Paul Fericano: California Poets Part 9, Five Poems

Paul Fericano (Photo by Ted Bell)

December 22nd, 2025

California Poets: Part IX

Paul Fericano

Five Poems

THE MAN WHO CHANNELS BARBIE

                                              persona non grata

Perhaps you think that any fool can be a

Man but do you have any idea what a true

Man is a man of men a professional man    

Ordained by verdict a trained specialist a

Dedicated authority with past histories

Analyzed for generations back long before

Even I was given the honor of actually

Being allowed to make mistakes and yes

Mistakes were made but even a butcher  

Needs a line of work to understand what he   

Must never regret if I were to be born a

Thousand times over I would be a thousand  

Times what I already am what I have already   

Been what I will always be willing to re-   

Draw lines on maps make horrible choices

Less difficult to execute I tell you I would   

Hand my credentials back without pause if  

They were not already revoked for I have no   

More interest in those who are dead only in

Those who will soon join them with the

Aid of a man a right man who in the end

Will talk yes even I will talk but who will    

Not be held accountable even if somebody

Like you finds out how all this happened

MORE BARRELS OF BOURBON THAN PEOPLE

                                                              persona non grata

I could be wrong but ever since they increased my Clozaril

I haven't had much interest in taking sides though I know

One of the nurses on this floor stole my watch did I tell you

That the food in here would make a hog gag wait there

Goes one now sure I like jam on my cornbread they serve

It with maple syrup every Wednesday I’m telling you the

Time has come when the darkies have to part and the TV

Is always on tornadoes thunderstorms flooding my old

Kentucky home what time do you have they’re supposed

To change this damn thing every hour look there goes

Another one they hunt no more for the possum and the

Coon I think I’m going to switch states instead of parties

SUICIDE POEM WRITTEN IN COUPLETS

                                                 persona non grata

Higher education is okay for some but it   

Has limits and let’s be practical it isn’t

Something you learn you either have it  

Or you don’t if we can’t make it harder   

For certain people to get into college  

How can we expect to make it easier

For certain others to obtain grants win 

Scholarships study abroad we can’t all   

Be idealists teachers constantly com-

Plaining making trouble nitpicking this

That class size testing same ones same

Shit always moaning whining never

Enough money for things pens paper

Pencils books hot lunches does anyone  

Even remember how to use a pencil I

Sure don’t life is a zero-sum game you 

Get used to it fortunately I won’t have

To anymore since by the time you read  

This poem I’ll already be dead although

That may depend on your reading level

THE SPEAKER OWNS HIS NAME

                                  persona non grata

As I stand here today I am reminded to 

Be resolute in my duty and to not dither    

My support for every righteous act that

Does not obligate to truth that does not

Pledge to reason that does not submit to 

The rule of law for in and with all things   

I will parse no words to codify not one

Vote of confidence but rather enlighten 

More incredible as Jesus once taught me

More unbelievable in my faith the very 

Soul of this grand old party favored in

The tradition that fakes and takes and

Shakes and bakes and moves me back

Until my name spoken in jest purges 

The barroom dick joke that grows more

Flaccid with the passing of my parade

A QUANTUM THEORY OF GRAVITY

                                         persona non grata

There is this place I go to listen sometimes

Where effective altruism is on tap people

Hold forth on stools with utmost importance 

Degrees computer science economics public

Policy communications all part and particle 

Multiple waves alarming sobriety but here’s   

The catch if I could actually be in two places 

At once neither one of them would be here

Interview

February 23rd, 2026

California Poets Interview Series:

Paul Fericano, Poet, Editor, Publisher

interviewed by David Garyan

DG: There’s no one I can think of who has mocked the literary establishment more creatively than you have, and so I must start with the Howitzer Prize, which you “won” in 1982. How did winning it “feel” and to what extent did it “change” your career?

 PF: I’m a shy person and very reluctant to be in the spotlight for any length of time. So it was a great relief for me to send someone else to the awards ceremony to accept the Howitzer Prize on my behalf. I chose my friend, Thomas Pynchon. He agreed to do it, but only if he could show up as Professor Irwin Corey. I heard that the acceptance speech was so moving small children were weeping in the aisles. Tom never actually shared his speech with me, so I don’t know. But that’s Pynchon.

Of course, winning the award changed my life completely. The arc my career took afterwards was absolutely astonishing. During those first few months after I received it (a bronze bust of a high explosive howitzer shell) I would often sit by the fire in my study smoking my pipe, stroking Marley, my golden retriever who’d be resting by my side, and I’d contemplate and consider all the offers pouring in from publishers. I’d be less than honest if I said I didn’t feel a great deal of pride in what I had achieved. I also received a congratulatory telegram from Charles Bukowski, which I cherished, although Hank later admitted it was actually meant for Gabriel García Márquez. 

As Americans, we are a nation of nitwits addicted to awards. Our absurd obsession with “the best” only undermines our sense of not just what is “great” but what is most valued: our individual and collective creative spirit that moves us all. I realize there are many who don’t agree with that assessment, and that’s fine. But at this moment in time it might be a good idea to start paying some serious attention to your caffeine and sugar intake.

It’s been argued for centuries that artists should never be in competition with one another, and certainly not for the sake of feeding the public’s cannibal appetite. It’s a sound argument. Yet, for just writers alone there are more awards, prizes and contests today than at any other time in our history. So many, in fact, that if you laid all those awards end to end they’d stretch from New York to Alaska, and a person wearing a strong pair of heavy, steel toe work boots would be able to crush them all in a just over a year.

Most of us fail miserably to acknowledge that the best is only the best until our next fix. And even then we end up looking beyond that fix to our next fix. And then beyond that to the next. And on and on and on. It makes no difference that anyone who eats a lot of fiber and gets plenty of sleep knows this makes no sense at all. Our mania for constructing scaffolds to keep our false accolades from collapsing under the weight of our own pretentions is often determined by who has the right friends to vote you into the winner’s circle when nobody else is looking.

We miss entirely that the irony of what diminishes the idea of greatness is actually our idea of greatness itself. It’s Parsifal’s quest for the Holy Grail. A gold statuette, a chunk of medal, a fancy ribbon, a piece of paper, a cheap trophy, a cash award, etc.. We want so desperately to believe this type of recognition is an immense achievement that defines not just who we are but who others are not. To even begin to acknowledge the sheer foolishness of it all would mean coming to terms with why so many of us can no longer tolerate seeing Marco Rubio’s face on a big screen TV, particularly when the truth comes across as suspicious and boring.

DG: Serious question—do you actually like Frank Sinatra and can you say if he ever discovered the poem’s existence?

PF: I love Sinatra the singer. And I generally agree with what’s been written about his art, his craft, his style. I have quite a few of his early recordings with Tommy Dorsey’s orchestra. Also his Capitol and Reprise albums and all those cool arrangements with Nelson Riddle, Gordon Jenkins and Axel Stordahl. I’ll play his LPs on my turntable and the songs take me back to growing up in the fifties in San Francisco where music was a big part of our family life. Sinatra and Dean Martin were my mom’s favorite singers. Their records were played so often we wore them out.

During that time my dad drove a delivery truck for a company that distributed record albums and sheet music to drug stores and music shops throughout the San Francisco Bay Area. He was always bringing home albums with soiled or torn covers that the stores rejected and returned. From opera to rock ‘n roll. We got one helluva musical education.

So it was a major disappointment when Sinatra, admired by so many of my parents’ generation, jumped ship and went from a being a liberal Democrat and early civil right activist to a conservative Republican who supported crackdowns on campus protests during the Vietnam war. 

In my poem, “Sinatra, Sinatra,” I used Frank’s name again and again as a satirizing symbol, emphasizing the absurdity of the nation’s ideological shift and the condemnation of Reagan-era banalities. Some have called the poem brutally funny for connecting the dots of  Sinatra’s conservatism with the country’s woes. But I dealt straight from the top and played it fair, even sending Sinatra a copy of the little eponymous poem/chapbook every year on his birthday.

I never heard back from him, personally. But I’d like to believe he read the poem. And I’d also like to believe he had a sense of humor and sense of himself. But who really knows? What I do know is that for the first nine years after I mailed him the poem I started receiving a vintage, photochrome postcard of the Palm Springs area. On the back of the card, bearing a Rancho Mirage postmark, was always the same, unsigned, cryptic note written in longhand: “Watch yourself.” 

At an industry memorabilia show that I attended many years ago, I showed the postcards to two different celebrity autograph exhibitors. Both confirmed that the writing on the postcard was definitely done in the same person’s handwriting, but not Sinatra’s. 

My personal belief (and it’s wishful thinking on my part) is that the postcards were sent by Sinatra’s longtime associate and trusted companion, Jilly Rizzo. Rizzo was a resident of Rancho Mirage and was known to be Sinatra’s protector or bodyguard. It may be one of those mysterious coincidences, but when Rizzo died in 1992, the postcards stopped arriving. 

DG: Six years before the Howitzer, you launched the “Stoogism” movement. How do you see mainstream literature today in relation to the movement you founded precisely fifty years ago?

PF: There’s stench and stagnation in the mainstream publishing world. The “Big Five” don’t sit around a table mapping out strategies to discover new talent. They’re not called “commercial” for nothing. Writers are left to seek refuge in the independents and smaller presses where the real poems and stories struggle for existence. Poets and writers struggle not so much with rejection as we do with frustration: the ill-informed editors, the less-than-courageous publishers, the predatory promoters who stroke egos for a price.

Allen Ginsberg once dubbed Stoogism “the only movement with a punch line.” For me it perfectly described a literary movement that mocked literary movements. During the thirties and forties when the country was in the depths of the Depression, desperate people paid a nickel to sit in a darkened movie house and laugh themselves stupid watching the Three Stooges destroy the elegant homes of the upper classes, wreck their society parties, and generally make a shambles of the capitalist system. The Stooges were the undisputed masters of mayhem and mockery.

History has shown that many (but not all) literary movements were either started by humorless individuals who sought to impose on others their belief that serious writing required serious writers to take themselves seriously, or by seriously screwed-up narcissists who took themselves so seriously that their equally screwed-up writings became the model for many seriously screwed-up college writing courses.

This great feigning and profaning has caused tremendous angst among young writers who have yet to earn their advanced degrees and are still waiting to hear if their application to the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference has been approved (with a 17% acceptance rate). This peculiar form of teachable mediocrity might cause a beginning writer today to assume that getting published, reaching an intelligent audience, and winning a coveted NEA fellowship requires endless hours decoding the cryptic clues in such sober magazines as Poetry, The Paris Review and, in less stressful situations, Highlights for Children.

I’d like to say things today have changed. I’d also like to say they haven’t because I know it pisses certain people off. A tsunami of small presses and literary magazines has been flooding the basement of social media platforms since the introduction of chewable coffee. There is also this strange phenomenon of “editorial teams” that accept or reject work based on what Netflix series the majority of its team members watched the night before. And if you consider that 92% of all online journals only accept horror, science fiction, and fantasy, you begin to understand why keeping a loaded revolver in the top drawer of your desk is a real career choice.

DG: The five poems which appear in California Poets are due to appear in a collection titled Anonymous Scoundrels. Could you speak about how you chose the title, the writing process in general, and when the collection is set to be released?

PF: I changed the title to Anonymous Scoundrels after discussing the nature of the manuscript with respected friends. I originally intended to call it persona non grata given that all the poems are spoken in the voices of offensive people. But since those being mocked are both anonymous and scoundrels, the directness of the title, Anonymous Scoundrels, seemed perfect for cutting more derisively to the chase.

The poems are stylized satires of modern day narratives delivered by political and cultural figures who, to paraphrase Dostoyevsky, have destroyed and betrayed themselves for nothing. My targets are not identified by name. And for the discerning reader there are both subtle and overt hints. But the words that spew forth could come just as easily from the mouths of many who depend on Newsmax for the truth. Revealing actual identities is secondary. The poems are positioned to go on record and outlive their inspirations. The despicable, farcical and criminal scoundrels mocked today will likely be the same hateful and ludicrous scoundrels of the future.

I first began writing the poems in September of 2023. Biden may have been the president then but Trump was still dominating the news. His relentless election-denial bullshit played nonstop as his gang of morons, cowards and scoundrels beat the drum. The news energized and motivated me to write these poems, but looking back they could have just as easily inspired me to write a suicide note. But I was making myself laugh. And I also found encouragement in Elio Ligi’s wildly funny and brutally honest Substack posts (more on Ligi, later). I’d comment as often as I could, always in persona, and those comments would often become fodder for many of my poems.

Watching the manuscript morph into an actual book comes next. As every writer knows, the thrilling search for a publisher is a joyful thing to behold. I often say it brings out the very best in my character in spite of the anti-depressants I’ve been prescribed.

DG: In 1980, you co-founded the first parody news syndicate with Elio Ligi called Yossarian Universal News Service in response to the right-wing policies of Ronald Reagan. Actually, these days, the paper is online and still going strong. To what extent do you collaborate with other artists or writers to keep the project going and do you view Reagan in a much more benign way—now that you have Trump as inspirational material?

PF: YU News Service is the platform that showcases my satires. But it also promotes and publishes the works of other writers through its various website portals. For example: Poetry Hotel solicits work from poets, and started paying contributors in 2025; The Minderbinder Review of Books has more than 80 freelance reviewers who write one-sentence book reviews at $1 a pop. These are book lovers who share a passion for the ridiculous, the absurd, the playfulness of life. 

I don’t collaborate much with other writers anymore. Not because I don’t want to. I’d jump at the chance to work with Al Franken again on Saturday Night Live. And I certainly wouldn’t turn down any offers from Jorie Graham. But several people I’ve collaborated with in the past have taken out restraining orders which can make things difficult when all I want to do is return their knives (Note to K.Lipschutz: Is the machete yours?) 

My collaboration with Ligi was one of the most successful partnerships since Al Capone and Bugs Moran. In addition to co-founding YU News, we co-authored The One Minute President, a parody of The One Minute Manager and a Candide-inspired satire of Ronald Reagan’s presidency. We composed the first two drafts by sending work back and forth through the mail. Ligi was drunk most of the time and I was always able to supply us with some really good drugs. For the final draft, I ended up flying to Chicago for three days so we could work together and smooth out all the rough edges. Unfortunately, Ligi was living in Portland and by the time my train arrived in Los Angeles he had already taken a bus to meet me in Seattle.  

Ligi and I became fast friends in 1975 when a poem of his appeared in Stoogism Anthology. We then hooked up to create YU News. We issued our own press cards and registered with Editor & Publisher in New York as a bona fide, content-providing news organization. These were the Reagan years, taking risks, pulling no punches and making ourselves laugh all the way to the underground shelters. At its peak YU News had more than 100 media subscribers.

Later, after we burned ourselves out and decided to go solo, we assassinated our respective editor-personas in a final news dispatch and sent it out to all our subscribers. Ligi went on to create the Pataphysical Outpatient Clinic, Lounge and Laundromat, as well as his online presence on Substack. I developed and expanded YU News further, rebuilding the website and posting my stories regularly on Bluesky. 

As for Ronald Reagan, those who stopped feeding the meter couldn’t understand why he didn’t expire while in office. But Ligi and I reported he had been replaced by a surgically altered porpoise. All of our dispatches reflected that and our news became so much more believable. Considering the current psycho-pedophile that the stupid class voted into office, it’s only natural to get all nostalgic for an old rummy like Reagan or even a dim-witted lunkhead like George W. Bush. But we make a mistake if we forget  that these guys and their corrupt cronies set a sumptuous table for a dangerous unhinged grafter like Trump to poison everything on the menu.

And the irony gets more gelatinous with every official press release: The Trump Administration is now letting YU News report its stories directly to the White House. No joke.

According to the government’s own website, a newly established Media Bias Offender Tipline allows anyone who knows of “any media outlet misrepresenting the Trump Administration and skewing the truth” to link the article “for our team to review it!” (exclamation point theirs), If the article is flagged by the White House the offending news outlet’s name will be added to their “Offender Hall of Shame”, an online record of the media’s “false and misleading stories”. 

In response, I’ve created a tipster-persona who now links YU News stories on the White House tipline. YU News is essentially snitching on itself to help Trump expose the truth (in more ways than one). Since morons are actually in charge of this program there’s a good chance the White House will flag a YU News story as false and misleading and add it to its Offender Hall of Shame.

But I can’t imagine ever being that lucky.

DG: In the poem “Howl of Lon Chaney, Jr.” you parody one of the most famous works in American poetry—Ginsberg’s “Howl.” When did you first encounter the poem, why did you choose that specific one, and was it difficult to satirize a piece that already has a great deal of humor and absurdity in it?

PF: I first became aware of “Howl” in my junior year of high school. An English teacher had introduced the class to the Beat writers and Ginsberg’s controversial work invariably came up. The teacher, a short, intense man of Irish descent, read just the first lines of the poem to illustrate a point he was making about Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass.” Afterwards I went to our school library and, of course, no “Howl” on the shelves. So I visited our public library in town and the librarian there, who was the sweetest woman I ever met who held a rubber stamp in her hand, told me the book was restricted to adults only.

It wasn’t until I graduated in 1969, and moved to San Francisco that I finally read “Howl.” I had gone to North Beach and read the poem sitting on a stool downstairs in the basement of City Lights bookstore. Back then I couldn’t have possibly understood or fully appreciated the depth and feeling of what Ginsberg had written. But I do remember feeling energized that he had.

The idea of using Lon Chaney Jr. in a poem parodying Ginsberg’s “Howl,” had been percolating in me for many years. It left itself wide open for the kind of seriously absurd humor that drove the original. Over the years other writers had written various parodies of “Howl.” But none of them had attempted to faithfully mimic, word for word, all three sections of the poem in its entirety, and unify the parts with a similar and compelling theme.

Chaney, the beleaguered and troubled actor who rose to fame portraying the tortured title character in “The Wolfman,” was a perfect match. His life mirrored the horrors and transformation of his screen character. His story was much more than the madness and alcoholic haze engulfing both his personal and professional life. It became an honest retelling of the myth and legend that Chaney could never escape.

When I actually sat down to finally write “Howl of Lon Chaney, Jr.” it took me a full year to complete it. Satirizing “Howl” was never an issue for me. The big picture it represented seemed to organically evolve the deeper I dove into the parody. It was the rigorous and concentrated effort that often left me spent and exhausted. That was the hard part: finding the energy to stay focused and then trust that my own creation (Chaney) would not just guide me safely in and out of the dark places, but help me see the humor and humanity of his own creation hidden beneath his Hollywood makeup.

DG: Who are poets that have inspired your outlook on humor and what writers have influenced you in general?

PF: In 1969, I had a marvelous high school creative writing teacher, Mrs. Welpton, who first introduced me to the world of contemporary small press poets and writers. It changed the way I looked at the literary world. All these living poets I had never heard of publishing work in obscure little paper chapbooks and magazines, most of them mimeographed and bound with staples.

That was when I first encountered Edward Field. His poetry blew my socks off. I was eighteen when I read his seminal collection, Variety Photoplays. I really had no idea you could get away with writing funny, pointed and entertaining pop culture poems about Lana Turner, Joan Crawford, the Bride of Frankenstein, etc., and still be taken seriously by the literary gatekeepers. Field is a true profile in courage (he’ll be 102 in July). He has inspired me and countless others to strive always to be our genuine selves.

Over the last several decades a number of us stand-up poets (so called) have gleefully bounced our work off each other. We’ve honed our craft and our rebellious humor and inflicted it on others without mercy. I feel our contributions to that great literary mush have been just as relevant and valuable as poems by W.S. Merwin or Mary Oliver or Leonard Nimoy. And I know it would make my mother happy if I could show up just once as an obscure footnote in a post-graduate thesis.

The satirical edge in Denise Duhamel’s poems is like risking a close shave with a straight edge razor. K.Lipschutz can rattle the nerves of editors who think he might be the second coming of Kenneth Patchen. Ron Koertge was (and still is) writing perfect little masterpieces of poetic stoogisms long before I coined the phrase. And the same, and more, holds true for the late Gerald Locklin, Wanda Coleman, Ann Menebroker and Steve Kowit. All are satirists who continue to confound the poetry gods.

In 1970 I read Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 in one sitting. I stayed up all night in the cafeteria of my girlfriend’s college dormitory drinking pots of coffee, smoking filtered cigarettes, and realizing that it wasn’t just war that was absurd, but reality itself. The system was a monstrous failure. Heller’s book enlightened me. I glimpsed ways in which the news was manipulated to hide the truth, and I felt the seeds of Yossarian Universal News Service had been planted that day.

I’d also like to mention here someone who’s not a writer but a reader who’s influenced my work just as much, and intimately, over the course of my questionable career. My wife, Kathy Daly, is a voracious reader of all books and genres. Over the years she’s read so many different drafts of my poems that she’s only threatened to leave me four times. She has a discerning eye, pays attention to details and has an infectious laugh that can make my sister Anna Maria pee her pants. If there’s no Kathy, there’s no Paul.  

DG: Do you see humor as a survival mechanism or is it a way to say something controversial you could otherwise not get away with saying seriously?

PF: Both. I wear a charm on a chain on my wrist that simply says “laughter.” It reminds me to see, live and spread it every day in spite of the pain and suffering we all might be witnessing or feeling. I allow my anger at what’s happening in this country to feed my art, not my despair. I push myself to write, to make myself and others laugh and then question why the hell we’re laughing. A guiding principle is to tell the truth with a laugh.  

DG: Your friendship with, A.D. Winans, who appears in the eighth part of the anthology, goes way back. How did you meet and what is it about his work that you enjoy?

PF: A.D. (Al) Winans is my oldest and dearest friend in this literary circus called home; a brother and a mentor with a bold sense of humor. His poems have been fearless, honest and direct, addressing the social and political injustices of the day and championing causes that impact every person. We met in 1975, at a book fair in San Francisco. He was 39. I was 24. Al was manning a table selling his magazine and books published under his imprint, Second Coming Press. A thin poetry chapbook of his, Tales of Crazy John, immediately caught my eye. It was funny, scatological and original. We exchanged phone numbers that day and never looked back. 

In 1977, his Second Coming Press published my first collection of poems, Loading the Revolver With Real Bullets, partially funded by a grant from the California Arts Council. One year later in September of 1978, a California state senator feigned outrage after reading one of the poems in that book, “The Three Stooges at a Hollywood Party.” He argued on the floor of the senate that the poem libeled John Wayne and three other actors and that the state would be held liable if they all decided to sue. It was a failed political stunt to abolish the California Arts Council and it succeeded only in helping boost the sales of my book (which sold out by the end of that year).   

DG: Is it true that in 1976 you and Winans taught poetry to high school students, and if so what was that like?

PF: It was a very gratifying experience to be with young people; to help them express themselves in ways that they hadn’t tried before; and to be on the receiving end of their trust and respect which didn’t come easy.

We committed ourselves to go into two different junior high school classes in South San Francisco with a combined total of about 50 students and teach a one-hour class, one day a week for sixteen weeks. We used the same method of teaching poetry at both schools which we visited on the same day. At the end of the course we planned to publish a special issue of Al’s magazine, Second Coming, devoted entirely to the poems the kids wrote. Our particular venture was overseen by the Poetry-in-the-Schools program run out of San Francisco State (College).

The kids at first were skeptical and suspicious. They didn’t pretend to know what a poet was supposed to look like. In their world, if you said you were somebody it could mean you were somebody else. Al had long hair, a mustache and a commanding voice. I had longer hair and a full beard. We were both so laid back that some students believed we might be narcs planted in their school as a trap. It took a couple weeks before they were all pretty convinced we were, indeed, poets. 

Once our identities were established to their satisfaction the students began opening up. At first, all of the poems they wrote came from perceptions of poetry that rhymed and focused on the mundane, separate from themselves and outside their own experiences. But as the weeks rolled on and we stressed writing about their feelings and what was happening in their own homes, their own lives, we felt the energy in the room change.

We introduced themes and offered prompts, and read some of our own poems as well as the poems of other poets. The kids seemed really surprised and fascinated that a poem like William Carlos Williams’ “The Red Wheelbarrow” could be so simple and yet so focused on what the poet was describing with his own eyes. We also had them read a lot of poetry that didn’t rhyme. We made it clear we weren’t against rhyming. We just wanted them to experiment, trust their instincts and color outside the lines. And they did. A couple of hardened cases, boys who resisted and thought poetry was dumb and childish, ended up writing some of the most personal poems in the class.

When the program finally ended we gathered up the work the students had created and set about putting them into a collection. The result was a sweet record of personal, imaginative and humorous poems which we published and distributed to the schools, the students, and their families.

DG: Is there anything about the past that you miss and is there anything, perhaps, from that time that wasn’t necessarily better than it is now?

PF: An enticing question. But I think it would have to be the warm and stimulating conversations I used to look forward to with dear friends who are mostly absent now—either missing in action or deceased. Sharing a bottle of wine with Ann Menebroker. Seeing Leon Spiro smile as he held my infant daughter for the first time. Mailing a letter to Richard Grayson and receiving a response back that could be mistaken for a novel. Good friends are always missed.

As for something from that time that wasn’t necessarily better than it is now, I confess to loving the first typewriter I ever bought with my own money in 1971, a brand new Smith-Corona portable. I wrote hundreds of poems, stories, television scripts and plays on that beautiful machine. It helped produce two of my literary magazines, several of my chapbooks, and two perfect bound books of my poems. I pounded those keys so much I’m shocked I don’t have arthritic hands. But on the very day I discovered word processing I packed up my typewriter and shipped it off to my closet for retirement. The mere elimination of White Out alone was more than enough reason to give me spasms of manic joy.

My Smith-Corona is still there in the closet. Every once in awhile I take it out of its case and sit there remembering and questioning and marveling at my own fierce determination.    

DG: What are you reading or working on these days?

PF: Since I don’t have a smart phone, just a flip, I’m always surprised at how much more time I have for doing other things, like reading books. Several at a time. I take a book with me everywhere I go and always have. Right now I’m reading (or rereading) John Fante’s selected stories, “The Wine of Youth,” Kurt Vonnegut’s “Palm Sunday,” Gavin Newsom’s memoir, “Young Man In A Hurry,” and Joan Walsh’s “Corporate Bullsh*t.” I also have a couple of vintage MAD Magazines sitting on my nightstand.

My current writing projects include: YU News headlines, stories, and memes for “The One Minute News Hour”; a trio of one act plays about Mario Puzo’s early drafts of The Godfather; a third draft of a novel based on my experiences as a fourteen-year old student at a Catholic seminary in the sixties and living to tell about it; and a collection of poems about growing up in a lovable but homicidal family of Sicilian refugees. 

Sometimes I can’t help feeling I may be on an endangered species list. I start questioning if there is such a thing anymore as satire. How do you satirize satire in Trump world? I was thinking about this a couple of months back when I came across my signed copy of Victor Navasky’s “Naming Names,” a definitive account of the notorious House Un-American Activities Committee, and it immediately brought to mind a very happy memory.

Some years ago I was privileged to spend a good deal of time with Paul Krassner who took me under his wing. Paul became one of my heroes. One day we attended a book signing for Navasky's “Naming Names.” At some point during his talk Navasky made the statement: “Satire is a losing proposition.” Krassner immediately stood up from where he was sitting in the room and said, “But some of us fools can't help ourselves.”

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Author Bio:

Paul Fericano is a poet, writer, and socio-political satirist. He is the editor and publisher of Yossarian Universal News Service (YU News), a parody news and information syndicate founded in 1980, and the instigator of the infamous Howitzer Prize hoax (1982). He is the author of several books including “The Hollywood Catechism” (Silver Birch Press, 2015), and “Things That Go Trump in the Night” (Poems-For-All Press, 2019), winner of the 2020 Bulitzer Prize. His word-for-word parody of Allen Ginsberg’s poem “Howl” (“Howl of Lon Chaney, Jr”), was awarded a Mark Fischer Poetry Prize in 2015 by the Telluride Institute. Born and raised in San Francisco, he makes his home on the San Francisco Peninsula. Website: yunews.com /  Bluesky: @yunews.bsky.social