Patrick James Dunagan: California Poets Part 9, Three Poems

Patrick James Dunagan

December 22nd, 2025

California Poets: Part IX

Patrick James Dunagan

Three Poems

Birds

Jason,

                    Again.  It's

     Poe's children  —

            strolling @

         The Botanical Gardens

entering into California shrubs

                   everybody

        finally is getting green

     & wet a bit.

                            Wind

                          rattles branches

          leaves fall down about

                                                  & birds:

                    Seemingly all over

        rejoice

                             seeds to

  scoop up

                         as they flit all about.

           Small ones

                   the scrub jay too

               Av even spied a mouse!

                                    Cool sunlight

                                                  shafting low

       crisscrosses branches 

                                         hits stone.

                               We sit

                       birds go.

                                   It's all alright

         12-23-20

SHITTING

watching sunset is always incredible.

T W O    B L O C K S    N O R T H    I S    A F R I C A

          Deep  forest  green    

                                  birds  fly   all  round

               up   over        across

                                                             the world

                       city streets 

                                                      fogged  early  morning

            train rides

                                               tree tops   shrouded

                                     Africa           is   rolling    by

         late  afternoon     staring out      at     Mt. Tamalpais

                                  every change brings renewal

                                                                       moving    between  states

                       of being

                                                         not just   here   or  there

                                   but   if    when    &     rather

            continuous      further       exposure

                                                                    all   you  know

                           all  you’ll ever  not knowing  coming  down

                                                                  to split-second

       glimpses     where     eternity   keeps   flipping

channels      between             doomed         &       notsomuch

                                          the eunuchs have raised    funds   for   survival

                                                         though we’re not sure whether

                      that includes any of us                       they’ve been  busy

             (for eunuchs

                                                                                 arguing   long into  dawn’s hour

          over who gets  to sit where

                                                                       etc.

                                       Jimmy they appear to hold in most high regard

                 praising his maneuvers   from   across   the way

                       although   nobody    lives  forever

                                              Jimmy  just might

                                      is how  things feel

                                                                                            rumbling   down    along Judah

                                                  dreaming of Redondo

(Meaning                                                                    there are reasons worth believing

       what does                                       you’d best  let them   go

   it mean                                                                   one more night

    nothing means                                               down

                                  several centuries to go

                                                                           Jimmy lives FOREVER     

                                      FOR KEVIN OPSTEDAL

                                                                  2-23-21

                                         (written split-page in the notebook McClure-style

                                                  after hearing of Ferlinghetti & reading

                                                     EXILE ON BEACH STREET up on the roof

Interview

January 12th, 2026

California Poets Interview Series:

Patrick James Dunagan, Poet, Editor

interviewed by David Garyan

DG: Let’s begin with the Rain Taxi Review of Books, where you’ve contributed regularly. How do you select what to review and do you then read those titles differently as opposed to books you only absorb for pleasure?

PJD: With Rain Taxi reviews I’ve generally requested review copies directly from publishers of forthcoming or recent titles I either came across perusing their sites or else heard of one way or another. I just look for new work on things I’m interested in. On occasion Rain Taxi recommends something and/or a publisher reaches out, however, Rain Taxi has a pretty strict policy of no contact between reviewer and press/author so if there is reach out it’s not like a pal or pal’s publisher, or my own publishers etc. As far as how I read for reviews it’s generally always the same as any other reading/writing, i.e. for fun. After all, I started writing reviews because I was responding to what I was reading via writing “poems” but not having much luck getting poems published (which continues to be the case. I rarely have ever received publication via submitting poems to a magazine) … also I wanted to get a hold of more new books and not have to wait to get them used/at discount. 

DG: You were raised in Southern California, did a bachelor’s in literature in New Hampshire, then returned west to your home state for a graduate degree—with a thesis on an East Coast poet, Joel Oppenheimer. Could you talk about how upbringing your work influenced your work, along with the years in NH, and more specifically, also, the MA/MFA in relation to all that?

PJD: My folks moved to a white colonial on a dirt road in New Ipswich, NH when I was about 16; it was then that I first sort of started writing things down in Penny Culliton’s classes at Mascenic Regional High School …. I’d read Poe, some Hawthorne, and so being surrounded by the New England woods was like being suddenly dunked, head first, into the transcendentalist milieu. Around that time, I also dove into Ginsberg and this took me to Whitman and Blake.

Oppenheimer died while teaching at New England College—where I took a BA in Literature pretty focused on poetry/Americana, along with a Philosophy degree healthily doused in Feminism. Oppenheimer's grave is in the town cemetery so there was a certain familiarity in the air. I came back West as I had first applied to all the classy MFA joints and gotten rejected. My sister was finishing her PhD in Dance History and Theory at UCR (she has taught at CSULB ever since) and so we crashed with her for a year as I reapplied more realistically. I’d been eyeing Poetics at New College but basically hoping to go somewhere that was a “free ride.” In the end, I got in at Mills in Oakland and at Poetics. I looked at the former, surrounded by a fence and suburbia, then at the latter, in the ever-lively Mission district of SF, and that's when I knew where I wanted to be. I was also heavily drawn by the non-workshop curriculum. I took the MA/MFA option to have some extra time; this allowed me to be enrolled full time for three years and not have to work full time. I chose Oppenheimer, as Creeley seemed way more complicated.

DG: Skateboarding was a huge part of your youth. Is it still something you do from time to time?

PJD: Rarely, if ever. I can’t ollie really at all any more. I have gout that rears up, etc. However, I did hit up the snake run at Derby Park in Santa Cruz with my pal Jeffrey Karl Butler a couple years ago. Took some spills, one in particular sent me over the lip onto the grass bruising some ribs and busting my elbows. I also last took a few runs on the really fun public surfer halfpipe right across Highway 1 from the surfing spot down in Half Moon Bay.

DG: You assist, Ava Koohbor, who is an Iranian poet with translations from Persian. Who are the writers you’ve worked on, what is the collaborative process like, and how does, if at all, the act of translating make you see your own work differently?

PJD: Ava and I are partners; we live together. She has a book in Farsi published in Tehran, so we started with some of her own poems. Then we moved on to Hafez as she began increasingly writing directly in English. She has since published books in English .... We haven’t done much translating at all in recent years but do intend to return to the Hafez project at some point. Selections have been published—most notably in Amerarcana, which is the house mag of Bird and Beckett Books in the Glen Park hood of SF. As far as the collaboration, we go word by word building up a sense of line/s and then the overall poem. I suggest some things and we tinker, going back and forth. The largest takeaway is simply how truly rich and weighty Farsi is as a language—one word often has a galaxy of consequential meanings which English only approaches by slamming down a phalanx of words to match. So, often, what we’re doing is trying to cut down on the number of words in the translation. We try to match the length, as well as tone and meaning of the original—less so the verse form, per se. From my perspective, it is akin to Paul Blackburn’s translations.

DG: In honor of David Meltzer, you assembled a portfolio of his writing which was featured in Dispatches From The Poetry Wars. Could you talk a bit about the influence he had, along with how you selected the work? Where they your favorite pieces or was the decision based more on thematic continuity?

PJD: I'd known David ever since Poetics. A few years before he passed, Ava and I took to seeing him and his wife Julie Rogers on a somewhat regular basis. After his passing, along with Marina Lazzara and Nicholas James Whittington, I assisted Julie with going through his final set of papers for the Bancroft archive at Berkeley. I think that entire portfolio was drawn from the papers, all of which I scanned before they were deposited at the Bancroft. I just tried to pick a range of things and keep them on the short side. I later discovered that one piece, which I sort of collaged a few versions together, had in fact previously appeared in a Jerome Rothenberg anthology. My favorite page from these papers is from a long poem series: David has a drawing of a Kabbalah scholar staring at a book with a chain dangling down from its spine which is drawn back up to the scholar; below that there is text and the last line reads “Direction; life; demon.” I have it pinned up in my cubicle at work.

DG: Staying with Meltzer and returning to the New College of California, you’ve spoken about how only a few of the faculty possessed more than an MA, if that, and how the longest serving core faculty member, who was Meltzer, held, in fact, no degree. Yet all the poets were actively publishing and pursuing work outside of academia. Could you say a bit more about those years and what other writers shaped your work during this time?

PJD: David was always sort of angelic, a rosy cheeked cherub of joy. Not that he didn’t tackle the dark hard core of shit—he assuredly did—though always with a bit of a twinkle and a chuckle. He showed up for classes, often hobbling from, I believe, some bone issues with his legs, hauling a bag of books and papers. He’d plop a large stack of notes down on the table and commence to lively read from it for awhile—in the midst making side comments and taking any questions; then he'd stop abruptly and announce that was enough of that. He spent a great deal of class time listening to students read what they’d written in response to assigned readings. He was always more curious in others than in what was cooking in his own pot.

Tom Clark, on the other hand, lorded over his classes which were held in his living room. He did most nearly all of the talking, weaving in Oxford Don level commentary upon the poem (for instance Keats) with everyday talk, i.e. politics, his home life, what students might be wearing, the latest sports game, and any bit of past or present gossip that might be found somehow relevant or not.

Joanne Kyger, meanwhile, encouraged in-class writing and reading aloud—both with regard to our own work and the assigned text. She placed utmost value on how the voice rendered in air what was printed upon the page. How the lines moved across, down, and around the page mattered. I’ve had the opportunity to acknowledge my debt to each of them in varying ways: assisting with David’s papers resulted in publication of his '60s era pop cult study Rock Tao (Lithic press); with Owen Hill I organized a memorial for Tom, and this, in turn, resulted in my own faux Chinese ancients riff dedicated to his memory, After the Banished (Empty Bowl press); in addition, there was a paper, "Joanne Kyger and ‘the Kook Strain’ in Olson: A Reading," which I wrote for the Louisville conference a few years ago; lastly, I produced some other material on Kyger and that will form one of a few new sections of what I hope is going to be an expanded edition of The Duncan Era: One Reader’s Cosmology (Spuyten Duyvil).

DG: In San Francisco, you work as E-resources Assistant the Gleeson Library at USF. What’s the thing you love most about the job?

PJD: It enables me financially to live in San Francisco and, in general, is not too demanding (given my own personal flexibility).

DG: Doesn’t it ever get tiring of being surrounded by so many books—titles you can never read in a lifetime? I feel this concept walking through a library and have described it, just for myself, as “librotrauer.”

PJD: Hahaha … well, I mean not really. That’s sau la vie. And when I get turned on to new things, if they’re older, I can often find them downstairs, such as Grillot de Givry on Witchcraft Magic and Alchemy (Breton’s final essays just translated to English and published by City Lights has a bit he wrote on Givry) or the literally golden hardcover book Works of Thomas Vaughan: Mystic and Alchemist, with an intro by Kenneth Rexroth (I came across haphazardly while scrolling through Rexroth’s “author” entries in our catalog).

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

PJD: Reading: Red Pine’s Han Shan translations, the summer 1926 letters of Pasternak, Tsvetayeva, and Rilke, Sonny Rollins Notebooks, Richard Cobb on Paris (in the bathroom). I recently finished Tom and Clark Coolidge’s colossal classic, Rock Notes, which was just published by Lithic in a tremendous large format typescript edition, 300 pages! Working on: getting through the current Iranian blackout and ongoing massacre (we have family in Tehran), after the results of the last election I started an ongoing poem-series You Surprised (“A true Shithole nation? / There is only one / these United States of AmeriKKKa.” Etc.), fiddling with organizing a manuscript in a Word file from a recently typed up notebook along with other random poems afloat, another notebook recently typed up now needs to get typed into a Word file; there's a collaborative manuscript of my poem responses to near daily poems, sometimes more than one a day, sent by my close pal Micah Ballard over several weeks; also I'm considering developing some notes onto a review of a new selected poems by Persian poet Shamlou …. And, finally, I attended a great free day long symposium of papers on Manet and Morisot at the Legion of Honor. That was last Saturday.

Author Bio:

Patrick James Dunagan lives in San Francisco and works as E-resources Assistant in Gleeson Library at the University of San Francisco. His latest books include City Bird and other poems (City Lights) and Reading Writing Reading: Essays Reviews & Notes (Lithic press).