assumption that our unconscious intelligence can be superior to our consciousness and handle more complex data. I think getting one’s right brain deeply involved is the key to success in any artistic pursuit.
4. You have been Co-chair of the Santa Cruz County Local Mental Health Board and continue to be involved with the Mental Health Clients’ Action Network. How would you characterize this work?
A few years ago, after being appointed to the County’s Board, I was fortunate enough to affect the entire country’s health textbooks. The details are too complex to explain here, but it helped bring them up to speed on mental illness in the schools. Partly as a result of my own mental illness and also that of my mother, I have been motivated and very effective in advocating for mental health causes. I seem to see and act on possibilities that most people dismiss or don’t recognize. Sam Keen, the American philosopher, wrote that schizophrenics can be agents of cultural change. I’m an example of that. My work on both boards has been recognized as exemplary. I feel very lucky that I’ve been endowed with the skills and abilities to be a successful activist.
5. What is your sense of your “readers” and “hearers” and how you are connecting with them?
I’ve had poems in textbooks, including heading a section of one by Oxford University Press. Three of my books can be bought on Amazon and are accessible through Kindle, while another is due next year. My poems have been in many magazines, primarily literary journals. I’ve read poetry in scores of venues, on the radio and on local TV, arranged and conducted readings of my own and other people’s works. I think the audience for poetry in America is small and rather specialized: mostly it’s other poets who read and listen to our poems. I help coordinate a wonderful editorial group of excellent poets. We hear and read each other’s poems, commenting on each one. I sometimes think of us as “poem doctors”.
I’ve also published poems and prose about mental illnesses, my mother’s, my own, those of students I counseled. Some of these have won competitions. In addition I wrote a column for mentally ill people (178 pages to be out soon in hard copy) that existed on the internet for several years until AOL took it down. I believe I was the first to have this kind of website. It’s general knowledge that many significant poets have had mental illnesses; all one has to do is look up suicide records to be cognizant of this. I’ve had my share and survived them along with two major cancer operations and a few other things that could have killed me. I’ve had feedback from poets and others who liked some of my work, said it had been helpful to them. That has been a great satisfaction.
6. Do you have a dream for your ongoing work?
I’ve written a few hundred poems over the years and have gotten less than half published; many languish in notebooks, on my computer, or in old manuscripts. They need work and arrangement into books. I see that as one of my on-going tasks. Also I’ve been experimenting with some autobiographical prose, primarily about some of the many jobs I’ve had, from being the only white musician in a prominent 1950’s black rhythm and blues band (Lord Luther and The Kingsmen ((Luther still has a website)), to teaching driving in San Francisco to people from 25 or more countries, delivering flowers in the funeral industry, clerking in a liquor store where the owner was killed by a holdup man, working on an assembly line for The Ubango Blowgun and Dart Factory, a toy company.
As far as my mental health work, I’m still active on the County Board though I don’t think I’ll ever affect the entire country again as I did in 2001. A Google official once said, “We each have only one opportunity, or two at the most, to change the course of human evolution.“ I took that chance and a much earlier one where I may possibly have moved the U. S. census toward more accurate categories. With the Mental Health Clients’ Action Network, a drop-in center for the mentally ill, I recently helped replace the old director with a new person. For a while, almost all the governing board members for the organization were recruited by me. I also brought in over $150, 000 worth of donations including some of my own.
As to whether my writing will survive the test of time, that’s not as important to me as doing it right now and getting it read. I get pleasure enough out of turning a good phrase. I’m not willing to compromise my ideals to conform to what is popular. I did the first drafts of many poems over fifty years ago; that they’ve been accepted for publication in this era tells me they have some lasting value. But I’m not obsessed with that: by the time this interview will be published, I’ll be 77 years old. My life is full and satisfying. I can’t see that it will ever get any better, so I want to continue contributing to society now while I’m still able.
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This Interview of John Laue, Editor of Monterey Poetry Review, by John Dotson first appeared in The Seventh Quarry, a literary magazine based in Swansea, Wales.
l. Can you recall when poetry first thrilled you?
One of my earliest memories is of being snug in bed at four years old while my father read poetry to me, especially Alfred Noyes’ wonderful narrative poem, “The Highwayman” (“The highwayman came riding, came riding, came riding, the highwayman came riding up to the old inn door.”) In addition I had a children’s book that featured colorful pictures of samurai and cherry trees accompanied by haiku in English. Both of these influenced my writing.
My father was also principal of the New Jersey grammar school I attended where we had to memorize poems. I remember with pleasure, Longfellow’s “The Village Blacksmith” (“Under a spreading chestnut tree the village smithy stands”. )
I loved these and other poems encountered early in my childhood and believe my rhythmic sense stems from them. Poetry still reminds me of my father and the loving preparations for life I acquired through his tutelage---although my family was often in crisis because of my mother’s problems (She entered a state mental institution when I was eight years old and died there 23 years later).
2. An epigram in your latest book, A Confluence of Voices, offers these words of Stephen Dunn, “The more poets are able to give a home to what is contradictory, ambiguous, and unruly, the more I would trust their sincerity, if by sincerity we also mean fidelity to the complexities of experience.” I expect, then, that your poetry provides such a home. Am I right that you are drawn to complexities more than to simplicities?
In colleges I’ve been an actor, a newspaper editor, a football player, a literary magazine editor, a student of psychology, literature, creative writing, education, philosophy, counseling, and many other things. I’ve joined numerous non-college groups---softball teams (I was a professional level softball pitcher), group therapy, improvisational drama, tai chi, yoga, and meditation groups. I still attend seminars in several disciplines.
I’ve worked for pay as a dishwasher, liquor store clerk, rhythm, blues, and jazz musician, newspaper columnist, soldier, driving instructor, county research planner, accounts receivable bookkeeper, delivery truck driver, janitor, floater in a boiler factory, plant nursery worker, flower delivery man, toy factory assembly line worker, newspaper writer, college teacher, high school teacher 20 years (English, Peer Counseling and Driver Education). I even did short stints at the Department of Motor Vehicles and Post Office.
Non-paying things I’ve done---Editor of Transfer, Associate Editor of a national literary magazine, San Francisco Review; Performer(San Francisco Improvisational Theater Group); widely published poet and prose writer (a little pay but not much—usually only when I’ve won prizes): Board member of two mental health organizations; twenty year coordinator of poetry series and benefit readings; 4 years Coordinator of national poetry contest (Writers’ Union);producer of local TV programs. (Jazz/poetry readings, Poets for Mental Health), Member Musicians’ Union, Driving Instructors’ Guild (Founding Member), Teachers’ Union, Writers’ Union (Steering Committee).
I believe you will agree that my life has been full of contradictions, ambiguous, and unruly. In the book you refer to I adopted several masks, or personas, some of which don’t totally agree with others. That’s in the tradition of Eliot and Browning, but doesn’t happen to fit the prevailing poetry esthetic: nowadays most American poets seek to write with one stable voice; it’s the age of “Oprah” and “Reality TV” the products of which can be even more contrived and false than products entirely of the imagination. I believe to live fully one has to embrace contradictions: for instance I am diagnosed as “gravely mentally ill” but still function quite effectively in society.
3. When do you experience poetry at its best?
It happens when I experience “flow”. I originally became familiar with this when I soloed on clarinet and saxophone as a jazz player. I was able to let notes emerge without consciously controlling them. Then when I took up poetry and studied improvisational theater the same thing happened. Allen Ginsburg, the famous American poet, went by the motto, “First thought; best thought” and kept his first drafts intact. Most of my best poems were written in this state (although I believe rewriting is sometimes necessary). The method allows one’s symbolic right brain thoughts to merge with the more verbal left brain. Recent research has validated the assumption that our unconscious intelligence can be superior to our consciousness and handle more complex data. I think getting one’s right brain deeply involved is the key to success in any artistic pursuit.
4. You have been Co-chair of the Santa Cruz County Local Mental Health Board and continue to be involved with the Mental Health Clients’ Action Network. How would you characterize this work?
A few years ago, after being appointed to the County’s Board, I was fortunate enough to affect the entire country’s health textbooks. The details are too complex to explain here, but it helped bring them up to speed on mental illness in the schools. Partly as a result of my own mental illness and also that of my mother, I have been motivated and very effective in advocating for mental health causes. I seem to see and act on possibilities that most people dismiss or don’t recognize. Sam Keen, the American philosopher, wrote that schizophrenics can be agents of cultural change. I’m an example of that. My work on both boards has been recognized as exemplary. I feel very lucky that I’ve been endowed with the skills and abilities to be a successful activist.
5. What is your sense of your “readers” and “hearers” and how you are connecting with them?
I’ve had poems in textbooks, including heading a section of one by Oxford University Press. Three of my books can be bought on Amazon and are accessible through Kindle, while another is due next year. My poems have been in many magazines, primarily literary journals. I’ve read poetry in scores of venues, on the radio and on local TV, arranged and conducted readings of my own and other people’s works. I think the audience for poetry in America is small and rather specialized: mostly it’s other poets who read and listen to our poems. I help coordinate a wonderful editorial group of excellent poets. We hear and read each other’s poems, commenting on each one. I sometimes think of us as “poem doctors”.
I’ve also published poems and prose about mental illnesses, my mother’s, my own, those of students I counseled. Some of these have won competitions. In addition I wrote a column for mentally ill people (178 pages to be out soon in hard copy) that existed on the internet for several years until AOL took it down. I believe I was the first to have this kind of website. It’s general knowledge that many significant poets have had mental illnesses; all one has to do is look up suicide records to be cognizant of this. I’ve had my share and survived them along with two major cancer operations and a few other things that could have killed me. I’ve had feedback from poets and others who liked some of my work, said it had been helpful to them. That has been a great satisfaction.
6. Do you have a dream for your ongoing work?
I’ve written a few hundred poems over the years and have gotten less than half published; many languish in notebooks, on my computer, or in old manuscripts. They need work and arrangement into books. I see that as one of my on-going tasks. Also I’ve been experimenting with some autobiographical prose, primarily about some of the many jobs I’ve had, from being the only white musician in a prominent 1950’s black rhythm and blues band (Lord Luther and The Kingsmen ((Luther still has a website)), to teaching driving in San Francisco to people from 25 or more countries, delivering flowers in the funeral industry, clerking in a liquor store where the owner was killed by a holdup man, working on an assembly line for The Ubango Blowgun and Dart Factory, a toy company.
As far as my mental health work, I’m still active on the County Board though I don’t think I’ll ever affect the entire country again as I did in 2001. A Google official once said, “We each have only one opportunity, or two at the most, to change the course of human evolution.“ I took that chance and a much earlier one where I may possibly have moved the U. S. census toward more accurate categories. With the Mental Health Clients’ Action Network, a drop-in center for the mentally ill, I recently helped replace the old director with a new person. For a while, almost all the governing board members for the organization were recruited by me. I also brought in over $150, 000 worth of donations including some of my own.
As to whether my writing will survive the test of time, that’s not as important to me as doing it right now and getting it read. I get pleasure enough out of turning a good phrase. I’m not willing to compromise my ideals to conform to what is popular. I did the first drafts of many poems over fifty years ago; that they’ve been accepted for publication in this era tells me they have some lasting value. But I’m not obsessed with that: by the time this interview will be published, I’ll be 77 years old. My life is full and satisfying. I can’t see that it will ever get any better, so I want to continue contributing to society now while I’m still able.
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