Kawin to Gottesman
The elevator didn’t stop
this morning, the
solenoid’s
failing.
Every day
the long ones and
the short ones
you’re missing.
The Doorknob: Les Gottesman, Columbia Review, and the 1968 Student Protest
I met Les Gottesman in a Columbia dorm in 1963. All freshmen in the college had to spend their first year in a dorm. Our rooms were two doors apart. Most of the rooms were doubles, but I don’t remember anything about his roommate or whether he had one. Les and I became friends with another freshman, Aaron Fogel, and the three of us used to hang out and talk about books. All three of us wanted to be writers, and we all joined the college literary magazine, Columbia Review. In time, each of us became its editor.
An editor served for a year after spending at least a year on the editorial board. When Les and I were freshmen, Phil Lopate was the editor and Ron Padgett was on the board. The issues they produced were inspiring, brilliant work, authentically literary. Lopate and Padgett were seniors, and after they graduated, the next editor was Alan Feldman. In addition to the commercially printed literary review, we began to publish mimeographed books as Columbia Review Press. The first book was Six Arguments, a novel by Carol Lopate.
Aaron Fogel became the editor after Alan, and I was next. Les stayed on an extra year, and in his fifth year he was the editor. His competition had been David Shapiro, the poet who had published January, a hardcover book of poems, in his freshman year. Les was editor of the Review in 1967-68, the year of the student protest against Columbia’s plan to build a gym in a nearby park in Harlem, with no consideration for the people who used that space. To clear out the protestors, Columbia called the cops. (The more recent student protest and Columbia’s reaction may echo some of this, but the university president we had to deal with was both inadequate and inflexible, consistently ignoring what students and the community were trying to tell him.)
Les and the next (joint) editors, Hilton Obenzinger and Alan Senauke, were among those who occupied forbidden buildings on the campus. One of our greatest English professors, Frederick Dupee, was one of the faculty who tried to intervene between the students and the police, and like many of the students he was clubbed by a policeman—in the head, and he fell to the ground. Steve Vinocor, a guy I’d gone to high school with who was at that time enrolled in the Jewish Theological Seminary and studying to be a rabbi, was dragged down one of the narrow circular staircases in the library’s stacks by a cop who pulled his feet while Steve’s head dropped onto each steel step. A photo of David Shapiro smoking a cigar in the office of Columbia’s president went the predigital equivalent of viral.
David Shapiro, who died only a few months ago, went on to teach art and to publish volumes of poems that are essential reading. Les Gottesman, who died only a few years ago, had moved to the Bay Area, gotten married, worked in the school system, continued to write poetry, and among other things created Omerta Publications. He was the editor and publisher of Omerta’s books: original poetry and prose, there must have been more than 30 of them. As an editor he was both generous and ruthless. The last book Les told me about acquiring for Omerta, and he was very happy about it, was by Diane di Prima. Shortly after that I heard from David Lehman that Les died.
Les missed today, just as he missed, and was missing from, the recent day I wrote the poem. The doorknob came off in his hand. By which I mean:
One day when we were both undergraduates, I was sitting on a corner of the library steps when Les ran up the steps to me, talking fast—telling me what happened and his poem about it:
Paranoia
The doorknob came off in my hand!
The doorknob came off in my hand!
He repeated it, he told me how it felt when he’d just now gone to open a door but the doorknob had come out of the door when he pulled on it, and he left both of us laughing and scared—because behind the laughing and the poem-making was the realization of how something we feared or didn’t expect, death maybe, could just suddenly be there. I don’t think he published it.
7/ 23/ 24
by Bruce Kawin
for David Lehman
Go to Source
Author: The Best American Poetry
