This copy of poems is published by Cahuenga Press, a publishing house founded and financed by the member poets. Cushing's poems are both conversational and dense, but I'm not a poetry critic. I enjoy looking through the pages when I come across the book in its long life outside the bookshelf.
I mention it because while it may be a rarity, Jim Cushing was a professor of mine at Cal Poly in SLO. I had him for two separate classes. The first was during the beginning of my senior year, and my friend Dennis and I were able to hang out for a last hurrah as it were. I mention that class specifically in my post about Madame Bovary and how Dennis and I had to calculate what page we were on in his different edition.
The second class I had with Jim Cushing was a poetry composition class; a creative writing class. I took it with the creative writing short fiction class the same quarter, my last before graduation. I had the two writing classes (taking both CR/NCR), my senior project class, and a C++ class, and I had already taken C++ at some other school a few years before. That last quarter was a blur of of alcohol, bike riding, poetry, Denis Johnson coming to campus, and meetings with my adviser about the last touches of my senior project.
In any case, Doc Cushing had us purchase his own book as well as another Cahuenga Press poet who'll appear here in a hot minute. I have both books because Cushing was a fun, white pony-tailed stoner-type who was passionate about literature, and Harry Northrup, the other poet, on whom my group did our project, had his own interesting back story, and I'll be getting to that at that time.
Poetry, while highly respected by myself, does not make up a large portion of my library.
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