Salvage

Salvage by Steven Lavoie printable pdf

Steven Lavoie is the co-founder the Black Bart Poetry Society, quickly exiled to the Corn Belt, only to return to a life in Oakland as one of the Bay Area’s best-kept poetry secrets. Before his exile with the Actualists, he launched Famous on an A. B. Dick brand mimeograph machine previously owned by Barrett Watten, co-editor with Robert Grenier of L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E, a little magazine often thought to be the crucible of the “language poetry” movement. Arguably, Ron Silliman’s work appeared in print for the first time in Famous–it also published future Nobel Prize-winner Czesław Miłosz alongside future American Book Award-winner Gloria Frym. Jackson MacLow, Victoria Rathbun, Michael-Sean Lazarchuk, Lana Marie Michaleczko, Jeffrey Miller, Andrei Codrescu, Alan Bernheimer, and Carla Harryman are among the poets to appear in Famous. The same mimeograph machine produced an affiliated series of chapbooks titled Famous Last Words. Steve spent many years writing a trail-blazing local-history column as librarian at the virtually defunct Oakland Tribune; then as librarian at the Oakland Public Library, taking up the task of bringing the collections of the Oakland History Room (now Oakland History Center) into cyberspace for the first time. He is the author of On The Way, published by Doris Green Editions, and Historic Photos of Oakland, published by Turner in Nashville, Tennessee where he should have relocated long ago to turn his considerable lyrical gift into a multi-million dollar songwriting career. Alas, he’s living in Santa Rosa, very near where he grew up in the B Section of Rohnert Park in a house designed by visionary architect Joseph Eichler. The B Section is NOT mentioned in Eichler’s Wikipedia entry.