Mel Weisburd, Mapping the Artist: Memorial Tribute

​​In mid April, 2015 we lost our precious Southern California poet, Mel Weisburd, especially dear to my heart. His wonderful poet daughter Stefi Weisburd has arranged a memorial gathering, to celebrate his love of life, humor and wonderful poetry, August 2 at Beyond Baroque. This seemed far in the future. Now that we are here, approaching August, the sadness is still so fresh for all of us.

It will do us all good to gather in his honor. I was so glad to have collaborated poetically with Mel over our years of friendship. He considered all of us his successors and wanted the future of poetry to be bright, yet looked with a sober eye on the world. See our conversation below.

I am so glad I could do this interview with him! He worked hard on it even though he was not well, and had much more to say than appears here. He asked questions of himself, and sent all the material I’ve included all of it in a link at the end of the interview, much more than I asked for. Poems, musings, and thoughts for the future. He wrote these as a “testament” (the word he used for it.) He wanted to share.

Most of all, he had a heart of gold. He truly loved his friends, his family and poetry.

Kathabela Wilson

Join us at:

Beyond Baroque
681 N. Venice Blvd.
Venice, CA 90291
Sunday, August 2, 2015 at 1:00 p.m.

From the Beyond Baroque website calendar:

MEL WEISBURD MEMORIAL
Join Sherman Pearl, Stefi Weisburd, Alice Pero, Kathabela Wilson,Glenna Luschwe, and many others to celebrate the life, humor and poetry of Mel Weisburd. Mel who, passed away in April, was Los Angeles’s original Smog Inspector, an LSD literary pioneer, Co-Founder with Gene Frumkin of Coastlines literary magazine, consummate spanner of C.P. Snow’s two cultures, a deep and beautiful writer and an all around kind and playful soul. Refreshments, hugs, laughter. FREE.

________________________________________________________

Mel Weisburd and Kathabela Wilson.

An interview* with Mel Weisburd, a father of contemporary poetry since the beat era in Los Angeles, and a pioneer of our environmental movement.

Mel Weisburd is a brilliant poet, and a longtime spirited unifier of communities of poets. ​

By Kathabela Wilson

A microscope on the poet

When and how did you become a poet?

Looking back, as a child, I can see that I thought in short lines to maintain myself as a resonant being. I did not know about poetry, but there it was! That may have been a form of autistic thinking. My father divorced my mother, a Polish immigrant, before I was three during the great depression. Records show that both she and I were tested and declared morons! She was diagnosed ‘feeble minded’ and put away. Given how I turned out to the contrary, and the discredited mental health practices of those times, I laughed much of this off. On the other hand, considering the importance we give the first three years of life, I have always wondered who she was, how much did she determine the rest of my life? In a sense, her absence is present in my life just as much as if she had always been with me. This mystery still haunts my poetry to this day.

A telescope on the poet

You’ve led a double life–an active poet in Los Angeles since the 50’s, an editor of the renowned Coastlines Magazine, where you wrote and published the best beat poetry and poets of the day, while simultaneously being an Environmental Pollution Specialist! Tell us about that.

I was fortunate to meet and study with the great poetry teacher Thomas McGrath in LA in the 50’s. He taught me that a poem could be a social machine; a mind-maker; a mind changer and the poem once expressed belonged to society, a powerful, meaningful and beautiful dormant germ that could explode or go viral at any time. Over a sandwich and a beer we got to know each other better. He was surprised by my profession. “A smogman?! Is there such a thing?! Man, that’s a hell where even Dante wouldn’t tread. And you’re the canary.”

Pulse of the poet

Along with your scientific, contemporary bent, I sense a lyrical romanticism, a strong emotional artistic element in your life and poetry.

Of course, the biggest event of my life was my marriage to Gloria Applebaum. She was four years older, but it was mutual love at very first sight. I found it difficult to adapt to marriage. I was still self absorbed, too interested in ideas, but we became attached to each other, sensuously and affectionately. It lasted 50 years until she passed in 2006. She was an artist in every media and our home, where I still live today, is covered inside and out, with her paintings, stained glass, ceramics, sculpture, metalwork and much more. Even her kiln still stands at the edge of our kidney shaped, now unused, swimming pool. I recall and celebrate my life with her in “The Gloria Poems.” Our marriage redeemed the bad effects of my childhood. We had a daughter Stefi Weisburd, who graduated with an MS in physics from Stanford and easily crossed the cultural divide to become a distinguished poet.

Space shuttle to the poet

After more than eight decades, how do you resolve the incongruities of life, and how do we explore contemporary poetry, and the future?

My work and my art make sense together though I and others often questioned it. I remember a trip to Mexico that clarified my view. Rivera and many artists there hand-wrought art, science, agriculture and industry into powerful public images. I wanted to go that way, towards some kind of world wide movement that would sweep industrial economies along with it in reaction to growing pollution, abandoning their sole self-interests. I see today’s poetry as a sub-culture that grew from the literary world of the 50’s and 60’s parallel to rock, hip-hop and pop. How good or long-lasting much of it is, we shall have to wait and see. We see metaphor becoming widespread in advertising, documentary, and everyday life. There is rapid expansion of human consciousness to the edge of the universe and possible multiverses beyond, from the local to the global village. At the same time, everyone on this planet is a poet at any age inputting to the great cloud babble! In the end, what else is there to do. The rational, natural and beautiful way would eventually be the only way left to go. Or else we resign ourselves to catastrophe.

________________________________________________________

*Feb 21, 2015.