The library book-sale tables are out of sight, the basketball backboards stashed backstage and the Roller Derby track rolled up in a storeroom somewhere. Folding chairs stand in straight rows as the jazzophiles file in and find their seats, anxious to hear the men in matching suits from New York blow into town and blow the town down, their Ellingtonian lungs deployed to raze this gym with a sound as powerful as Willie Mays. The band struts in from the wings, sits, and starts blowing Dukelike from sheet music, the brass muted so it almost squeaks from the trombonists’ noses, fast, with a classical tone, a hard Boppishness wrapped in uptown tailoring that morphs into a light blue Monkdom, tooting a little ironically along with graver accents of deep lefthanded melancholy.
Articles by Stephen Kessler
A Clean, Dimly Lit Place
After the movie, late at night, when the spouse is away and there’s no place to go but home nor any reason to, you like to retreat to a certain restaurant steps from the bay where the Aztec Zen feng shui is serene and the margaritas reliably brisk and limey.
Terroirisme, or Proust at The Wine Bar
The taste of this Soquel red whose name is Noir speaks a language of lost time on my tongue listening to old songs and finding echoes of Old San Jose Road years ago where I met bobcats or coyotes prowling from time to time, heard owls some nights or loud bees swarming as they moved their hive, and wild girls rode their bikes five miles uphill to find me in my remembered home with just such sips of blood-deep crimson to sweeten and darken some warm afternoons.
Santa Cruz Poets, Santa Cruz Inspiration: More Stephen Kessler
From the Santa Cruz poet, novelist, translator and newspaper publisher, a tribute to the late great poet Maude Meehan.
Borders of Oblivion
As its liquidation sale got under way last week the Borders store downtown was swarming with consumers, myself included, in search of bargain books, music and the miscellaneous merchandise marked down by 20 to 40 percent, ALL SALES FINAL. As a faithful longtime patron of both Bookshop Santa Cruz and Logos, I scarcely ever bought a book at Borders, but in the early years of the new millennium I did take advantage of the big chain’s extensive selection of new music, scoring quite a few excellent CDs, and—before the vandals trashed them—made use of its public restrooms from time to time.
Green Monk
A jazz concert triggers a meditation on sound and sense.
F. A. Nettelbeck, Outlaw Poet
F. A. Nettelbeck, who died Jan. 20 in Bend, Oregon at age 60, is probably the most important avant-garde poet you’ve never heard of. Through his 23 books and chapbooks, countless magazine (and more recently online) publications, quite a few infamous readings and, for me personally, a friendship and correspondence spanning nearly four decades, Nettelbeck since 1970 established himself more than anyone else I’ve known as a truly outside-the-law literatus, a man who, if not for poetry, very likely would have ended up in prison. His genius as a writer was to echo or reflect back through a fractured idiom some of the deepest pathologies of our culture, and through anger and outrage and an irrepressible need to offer some cry of defiance, to create a formally meticulous, visually musical, highly personal yet anti-lyrical poetry.
George Hitchcock, Jorge-of-all-trades
When I was an undergraduate and aspiring poet at school in upstate New York in the mid-1960s I started reading the small-circulation independent literary journals known as little magazines. It was a volatile historical moment when cultural life was starting to erupt in all sorts of unpredictable forms, and one of those forms was this suddenly dynamic proliferation of creative periodicals run by eccentric individuals with a taste for poetry and some esthetic agenda or political viewpoint to promulgate, and read by a self-selected bohemian elite. One such journal was the San Francisco quarterly kayak, a remarkably lively magazine launched in 1964 and publishing some of the best poets, both famed and unknown, then writing in the United States. The editor and publisher of kayak was someone named George Hitchcock.
A Bike Ride on the Westside
The bike cost 20 bucks at the Goodwill, what timing to find it, what a deal, it’s white with rusty spokes, it works, it fits, and so you take your aging heart for spin, sunlight revealing a long view across the bay, that purple slope of a distant peninsula akin to a tall nude lying on her side, reminder of distant springs, but now you are turning a corner downhill on Arroyo Seco letting gravity have its way with you and your wheels one late afternoon in April, breeze in your helmet, subtle joy in the soul to be gliding so easily along through such hard times …
Santa Cruz Welcomes Its First Poet Laureate
Last year, when my friend Gary Young received the Poetry Society of America’s Shelley Memorial Award, given annually to a “mid-career” poet, I couldn’t help wondering why the PSA had named such a prize after a poet (the English Romantic Percy Bysshe Shelley) who had died at age 29. Shelley was a reckless genius, famous not only for his passionate verse but for his revolutionary politics and scandalous conduct, who drowned in a boating accident off the coast of Italy.
