Wednesday, June 26 - Poet Andrew Allport

Tonight at 8 PM on KPFK 90.7 FM:  ANDREW ALLPORT.  My guest this week is a young poet whose debut collection won the 2011 New Issues Poetry Prize, a very big deal from Western Michigan University Press and judge poet David Wojahn.  Andrew Allport’s the body / of space / in the shape of the human is a smart, sharp accounting of absence and loss, but always reckoning on possibility and a sometimes ironic but urgent call to attentiveness and creation:  “What today is killed on the page still survives in the world where no one reads.”  In a poem set at a local Buddhist meditation retreat, Allport makes a Zen funny while also calling out the artist and the reader, and perhaps a society chockfull of the virtual, and its endless absence.  Beginning as an elegy for a lost father and ending in the rich environs of the natural and man-made natural world of the Romantics, Allport introduces history and philosophy and humor to show us fullness and absence together.  Andrew Allport holds a Ph.D. in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Southern California.  His reviews, poems, and essays appear or are forthcoming in Colorado Review, Boston Review, The Los Angeles Review, and elsewhere. He is the author of an earlier chapbook, The Ice Ship & Other Vessels and he teaches at USC.  Thanks for listening, for purchasing books by guests of this show, and for supporting your, our community-sponsored alternative radio.  

Wednesday, June 19 - Tom Lutz, LA Review of Books

Tonight on Bibliocracy, on KPFK 90.7 FM at 8 PM:  TOM LUTZ.  My guest is local literary hero Tom Lutz, a friend of readers and writers.  His Los Angeles Review of Books has in two years since its online debut not just filled the gap created with the loss of so many regular newspaper book review venues, but established a community of cultural workers well beyond being only an alternative. LARoB is a collective invention of mind and spirit that defines literary life in our region and beyond. As Founding Editor-in-Chief, Lutz brought on board the LA Review of Books website dozens of talented Southern California writers, offering essential reviews, essays and interviews.  Organized as a non-profit reader-supported online journal, where critics, journalists, artists, filmmakers and scholars convene and celebrate the life of the mind, LA Review of Books is committed, as its mission statement declares “to the intellectual rigor, the incisiveness and the power of the written word.”  Dig it.  Tom Lutz is a teacher – at UC Riverside-  a critic, and reviewer. He is also the author of Doing Nothing: A History of Loafers, Loungers, Slackers, and Bums in America, Cosmopolitan Vistas: American Regionalism and Literary Value and Crying: A Natural and Cultural History of Tears.  Join me in conversation with the Founding Editor in Chief of everybody’s favorite literary arts website, the Los Angeles Review of Books, soon to be a quarterly hard copy magazine in addition to an essential online resource for bibliophiles, activists, thinkers and creative Angelenos everywhere.  Not yet discovered LARoB?  Here’s the link, friends: http://lareviewofbooks.org/.  Donate, subscribe, share.

Wednesday, June 12 Jim Gavin, "Middle Men"

Tonight on Bibliocracy Radio, on KPFK90.7 FM:  JIM GAVIN, on Middle Men. Do you recognize the real deal when you see it?  I mean the Real Deal, in caps, or in quotes, or whatever punctuation is required to separate it from The Rest?  Friends, home-grown So Cal short story writer Jim Gavin is the R.D., though most everybody already knew that except me, from The New Yorker to my friend novelist Victoria Patterson, who turned me on to his work, and ZYZZYVA editor Oscar Villalon, who raved about Gavin on NPR.  So, here I am, a Johnny Come Lately, with my over-eager and justifiably excited upper case of enthusiasm.  From Long Beach to Echo Park, Riverside to Compton, Gavin charts the stunted emotional growth of his “middle men,” boys and adult males who struggle with the near-geographical emotional boundaries drawn by work, school, family.  In the too-perfectly, ominously, hilariously titled “Bewildered Decisions in Times of Mercantile Terror,” an overachiever with one foot in failure dreams of spiritual wholeness in her ancestral home even as she negotiates the demise of her corporate career and tries to take care of a kind of her alter-ego, one in a series of Gavin’s lost boys named Bobby – the incarnation here of a series of hapless, feckless, just plain “less” young, old and middle-aged men.  Nora works unhappily in sales for a software company while the childhood family friend, a boy-man, pretends to invent a miracle product. Gavin’s writing confronts our region with the power of DJ Waldie, Joan Didion - Nathaneal West without the hyperbole, but with wicked humor and tenderness, too. This guy is a new favorite, and Middle Men is a must-read bound for a place in our region’s literary canon.  Thanks for listening, on the radio or online, as a download any time you like from the station archives.