Jay Passer: California Poets Part 8, Three Poems

Jay Passer

January 8th, 2025

California Poets: Part VIII

Jay Passer

Three Poems

Dr Day

I took fists

the boy and

the black horse went over the sand onscreen

They seemed happy

so I got a ride to Torrance

the good doctor, boots made from Komodo dragons

"Basically you’re fucked son"

say fly to Bangkok

on $300 a month you can live like a king

maybe less! Maybe develop a taste for

cockroach paste

Prognosis: detached retina

moon waning gibbous, 86%

riffing at the lobby coffeeshop,

black as raven piss and

Maynard Ferguson

firing up the

Superbone

"Call it a day son"

I Never Stayed

at the Chelsea in New York

or saw a show at Max’s K.C.

or met Andy or Dick Hell

I was busy pulling espresso

and mispronouncing the

names of European women

in San Francisco in North Beach

and Cow Hollow in the Marina

where I worked with a Filipino

who’d been a policeman under

Marcos, and who promised me a

nice plot of land and a spare niece

Poem to Keep Me in Shape Like Working Out on Sawhorses

my father beat me with a tuning fork

it kept me from crawling back to mom

who leapt off the bridge of stars

to sleep ensconced in black op labs

raised from the dreams of physicists

resentful of the Nobel selection process

that kept them from choosing which

countries to annihilate back in the day

when Renaissance Popes appropriated

the canals of Venice and Amsterdam

for use as their personal latrines

Interview

May 1st, 2025

California Poets Interview Series:

Jay Passer, Poet, Writer

interviewed by David Garyan

DG: You’re a native of San Francisco but have also worked in Los Angeles. What do you miss about San Francisco?

JP: The verticality. Rarified air and all that Pacific angelic stuff. You can see it in the paintings of Richard Diebenkorn and Wayne Thiebaud. It’s why the cable car system was built back in the day. People were as lazy back then as they are now so the powers that be built a rail line that was environmentally practical for a change that became iconic. Then there’s the instant neighborhood shifts. You can walk from the Mission to the Castro in seconds like in a time warp. You can muck around through the sleaze of Broadway then 2 blocks up wander into Pacific Heights and be arrested for vagrancy. Gallivant from the downtown financial district to Chinatown and North Beach quick via the Stockton tunnel. Or you can take the stairs OVER the tunnel. Simple. San Francisco is a tiny compact jewel. Everything is easy to get to by walking. I’ve always been a walker. It aids in the dreaming and with perception. I can walk to Ocean Beach and back to the Tenderloin in a few short hours. I’ve walked to Sausalito. Who can say they walked to Sausalito, across the magnificent Golden Gate Bridge, here in Los Angeles? Here, I shuffle to Venice Beach in a straight line in the vicious sun and end up in a cesspool. A jaunt around the block in Los Angeles might take a year. You might never return. It’s true, as a native San Franciscan maybe it’s in my blood, or DNA, but I feel more comfortable there. I was born on Divisadero in the same hospital, Mt. Zion, literally in the same room, as my mother. We know that for a fact because the doctor who yanked me out was the same doctor who yanked her out. Back then life was somewhat more on the provincial side, even in the big city. Yeah, so roots. I miss my roots. And dim sum.

DG: LA is a city not short of literary culture, much less bookstores. What makes it enjoyable to write in this city and what are the challenges?

JP: I can’t say writing is enjoyable per se. It’s like anything else with the pros and cons. It can be a struggle as well as transformative. For me writing is compulsory and always has been, as a creative act, as a survival mechanism. I’ve delved into a lot of shit. Multi-tasking in the arts isn’t much different from a job or rescue mission or moon landing or cute romantic interlude. I don’t label myself as anything like a poet or writer or artist or lover or iguana or asteroid or alien. I’m a human being equipped with involuntary creational powers that naturally adapt to the environment I find myself in. I feel capable of pretty much anything and have covered a lot of ground in a variety of mediums, relationships, geographies. Bottom line though? Poetry is the end-all. Poetry pulls the strings on all the arts, you can add the sciences too. Architecture, medicine, ballet, aeronautics, film, sports …. You know how sportscasters describe an athlete’s particularly adroit performance as “poetry in motion”? Or say Einstein with his quote about dice and that alleged guy in the sky? That.

DG: If you had to write in another California city that was not SF or LA, which city would you choose and why?

JP: Sacramento comes to mind but only since the A’s moved there from Oakland. It’s pretty chill but sorta the anti-Frisco, like the flattest city on earth. But I really don’t know. Some little burg in Big Sur hanging out with Henry Miller’s ghost? Carmel and Robinson Jeffers’? Maybe Crescent City, they got a nice harbor, and it’s closer to the Pacific Northwest, where I lived and worked for 20 years. I do have a soft spot for redwood forests. But definitely nowhere east. I’ve had some rough encounters in Fresno and the like. I’ll probably end up back in San Francisco. I can pitch a tent in the park if I feel like disappearing in a woodsy sense. With the buffalo and the windmill and the ducks.

DG: Throughout your career, you’ve held a wide array of jobs, which have informed the subject matter of your writing a great deal. Were there some jobs that influenced your writing more than others?

JP: I’ve been a service industry bot all my life; my first taxpaying job at age 14 was at a Taco Bell. Foodservice work became routine, free food being the most motivating factor. But I like the kitchen atmosphere, I like knives, the precision and practice effect, which translates into discipline, applicable to a miasma of pursuits. I’m at my best working with the elements, the source material of subsistence; it’s like reshaping chaos. Besides, I was always the guy at the party rummaging in the fridge rather than “socializing”, trying to make something out of practically nothing. Just me in the kitchen with the keg. I was infinitely more at ease feeding people rather than dealing with them on a personal level.

DG: You’ve described yourself as a “lifetime plebeian”, but your poetry is not short of well-constructed images and musical lines. Not having done the traditional MFA route, how did you “study” poetry?

JP: I appreciate the reference to musicality. Music above all has been the driving force behind my work starting from a very early age when I was sat down by an evil stepmother and forced to listen to classical music in an attempt to “culture” me. I resisted and rebelled for reasons unrelated but the ordeal provoked seismic shifts which must’ve altered or sparked my brain chemistry. Classical music (and later jazz, blues and pop) nurtured and shaped the unconscious abstractions that became integral to my particular manner of linguistic expression. Phrasing, silence, harmony, dissonance.

Poetry for me was confined to pop song lyrics until high school literature instructors suggested different. The classic rhyming schemes and meters and forms I had zero interest in. I was a child of the 60’s, in other words, fucked-up American post-hippie-era trash; I found stimulation in celebratory excess and slang, subversion and girls and escape from conformity. A little punk libertine. Then what happened was I found a book by e.e. cummings, 100 selected poems, literally found it dog-eared on the street. Really that was all it took; from then on I was hooked on invention. Strangely enough, cummings was pretty much a classicist himself, but attraction to his experimental techniques coerced me to explore further, until I discovered free verse, Whitman and his American spawn for example, then the French moderns, then Mayakovsky and Paz and Zen koans and blah blah blah, off to the races. Poetry aside though, I absorbed the bulk from novels and nonfiction. I read a lot as a kid and throughout the years, like a lot, like a monk pretty much, or maybe a prisoner. Poetry develops with a kind of fluidity in novel form since the writer, if they’re any good at all, is able to dig deep into the core. Again with the soft metaphors; plowing, sowing, irrigating, harvesting. All that takes time, craftwork and discipline. I feel like for the most part, especially in our hand-held era of digital composition, people just puke out a paragraph, chop it up into lines, and call it a poem. All wet for the spotlight. Where’s the spotlight? Where’s my accolades? I’m a POET, goddammit! This may sound harsh, but poets like that remind me of certain bass players with the rep of failed guitarists.

I get along with visual artists and musicians fine but poets, not so much. In fact I don’t mingle at all with that community unless, full transparency, it furthers my own pursuits; a world in which I’m able to navigate online, and therefore in relative isolation. I just have nothing in common with them and have very little positive to say about it. I’d rather sit at a bar or wherever and talk about baseball. Nothing against that whole set, it’s just not for me.

I went to art school for a few semesters and a culinary institute for 18 months but otherwise have no “formal” training other than fending for my own ass since age 17. It’s my opinion that creatives aren’t born from nothingness, but must work like dogs to formulate their craft; that “inspiration” is basically a load of crap; there may be a prodigy here and again like Picasso or Mozart but for the rest of us who’ve ever done anything worth doing it’s 99% grueling assiduous effort. Nowadays, since anyone with the IQ of a baboon can magically create digital platforms, the resulting avalanche of literary slush is quite unfathomable. I made a decision at age 19 to get my efforts published and knew what it took because I’d read enough about it from accounts of the few writers and poets I admired that’d gone the same route. You see, people so often want to be what they’re not willing to learn, through grit and discomfort and travail, how to do. The culture of instant gratification and all. Myself, I submitted and continued to submit until I had the interior of the USPS lobby practically memorized. I can still describe the New Deal mural painted on the wall at the post office in downtown San Mateo where I used to wait in line with my SASEs; some kinda Western frontier motif of a bull and a bear in a corral facing off, tensed for battle. Getting the work out takes resilience and determination and a special kind of inverse arrogance. All of which comes in handy in the inevitable case of rejection. Which happened in my case most of the time, and we’re talking back in the pre-internet days of 3-6 month snail-mail form-letter responses.

DG: In 1988, you landed your first poem in the prestigious Caliban magazine. How long had you been writing before this breakthrough and how do you feel about the poem today?

JP: I’d been scribbling and working the manual typewriter like I was some kinda streetwise mystic bohemian for a couple-three years before I started submitting. The idea was to first compile a whopping huge stack of poems, because I figured I was going to get rejected repeatedly before netting any results. I wanted a surplus to keep the process going, in a factory sense, y’know, like in the real red-blooded American tradition. Fooled me. I wasn’t fucking around, I shot for the stars, I’d seen the Caliban on a newsstand with some big names; Robert Bly, W.S. Merwin, Robert Creeley, Jim Harrison, even though I hadn’t even heard of, let alone read, Jim Harrison, I mean who had? He hadn’t made any movies yet. I said to myself, why not. I sent out a bunch of batches without any expectations while my granola-girlfriend at the time urged me to send positive visualizations. Caliban was one of the publications I sent the first batches to and Larry Smith saw something and took 5 short pieces. My work was primarily in the short form, I had a little obsession going with Basho and Issa and that kinda nomadic muse ideal. When the poems were accepted it seriously freaked me out because that wasn’t the plan. I bypassed the whole struggle! Of course it didn’t go that way with the Paris Review.

I imagine the poems from that time stand up. You can tell at a glance it’s my work.  

DG: Having written fifteen collections, you’ve been quite prolific. Is this because you were willing to be flexible with your writing habits or more because these said habits have changed little? More precisely, what drives your writing?

JP: I don’t really have writing habits. What I do have is OCD. Life itself is a habit. The written word is a facet of life I’m compelled to express, like any other creative act, the difference being I choose to document the results. In reaction, or protest, lamentation, or worship …. The subject matter changes but the process, though conceived spontaneously, is actually rather painstaking to carry out. I suppose what ultimately drives my work is conceit, or any other number of sins. Who can honestly say different? Gandhi? Sappho?

DG: Some of your poems have very long prosaic lines, while in some a single word is all it takes. In addition some poems don’t capitalize words while other follow the traditional system. Are these choices made before the poem begins or do you sometimes change things for the sake and subject matter of the poem – depending on where it goes?

JP: The process fluctuates, I don’t have a set system or clinical approach. I have over time learned to let things percolate however. On occasion something may come out in a somewhat finished state, again, spontaneously, but that’s rare; even though I’ve practiced the craft for decades, editing is key. I don’t get manic about it, but conversely, I don’t delete or otherwise throw anything away. If I’m not satisfied with what’s going on I set it aside and give it time and look at it from a different perspective later on.

I chose writing over other plastic art forms mainly because you don’t have to buy anything, there’s not all this crap you need to make it, just a pen and a scrap of paper, or a stick in the dirt, or a toe in the sand… Or an iPhone. Love that iPhone.

DG: What are you reading or working on at the moment?

JP: I read mostly non-fiction these days – I had 2 eye surgeries last year and have some difficulty focusing on long concentrated texts. So now I go for short, concentrated texts. Wassily Kandinsky’s Concerning the Spiritual in Art; a biography of the painter Cy Twombly; Robert Irwin’s Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees; and I’m about to crack open Journey to Mexico, a 2024 release from Antonin Artaud’s previously unpublished oeuvre. Myself, I have a new poetry chapbook out from Bottlecap Press, If Ghosts Had Lips, and am editing and collating a full-length collection culled from the last couple years’ production. A second novel is also in the works.

Author Bio:

Jay Passer's poetry first appeared in Caliban magazine in 1988, alongside the work of William S. Burroughs and Wanda Coleman. He is the author of 15 collections of poetry and prose and his work has been included in several anthologies as well as print and online publications worldwide. His debut novel, Squirrel, was released in 2022. A lifelong plebeian, Passer has labored as dishwasher, barista, soda jerk, pizza cook, housepainter, courier, warehouseman, and mortician's apprentice. Originally a native of San Francisco, Passer currently resides in Los Angeles, California. His latest collection of poems, Son of Alcatraz, released in February, 2024 by Alien Buddha Press, is available on Amazon.