¡Presente! Mi corazón de los sueños. Buen viaje mi amor viejo. This was
the back cover photo of our bilingual chapbook,
Falling to Sea Level,
Aldebaran Press, 1986. A chronicle of our many journeys to Mexico and
beyond. Jorge Luján photo. Safe journey, old friend. 23 April 1942 - 16
Jan 2018.
JOS poet teaching article in T&W
JOS in Argentina 2012
JOS OBIT
John Oliver Simon, one
of the Bay Area’s most beloved poets, died in the early hours of Jan.
16th, from cancer, in the home of his fiancée Susie Kepner. He is
survived by daughters Kia Simon and Lorelei Bosserman, son-in-law J.D.
Moyer, granddaughter Tesla Rose Moyer, and former wives Pam Simon Hazel,
Alta, and Jan Courtright Simon. He was 75.
Born in New York City in 1942, he wrote his first poem under a full
moon in 1956. Educated at The Putney School, Swarthmore College (Phi
Beta Kappa), and the University of California Berkeley, Simon was
mentored by John C. Adler, Jeffrey Campbell, Daniel Hoffman, Gary
Snyder, Lew Welch and Carol Lee Sanchez.
While at Cal and after, Simon was active in the Free Speech Movement
and in the famous struggle to liberate Berkeley’s People’s Park. Of this
time, he wrote “I was a newcomer to the Bay Area, having arrived in
Berkeley in September 1964 in time to sit down in the crowd on Sproul
Plaza surrounding the police car which was holding Jack Weinberg
prisoner in the back seat in the first act of what would become the Free
Speech Movement. I came west three months after graduating from
Swarthmore College, planning to get my Ph.D. in English at Cal since I
had not been accepted to graduate school at Harvard, and because my
mother’s forebears had arrived in San Francisco a 110 years before that
and California was my terrain of legend.”
Simon’s nine full-length books of poetry included
Caminante (praised by Gary Snyder and Juan Felipe Herrera),
Roads to Dawn Lake (Oyez Press, 1968),
Rattlesnake Grass (Hanging Loose Press, 1978),
Lord of the House of Dawn (Bombshelter Press, 1991), and
Grandpa’s Syllables (White Violet Press, 2015). His poetry was published in numerous literary journals and reviews, “from
Abraxas to
Zyzzyva.” He also co-founded and edited the poetry magazine
Aldebaran Review, which ran from 1967 to 1978.
In 1989, Simon was awarded an Individual Artist’s Fellowship by the
California Arts Council. He also received an NEA Fellowship in
Translation for his work with the great Chilean surrealist poet Gonzalo
Rojas (1917-2011). On Jan. 20, 2015, Simon’s contributions to the Bay
Area writing and educational community were recognized by the city of
Berkeley with “John Oliver Simon Day.” On May 14, 2016, the Berkeley
Poetry Festival presented him with its Lifetime Achievement Award.
As an educator, Simon devoted himself to teaching children to write
poetry. He co-founded and taught at the People’s Community School in
Berkeley, 1969-1973. He was a former president and board member of
California Poets in the Schools (CalPoets) and served as the artistic
director of Poetry Inside Out, a program of the Center for the Art of
Translation. In 2013, he was named the River of Words Teacher of the
Year by former U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Hass.
Despite not learning Spanish until the age of 40, Simon became a
noted translator specializing in contemporary Latin American poetry. His
cultural reporting was featured in
Poetry Flash and
American Poetry Review. In 2017, he traveled to Madrid to attend a conference of translators of Gonzalo Rojas.
In addition to his daily writing practice, Simon was an avid backpacker, kayaker, gardener, and baseball fan.
John Oliver Simon touched the lives of thousands with his teaching,
friendship, and poems. Mexican poet Alberto Blanco wrote, “The poems of
John Oliver Simon, like all true poems, trace a map, a psychography,
which allows us to enter, not only into another life but into the voyage
of that life, and not only into another culture, but into other
cultures: into another point of view.”
Simon himself wrote, “Language is the central human invention, the hive which we are ceaselessly elaborating, even as I speak.”
A memorial service will be held at the
Chapel of the Chimes,
4499 Piedmont Ave., Oakland, on Feb. 3rd, at 2 p.m.
